Foundational Course Transformation Academy (FCTA)

Students bring a variety of past experiences to their first-year studies at Notre Dame. Excellence in foundational courses is critical for preparing them to move into more advanced studies during their sophomore, junior, and senior years and, ultimately, achieve their academic goals.

Notre Dame Learning’s Foundational Course Transformation Academy (FCTA) promotes equitable, evidence-based learning of a consistently excellent standard by revitalizing and redesigning a small number of these courses across the disciplines.

Through the FCTA, academic departments partner with a team drawn from Notre Dame Learning’s group of teaching, learning design, academic media, and technology experts to redesign a course with an eye toward:

• enhancing equity
• improving the consistency and efficacy of the learning experience for all students
• deploying the most current research on effective pedagogical practices in order to ensure that students acquire the foundational capacities and ways of thinking needed for longer-term academic and institutional success

The FCTA is an ambitious undertaking. The departments and faculty who engage in the course redesign process are doing an incredible service to Notre Dame undergraduates by investing in strategies, tools, and practices that will better position all students who take the courses to succeed as they progress further in their studies.

A Three-Year Commitment

Notre Dame Learning works with the Office of the Provost; the Office of Undergraduate Education; Institutional Research, Innovation, & Strategy (IRIS); the colleges and schools; and academic departments to identify potential courses for redesign. The FCTA represents a three-year commitment for participating departments.

Year One: Analysis

The FCTA cohort engages in “pre-design” research and analysis, including focused engagement with scholarly research and discipline-specific best practices, observational and interview research, and custom analysis of student readiness as well as obstacles/bottlenecks in existing approaches.

Year Two: Course Redesign and Modular Piloting 

Course teams are involved with an intensive course redesign and revitalization process, including any curriculum or media resource development, as informed by education research. Instructors may explore new pedagogies and techniques and conduct proof-of-concept experiments to inform course redesign; any such experiments are professionally assessed (including via observation and feedback).

Year Three: Pilot Launch of New Course Design

Each FCTA course team offers the newly redesigned foundational course, with extensive observation and detailed analysis of pedagogies, learning, and assessment activities (measuring efficacy down to the item level). The third year also features comparative analysis of student learning outcomes and groundwork for assessing persistence of learning (i.e., durability of foundational concepts in future courses).