It’s rough out there for colleges these days. Budgets are down, enrollments are up, and the population they need to educate is increasingly composed of low-income or academically under-prepared students that struggle to earn a degree on time, if at all. For many schools, the response is to throw up their hands, blame the state, raise tuition, and then threaten to cut enrollment. At the department level, this can mean reducing offerings—a dangerous outcome for students who may already have trouble enough getting into the classes they need.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. For over a decade, the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), a nonprofit group, has worked with colleges and universities across the country to redesign entire large introductory courses in such a way that they use technology to simultaneously reduce costs and improve student learning.
There’s a tendency when we hear the word technology in higher education to immediately associate it with
