ce enrollment.
"You can present logic in an interactive way or a boring way," said the computer science professor.
"There is a real nerd stigma to computer programming. I want to attract different kinds of minds to computer science by showing students that computer language is not some evil thing to be afraid of."
By assessing what students actually get out of class and then using the data to make improvements, the redesigners are challenging a stubbornly held campus mind-set.
"Most institutions continue to believe that getting better results from students is totally impossible without better-prepared students, more money or both," said Kati Haycock, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group pushing for higher success rates in college.
In fact, she said, schools teaching similar populations can have significantly different success rates. She said course redesign "is probably growing faster than any other innovation in higher education."
Some redesigns involve "gatekeeper" courses, traditional, mostly freshmen lecture classes that are required within a student's major. These classes, some with enrollments running into the hundreds, can be notorious for high student failure and withdrawal rates.
These classes may be less costly for institutions to deliver and historically were viewed as a tool to weed out those ill-suited to go further in a discipline. But nowadays, many ask whether these classes carry too high a price given student attrition rates reaching 30 percent or more.
A college can have 1,000 undergraduate courses, Ms. Haycock said.
"It turns out that somewhere between 25 and 35 of those courses typically account for more than a third of all undergraduate enrollment," she said. "The idea is, if you can get those courses to work better -- high standards but more deliberative efforts to get students to meet those standards -- then you can really begin to turn around the undergraduate success rate."
One organization, the National Center for Academic Transformation, uses information technology in course redesigns that improve learning while reducing instructional costs. Over the last decade, it's been a catalyst for more than 200 large-scale redesigns on dozens of campuses in various courses such as algebra, chemistry, economic statistics and Spanish. Schools that have benefited include Carnegie Mellon and Penn State University
Some of the most successful overhauls are shared with other schools, with the goal of increasing the number of students likely to pass these courses and -- just as important -- retain what is being taught.
One example, at the University of Alabama, involved replacing standard lectures with required time in math labs, where students at computers tackle problems at their own pace and get help on the spot from instructors and tutors. The school in four years managed to raise from 40 percent to almost 75 percent the share of students in intermediate algebra earning a C- or better, a significant gain in what was the school's biggest problem area in math, said Joe Benson, interim vice president for research.
The achievement gap between black and white students was erased in the course, and the gains did not require hiring additional faculty. In fact, the cost per student declined by 28 percent.
At the University of Notre Dame, Dennis Jacobs remembers how disheartening it was to stand in front of a general chemistry class of 250 students, knowing many would fail or be turned off by the subject.
So in 1997, he took students whose low math entrance scores made them most at risk to fail and placed them in a redesigned version. It covered the same general chemistry topics but replaced standard lectures with interactive group learning that required students to develop and defend their ideas in talks with their peers.
He found the success rate of those high-risk students increased from 40 percent to 70 percent. Fifty percent more of them succeeded in second-year chemistry than did their predecessors. The redesigned course has been expanded to other sections.
"It was