Contact:  Office of Media Relations, Michelle Fryling, Director

July 6, 2007

Indiana University of Pennsylvania has been selected as one of 20 institutions select nationwide as the first group of colleges and universities to participate in the National Center for Academic Transformation’s (NCAT) Colleagues Committed to Redesign (C2R) program.

The C2R program is sponsored by the Fund for Improvement in Post-Secondary Education and is intended to support the efforts of American colleges and universities in redesigning instructional approaches.

“The aim is to examine the uses of technology in order to achieve improvements in student learning while reducing instructional costs,” according to Dr. Carol Twigg, president and CEO of the NCAT.

Other institutions to be included in this groundbreaking project include University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon University, Penn State University, and the university system of Maryland.

Dr. Elizabeth A. Connor, a trained consultant and designated “Redesign Scholar” in the C2R program, visited IUP on June 27 to discuss the program. Dr. Connor met with members of IUP’s C2R Team, department chairs and several faculty members in the IUP College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics to discuss the program concepts.

IUP’s C2R team includes Dr. Carl Luciano (biology),  Dr. David Pistole (biology), Dr. Nicholas Kolb (associate provost and dean, IUP School of Continuing Education), and Bill Balint (IUP’s chief technology officer). The IUP team’s first goal is  to re-design a biology course for IUP’s 2007 fall semester.

The results of this pilot course will be presented at the Redesign Alliance National Conference in March 2008.

IUP’s C2R team will continue to collaborate with NCAT, having already attended their first institute in Austin, Texas in March of 2007 to present initial program data.

The intent of the National Center for Academic Transformation is to bring together selected scholars and institutions, strategies and techniques for successful course design and implementation.

“We are fortunate to have been chosen to participate in this project because it enables our faculty members to draw upon NCAT resources to improve student learning in a critical course in biology,” said Dr. Kolb.

“The work done by Dr. Luciano and Dr. Pistole then can be applied to other courses at IUP,” he said.

Collaboration and consultation are key elements of the redesign institutes and the ultimate goal is to both achieve significant educational change and to contribute to the success of students, Dr. Kolb said.

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