Web-Enhanced General Chemistry Increases Student Completion

Feb 22, 2013 - Division of Science, Penn State Berks, Reading, Pennsylvania ... Student achievement in the subsequent course, General Chemistry II, ha...
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Web-Enhanced General Chemistry Increases Student Completion Rates, Success, and Satisfaction Katie E. Amaral,*,† John D. Shank,‡ Ivan A. Shibley, Jr.,† and Lisa R. Shibley§ †

Division of Science, Penn State Berks, Reading, Pennsylvania 19610-6009, United States University Libraries, Penn State Berks, Reading, Pennsylvania 19610-6009, United States § Institutional Assessment and Planning, Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania 17551, United States ‡

ABSTRACT: General Chemistry I historically had one of the highest failure and withdrawal rates at Penn State Berks, a four-year college within the Penn State system. The course was completely redesigned to incorporate more group work, the use of classroom response systems, peer mentors, and a stronger online presence via the learning management system (ANGEL). Five years of data about the redesigned course were compared with the previous five years. The redesigned course significantly improved student success as measured by the average GPA and lower withdrawal rates. Student achievement in the subsequent course, General Chemistry II, has also improved, suggesting that not only are more students completing the first course, but they are also completing the course with better preparation for the next course. Student ratings have improved for the course, showing increased satisfaction with both the course and the instructor. The findings from 10 years of data suggest significant improvements in student success are possible for General Chemistry I. KEYWORDS: First-Year Undergraduate/General, Collaborative/Cooperative Learning, Inquiry-Based/Discovery Learning, Multimedia-Based Learning, Student-Centered Learning

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RETHINKING GENERAL CHEMISTRY

The administrative impetus for the redesign of General Chemistry I was technological: the administration believed that student success could be improved with a financial investment in technology, although specific aspects of technology were not identified. The Director of IT charged the redesign committee with starting from scratch and then building the course anew. The educational literature is replete with pedagogically sound methods to enhance learning in the sciences3−5 that rely primarily on a learner-centered approach.6 Technology can often be used as a lever to facilitate a more learner-centered approach and thereby improve chemical education.7 A committee was formed consisting of two chemists, three IT specialists, and an assessment officer to redesign General Chemistry I. Several ideas dominated the design: eliminating lecture; increasing the amount of active learning in the classroom; providing students more practice outside of class; and using undergraduate students as mentors in the course. Lecture lower-level learning (typically cognitive skills at the level of knowledge and comprehension) was moved outside the classroom in the form of a class guide and preclass assignments. Class time was spent on higher-level cognitive activities such as application and analysis in the form of problem solving using a classroom response system.8 The two chemists both espoused a philosophy that students can effectively learn on their own and

This paper describes a transformative change in the way General Chemistry I is delivered at one institution. Over the course of 18 months, General Chemistry I, a course historically taught in a lecture format, was completely redesigned. The redesigned course moved much of the responsibility for learning outside of class onto a learning management system (LMS) that practically eliminated the need for lecture. Face-toface time with students was thus reexamined to consider more pedagogically constructive ways to organize learning inside the classroom. The face-to-face time with students in the course was altered so that this time consists almost exclusively of students working in groups with the help of the instructor and chemistry peer mentors to answer a series of clicker questions. The evolution of the course and the assessment of multiple outcomes related to the course are the focus of this paper. Most courses offered in higher education can be parsed into one of four categories in order of increasing reliance on technology: face-to-face (traditional); Web-enhanced, blended (or hybrid); and online. Educational technology has developed to the point that its integration into courses can be virtually seamless1,2 such that more courses are developing into Webenhanced versions. Technology alone cannot transform the learning process. The incorporation of technology into courses requires careful attention to its pedagogical value to enhance educational goals in order to improve student learning. © XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

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Table 1. Elements of the Redesigned Web-Enhanced General Chemistry I Course Redesign Element Preclass assignments Collaborative learning with peer mentors Low stakes assessment High stakes assessment

Technology

Pedagogical Rationale

Course guides on the course management system that include tutorials, podcasts, and custom-built practice exercises Student response system (clickers) Preclass assignment completion; Clicker use; Online quizzes None: 3 semester exams and 1 comprehensive final, all given in class

Move first exposure to material outside of class, allowing for more difficult problem solving in-class Clickers provide individual accountability for knowledge; Immediate feedback and assistance for students Continual exposure to content; Immediate feedback on progress Same as for the traditional course

gressed, the blended course design morphed into a Webenhanced design rather than a truly blended (or hybrid) design. The redesign process encompassed over 1000 h of planning. The administration committed resources for the redesign with the understanding that all subsequent general chemistry courses would be taught using the Web-enhanced design for at least two years. The main components of the redesign, outlined in Table 1, were discussed in a series of meetings over the course of a year and were in place prior to the first offering of the redesigned class.10 The resulting course looks strikingly different from previous chemistry course offerings at the campus. Most notably, students complete preclass assignments on the assigned readings prior to attending class. To assist with these preclass assignments, students interact with the material using course guides (also called class guides) created by the instructors and the instructional designers. Course guides highlight important concepts and practice problems from the textbook and are distributed through the LMS. These course guides also contain online tutorials, downloadable podcasts, and practice exercises, all built in-house.11 During faculty−student classroom time, the students work together collaboratively in stable base groups12 on problems that increase in difficulty over the class period. Base groups are assigned on the first day of class to increase student comfort with their peers when struggling with difficult concepts. These base groups are assigned by students’ prospective majors; some groups are single gender and some are mixed gender, but no group consists of only one male or one female student. Peer mentors facilitate group interactions and offer students conceptual assistance with the problems. The mentors are undergraduate students who have successfully completed the course and have been invited to participate by a chemistry instructor. Peer mentors provide students with individualized assistance at the moment when the student is wrestling with conceptual understanding. The mentors receive training throughout the semester on group dynamics as well as on each week’s content. Students enrolled in the class provide answers to the problems through a student response system (SRS or “clickers”) that allow instructors to tailor each class to student needs. If students struggle with a problem, an impromptu lecture of no more than a few minutes is given to clarify understanding before assigning additional problems. If students are solving problems quickly and accurately, the instructor moves the class to a new topic. The use of the clickers to assess student understanding of concepts offers flexibility and has been demonstrated to increase student engagement with course material and ultimately results in a higher mastery of course content.13−16 Formal summative assessment procedures were revamped to use existing and emerging technologies. Although the majority of the students’ course grades derive from a traditional assessment series (three semester exams and one final exam),

from each other. The belief in student ability helped redefine the role of the teacher in the course: from disseminator of information to facilitator of learning.6 Using the administrative trust in the power of technology, the committee hoped to incite a small pedagogical revolution through a large-scale course design that built on solid pedagogical understanding of cognition and learning.

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GENERAL CHEMISTRY I AT PENN STATE BERKS General Chemistry I is the first course of a conventional twosemester chemistry sequence. The course is theory based and is worth three credits; the laboratory component is a separate course. The course varies across the university in the textbook used, the number of students, and the semesters in which it is offered. At the Berks campus (a stand-alone college of 2800 students within the Pennsylvania State University system), the course consists of 5−8 sections per academic year with approximately 60 students in each section. Students must place into the course through a combination of two placement tests: chemistry and mathematics. The text used at the Berks campus is the same as is used at the University Park campus: Chemistry: The Central Science.9 The number of chemistry faculty has increased over the past 10 years from four to six faculty instructors; all members of the department teach the course. Prior to the redesign process, each instructor taught individually: he or she created his or her own syllabus, homework, and exams. The course was primarily lecture-based and most sections used an undergraduate supplemental instructor who would attend class and then conduct weekly review sessions for the course. At Penn State, students are permitted to drop a course within the first 10 days of the semester without any permanent indication on their transcript. Students then have until week 12 to drop a course but are assessed a small fee, the dropped credits count against the 16 total drop credits students are permitted for a B.S. or B.A. degree, and the course shows up on the transcript as a withdrawal (W). The withdrawal rate for General Chemistry I was higher than most courses taught at Berks campus.

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COURSE REDESIGN The redesign of General Chemistry I was initiated in 2004 when the administration at Penn State Berks considered implementation of technology in General Chemistry I. The course was selected by the administration for two main reasons: the course had one of the historically lowest average GPAs on campus and one of the worst drop rates. College administrators were hopeful about a potential redesign because several chemists at the institution had published pedagogical scholarship and were enthusiastic about a redesign opportunity. Administrators wanted to reduce face-to-face time while increasing student success; however, as the planning proB

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nominal credit is also given for completion of the preclass assignments and in-class clicker questions. Additionally, student understanding of the material is assessed through weekly online quizzes taken via the LMS. The online quizzes offer continual exposure to content and provided immediate feedback to both students and instructors on student progress.

Table 2. GPA Scale Equivalents of Letter Grades

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ASSESSMENT Data were collected from a variety of sources, including student grades, number of withdrawals, completion rates (students receiving a grade of C or better), final exam grades, and student evaluations of teaching effectiveness. When the Web-enhanced course was implemented, the redesign team decided that all sections would be taught using the new methodology from that point forward. Students from 2001−2006, taught using primarily lecture, were used as a control group. To ensure that the students held to a normal distribution, skewness and kurtosis analyses were run using SPSS 20.0. The data were considered skewed; thus, Kruskal−Wallis analyses, which do not rely on normalized data, were run. If the Kruskal−Wallis asymptotic significance (AS) value is less than or equal to 0.05, the means of the populations can be considered significantly different. The redesign team suspected that the Fall semester students were academically different than their Spring or Summer counterparts. An analysis found that the three groups differed in their quantitative, verbal, and total SAT scores (AS = 0.000), so the students were separated into groups. The Summer students were then excluded from the analysis because the sample size was comparatively small. The remaining students were placed into one of four groups: 1. Traditional course Fall students (704 participants) 2. Traditional course Spring students (414 participants) 3. Web-enhanced course Fall students (1240 participants) 4. Web-enhanced course Spring students (627 participants) The traditional students were enrolled in General Chemistry I from Fall 2001−Spring 2006. The Web-enhanced students were enrolled in the course from Fall 2006−Spring 2012. The SAT scores for the four groups are listed in Figure 1. Every SAT score (math, verbal, and total) for the Web-enhanced students was significantly lower than the same score for those students in the traditional sections (AS = 0.000, Figure 1). To compare student grades in the traditional and the Webenhanced courses, letter grades were converted to numeric grades using the scale in use at this institution (Table 2). A

Letter Grade

Grade-Point Average Equivalent

A A− B+ B B− C+ C D F W

4.00 3.67 3.33 3.00 2.67 2.33 2.00 1.00 0.00 0.00

variety of grades were compared, including students’ first grade in the course, students’ high grade in the course, and students’ average grade in the course. The multiple comparisons were necessitated because many students attempted the course more than once, especially in the traditional cohort. A comparison of students taking the Web-enhanced course in the Fall semesters versus students taking the Web-enhanced version demonstrates significantly higher first (2.37 vs 1.74), average (2.44 vs 1.95), and high (2.53 vs 2.19) GPA (AS = 0.000 for all comparisons, Figure 2). A comparison of students enrolled in the Spring

Figure 2. First, average, and high course grades in General Chemistry I for four groups: Fall semester students in a traditional or Webenhanced format, and Spring semester students in a traditional or Web-enhanced format. The Kruskal−Wallis asymptotic significance (AS) value was found to be 0.000, which indicates that the means of the populations can be considered significantly different.

demonstrated similar results with significantly higher first (2.14 vs 1.58), average (2.19 vs 1.75), and high (2.27 vs 2.00) GPAs (AS = 0.000 for all comparisons, Figure 2). On average, the students who attempted the course in the traditional format did not earn passing grades on their first attempt and their average score was also below passing. An examination of the distribution of course grades for students’ first attempt at the course shows that the most common grade earned by the traditional Fall and Spring students was a W (withdrawal) while the most common grade in the Web-enhanced course for both Fall and Spring students was a B (Figure 3). The ratio of students who passed (earned an A, B, or C, inclusive of + and −) versus those who failed (earned a D, F, or W) was analyzed. The C cutoff was used because all majors at this institution require a grade of C or better in this chemistry course. During the Fall semesters prior to the course redesign, only 1.4 students passed the traditional lecture course for every 1 student who failed. Another way to

Figure 1. SAT scores of students enrolled in traditional and Webenhanced general chemistry course offerings. C

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Figure 3. Distribution of grades for the first attempt at General Chemistry I by Fall or Spring semester.

view this finding is that approximately 60% of the students passed the first time through the course. When the Webenhanced design was implemented, 3.1 students passed for every 1 student who failed (AS = 0.000). This result means that 76% of students passed the first time through the course. During the Spring semesters this trend continued, with 1.1 students passing the course for every 1 student who failed in the traditional format, a 52% success rate the first time through the course, while in the Web-enhanced course 2.5 students passed for every student who failed, a 71% success rate (AS = 0.000). Another metric used to measure student success was the percentage of students in each cohort who eventually passed chemistry. All students taking the course do so because the course is required for their major. If a student does not eventually pass General Chemistry I, he or she must change majors, so eventual completion of the course is required for student advancement within the major. For the students who took General Chemistry I in the Fall semester, only 77% of traditional students eventually passed compared to 82% of the students in the Web-enhanced cohort (AS = 0.000). A similar result was found in the Spring semester with students in the traditional course only passing the course 69% of the time compared to an eventual completion rate of 76% for the Webenhanced cohort (AS = 0.000). The number of students passing General Chemistry I could not have occurred without a significant decrease in withdrawal rates. Approximately 27% of students in the traditional Fall cohort withdrew from the course compared to only 10% in the Web-enhanced cohort (Z = 0.000). The results were even more dramatic in the Spring with an average withdrawal rate of 33% for the traditional cohort compared to 9% for the Webenhanced cohort (Z = 0.000). Another way to analyze the data is to consider that students in the Fall semester who took the traditional course required 1.32 attempts to complete the course while the students taking the Web-enhanced course in the Fall semester only required 1.13 attempts (Z = 0.000). The Spring semester students had similar results: 1.36 attempts for traditional versus 1.10 attempts for Web-enhanced (Z = 0.000). Assessment procedures in the traditional and Web-enhanced courses were varied: different instructors used different grading schemes prior to the implementation of the Web-enhanced course. To ensure that any increase in student success after the redesign did not come solely from an increase in available points, such as participation and preclass assignment points, the final exam given during the Spring semester of 2006 (the last semester taught in the traditional format) was given in the Spring semester of 2007. The finals in 2006 were never

returned to the students. The average grade on the final in the traditionally taught sections was 58 (±3) out of 100 points, while in the Web-enhanced sections the average grade on the final was 70 (±2, Z = 0.025). As more students passed General Chemistry I, enrollments in General Chemistry II were correspondingly larger. Not all majors require General Chemistry II so the number of students enrolling in this course is significantly smaller than in General Chemistry I. Student grades in General Chemistry II were examined to ensure that the larger influx of students from the first course was not simply delaying student attrition to the second course in the chemistry sequence. General Chemistry II has been taught primarily using a lecture format. The “traditional” and “Web-enhanced” designations in Figure 4

Figure 4. First, average, and high grades in General Chemistry II for four groups of students based on General Chemistry I status.

refer to the students in General Chemistry I. Four groups of students are compared: Fall semester students taking General Chemistry I in either traditional (220) or Web-enhanced (540) format, and Spring semester students taking General Chemistry I with either traditional (100) or Web-enhanced (187) formats. Student grades for Fall semester General Chemistry II were significantly greater for first, average, and high grade (AS = 0.000, 0.000, and 0.008 respectively). The results were more pronounced for students in the spring semester (AS = 0.000 for all three comparisons, Figure 4). Similarly to the analysis done for General Chemistry I, the withdrawal rates for General Chemistry II were examined. Approximately 19% of Fall semester students taking General Chemistry I in the traditional format withdrew from General Chemistry II, compared to only 11% of Fall students from the Web-enhanced cohort (Z = 0.000). In the Spring semester, the D

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results were more dramatic, with 24% of students from the traditional cohort withdrawing compared to only 12% withdrawal rate for the Web-enhanced students (Z = 0.000). The number of attempts required to complete General Chemistry II was also examined. Fall students in the traditional General Chemistry I required an average of 1.18 attempts to successfully complete General Chemistry II. Fall students taking the Webenhanced version of General Chemistry I required an average of only 1.13 attempts to complete the second course (Z = 0.004). For the Spring semester the numbers were 1.38 attempts for the traditional course compared to 1.11 for the Web-enhanced version of General Chemistry I (Z = 0.000). An end-of-course survey was administered at the end of the semester the first few years the course was taught in the Webenhanced format (N = 841 students). The survey included open-ended questions that asked the students to list tools that were helpful to them when they were trying to learn the concepts in the course. Because the question was open-ended, students needed to select those parts of the course that helped them without any prompting. Students often listed several course components and, therefore, the following percentages do not add to 100%. Over 40% of the respondents listed online quizzes as being helpful and 35% listed the class guides. The use of clickers was noted by over 40% of the respondents (Table 3).

Figure 5. Overall trend in student evaluations of the quality of the course and the quality of the instructor.

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DISCUSSION As technology becomes more pervasive, the impact that technology can exert on learner-centered teaching will continue to grow. Often the technology simply replaces an older technology, such as note cards,17 or exposes students to technology for the sake of technology.18 The advancement of educational technologies can prompt a reexamination of course design that in turn can promote pedagogical improvements in the classroom to increase student achievement in a course. The student success reported in this study seems attributable to the design elements of the course. By examining 10 years worth of data with clear demarcation between a traditional course and a Web-enhanced course, the results seem noteworthy. The increasing enrollment at the institution for students in STEM majors is evident by the increased number of students in the Web-enhanced cohort of students. The increased enrollment provides an even greater incentive to assist all students who want to learn general chemistry. One particularly striking result is that the students enrolled in the Web-enhanced version of the course had significantly higher GPAs in the course even though the average SAT score for this cohort was less than for the traditional cohort. The increased percentage of students eventually completing General Chemistry I means that the institution is retaining 4−7% more students in a given major at the campus where the course is taught. The increased retention translates to as many as 27 more students annually who are able to advance toward a STEM major each year almost exclusively owing to the student success in the redesigned course. The decreased number of attempts that students required to complete the course seems remarkable given the decrease in preparedness as judged by the average SAT scores. Students enrolled in the Spring semester are usually deficient in either chemistry or math, which is why they took the course in the Spring rather than the Fall. Given the remedial work required of the Spring students, the achievement gains by this group are impressive and may be the most positive finding of this study. Technology combined with active-learning strategies in the classroom can help academically underprepared students to succeed. One critically important aspect of the Web-enhanced design is the almost total reliance on active-learning strategies for face-to-face learning. An often-cited pedagogical study by Hake on active learning in the classroom found that interactive classrooms demonstrated substantially better learning outcomes than those classes that relied on lecture.19 A recent study on clickers in the physics curriculum found that using clickers as the central activity

Table 3. Distribution of Student Responses on an End-ofCourse Assessment Item Listed by Student as Being Helpful to Successa

Students Listing Item, % (N = 841)

Group work In-class work/clickers Online quizzes Class guides Instructor/mentor Text Exams

46.0 41.5 40.2 35.1 13.8 11.5 4.6

a

Students were asked an open-ended question about what facets of the course helped them learn.

End-of-course student evaluations were compared among sections. The two evaluation measures analyzed were “rate the overall quality of the course” and “rate the overall quality of the instructor”. These two questions are used by the college administration to rate the quality of a faculty member’s teaching (and thus correspond to faculty raises and possible tenure or promotion). The evaluations are anonymous and are not available to the instructors until after the course ends. The scale of each question is 1 to 7, with 7 being outstanding and 1 being poor. During the fall semester, the traditional course had an overall weighted average quality score of 4.79, while the score for Web-enhanced was 5.82. The students also perceived an increase in the quality of instruction, with the weighted average increasing from 4.76 to 6.03. The same trend was seen in the Spring semesters, with the traditional course having an overall quality of 4.65 compared to the Web-enhanced course with an average of 5.86. The instructors in the traditional format had an overall quality rating of 4.78 while those in the Web-enhanced course received an average rating of 6.30 (Figure 5, p = 0.000 in all cases). E

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inside a classroom improved student understanding by 50%.20 Hake lists 10 suggestions for improving interactivity: eight of those suggestions19 were incorporated in the redesign of General Chemistry I, including: “tight integration of all components [in the course]”; “careful attention to motivational factors”; “inexpensive augmentation of teaching or coaching staff by undergraduate[s]”; and “more personal attention to students by means of human-mediated computer instruction in some areas”. A key question that arises from any pedagogical study is whether the elements of the course are transportable to other institutions and other disciplines. The National Science Foundation focuses much of its educational efforts on projects that can be extended beyond a single institution. Two such projects are peer-led team learning (PLTL) and processoriented, guided-inquiry learning (POGIL), which have similarities to the approach advocated in this article although neither directly involves technological innovation. PLTL uses peer mentors currently enrolled in a course and usually requires that students meet with their mentor in an extra session each week.21−24 The peer mentors in general chemistry are students who have previously succeeded in the course and who have the necessary interpersonal skills to facilitate group work. POGIL entails replacing the lecture-driven presentation of content with guided inquiry wherein students arrive at their own conclusions based on presented data.25 In the Web-enhanced course design, students also work together to draw conclusions about the material but they are not given data. Instead, the Web-enhanced course involves a combination of problem solving, informal lectures, and clicker questions to both magnify and assess student comprehension in real time. Much like PLTL or POGIL, the components of the redesigned course described in this article can be implemented in almost any science course. The pedagogical value of tools such as the LMS, personal response systems, and a variety of disciplinary-specific technology modules relies on intentionality: those tools must be judiciously used to achieve educational goals. Exploring technological possibilities can expand considerations of the entire learning experience for students, both in and out of class. The use of undergraduate peer mentors, for example, can be implemented with little trouble. The merits of using mentors extend beyond the advantages to the students taking the course because the mentors themselves also improve as they teach the students.26 The increased ratings for the course and the course instructors suggest improved student satisfaction in courses using technology. Anecdotal evidence from the Learning Center on campus suggests that the Web-enhanced course has led to a reduction in the number of students seeking outside tutoring. Students seem to feel more confident in their learning but that confidence has developed slowly as the campus culture changed. During the first semester that the redesigned course was implemented students were uncomfortable and often asked why the instructors were not teaching. By the end of the second semester the culture on campus had changed to the point that students had generally accepted the redesigned course campus. Students entering the course now seem to embrace the Web-enhanced structure. Students know to expect clicker questions in class without formal lecture and these students often express disappointment by asking why other instructors do not teach in this way. Administrative support for the project was paramount to its success, as was the presence of a cohort of professionals willing

to work collaboratively to design the course. At a minimum, course redesign of this magnitude requires an instructional designer or a multimedia specialist (ideally both), an institutional assessment expert, and pedagogical experts in the department. The pedagogical expertise required for this project resulted from two members of the faculty who specialize in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Many institutional promotion and tenure committees are reluctant to give pedagogical scholarship the same weight as basic science scholarship, yet the scholarly backgrounds of the two chemists in this project provided the pedagogical grist for implementation and continuation of this project. The professional development of new faculty was an unexpected benefit of this project. Because the entire department collaborated on the learning outcomes for the course, each of the five full-time chemists was invested in the project. When two new chemists were hired, they were asked to teach the Web-assisted course. Although hesitant at first, both have now embraced the design. Regular meetings among the teachers of the course each semester ensure that all faculty are comfortable with the design, thus helping to ensure faculty buyin. Teaching a course that incorporates sound pedagogical practice has been beneficial for the new faculty as they learn how to be effective teachers. The collaboration among all members of the department provides a cooperative work environment. The success of the General Chemistry I redesign has resulted in redesigning General Chemistry II, Organic Chemistry I, and Organic Chemistry II. The design of these three courses has not been as extensive as the redesign of General Chemistry I; however, much of the pedagogical improvements used in General Chemistry I served as a template for the redesigned courses. Although the initial redesign took over 1000 h, subsequent redesigns have been more efficient because of the skills learned during the initial redesign. Improvements to each of the Web-enhanced courses have been incremental and not nearly as time-consuming. The collaborative nature of the department has led to a shared mission in which all teachers understand the technology and the pedagogy associated with the Web-enhanced courses.

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CONCLUSION The results presented in this paper suggest that significant gains in student achievement can be accomplished through careful course redesign. A recent study detailing a similarly structured design for an introductory biology course concluded with the following line:27 “If further research confirms the efficacy of highly structured course designs in reducing failure rates in gateway courses, the promise of educational democracy may come a few steps closer to being fulfilled.” The findings presented in this paper should help confirm the work completed in biology. Future work will be directed toward a better understanding of the extent to which each the various aspects of the course redesign enhanced student learning. When designing the course, the guiding belief was that using pedagogically sound curricular design would improve student outcomes. Rather than trying to change the course incrementally (and assessing each incremental change), the decision was made to completely revamp the course and then measure the outcomes. The results of this decision have led to significantly increased course completion rates, student success, and student satisfaction. F

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

Corresponding Author

*E-mail: [email protected]. Notes

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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