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 learning-centered environments of a consistently excellent standard by revitalizing and redesigning a high-priority group 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:
- building learning-centered environments that are better for all
- improving the consistency and efficacy of the learning experience
- 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, analysis, and brainstorming. This includes focused engagement with scholarly research and best practices, Notre Dame-specific learning analytics, and challenges 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.
Calculus I
The FCTA team completed its second year working with faculty from the Department of Mathematics to redesign Calculus I, identifying and pursuing their transformation goals for the course. Among these were integrating a learning cycle that takes students from exploration to application of new concepts; creating a new co-requisite, one-credit course for students who need extra support; and developing opportunities for students to build their mathematics mindset. Both courses will be taught for the first time during the upcoming fall semester.
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. 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).
Engineering Physics I: Mechanics
This past spring, the Department of Physics launched its new Engineering Physics I. The work physics faculty did to reimagine the presentation of the course material also informed the design of a remodeled, learning-centered classroom, which the course’s instructors expressed enthusiasm for teaching in and students said enabled their professors to move throughout the room, making them more accessible. With encouraging early results in the department’s priority areas—including student ability to solve complex, multistep problems—the physics team is continuing to collaborate closely with Notre Dame Learning to roll out a redesigned Engineering Physics II this fall.