Anyone who thinks computer-programming courses are as boring as binary code hasn't been to the University of Pittsburgh, where Daniel Mosse has enlisted Samurai warriors and ballerinas to help teach.
These and other 3-D animations, culled from instructional software developed at Carnegie Mellon University, are helping the Pitt professor breathe life into an introductory course that for too long, he says, has scared freshman away from computer science with its "nerdiness."
It's just one example of a movement taking hold as higher education challenges old notions about teaching. On a variety of campuses, faculty worried about high failure rates or lessons that lack relevance are redesigning their courses with the hope of improving student success and even saving their institutions money.
At Pitt, rather than simply slaving over arcane computer code or worrying about misplaced commas in the code, the 44 students in Dr. Mosse's class will create short, animated films that show how computer code is used and why it must be precise.
An index to the series
- Part 1: Students face a long list of obstacles on the way to college degree
- Part 2: Remedial courses used by many to adjust to college
- Part 3: First-year college students often fail as 'life intervenes'
- Part 4: Colleges on 'early alert' to help frosh
- Part 5: Required courses can boost degree of difficulty
- Part 6: Professors redesign courses for success
- Part 7: No simple explanation for college dropout rate
If they choose, say, a monster truck to be featured in their film, they must give it precise instructions on how to move. That's because the smallest missing step could lead to a crash. Likewise, an animated skater not programmed precisely enough to avoid a hole in the ice may fall in.
Carnegie Mellon's "Alice" software, with its catalogue of images and pre-programmed movements, is helping to make instruction more meaningful on an estimated 15 percent of the nation's campuses, where faculty such as Dr. Mosse worry about recent declines in computer science 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, us