Miami to revamp most enrolled courses

Though still in its beginning stages, Miami University has already begun to implement the Top 25 initiative – a program that works to revamp and reorganize some of the University’s most popular classes.

Despite its name, the Top 25 program works to restructure the 30 most enrolled in classes at Miami in an effort to create more student initiative when it comes to learning, said Jerry Stonewater, project director of the Top 25 program.

Stonewater, a professor of mathematics, tried this “student inquiry” method of teaching in a calculus class.F

“We learn best by doing, not by being told, and if you invent the notion of finding the area under the curve, you own it,” Stonewater said.

For many classes in the Top 25 program, more learning will be expected of students outside of class. Stonewater said he does not anticipate this extra time dedication to be an issue for students because he said that students do not spend enough time studying in the current lecture based format.

“In class time is more freed up for you to work on solving problems, working with other students, giving students feedback,… to do simulations or to do some really interesting simulations people are proposing in different disciplines,” Stonewater said.

The project comes as an echo of Miami President David Hodge’s inaugural address.

“Unfortunately, throughout most of higher education, the common approach to undergraduate education does not engage students as active research agents,” Hodge said. “In my experience, we spend too much time telling students what we think they need to know, and not enough time using their curiosity to drive their learning.”

Marjorie Nadler, professor of communications, is working to implement an accepted proposal to revamp public speaking classes (COM 135).

The class involves students delivering a series of speeches, both planned and impromptu, over the course of the term. According to Nadler, it can be difficult for students to improve their public speaking if there is no good way to go back and review the speech.

With the funding the department received from the accepted proposal, speeches will, beginning in the spring, be recorded with digital video cameras and uploaded to a blackboard website. From there, students and professors will be able to go back and review the speech and even add commentary that plays during the speech.

Nadler said she is confident the digitalization technique will work well as several grad students in the communications department have already begun doing this on an experimental basis.

Although the students enrolled in COM 135 have only delivered two speeches this semester, Nadler said she is already seeing improvement over the old system.

“What we’re seeing in the pilot program is the progress is much greater and much faster,” Nadler said. “We’re seeing a bigger leap between the first and second speech.”

The accepted proposal also calls for a communication web for COM 135 instructors.

As Nadler explained, most of the classes in the Top 25 program are large lecture halls, so the change only affects a small number of instructors. Due to the nature of the public speaking courses, however, the classes only enroll 24-26 students per section.

“We don’t always have the intereaction among the three campuses and among the faculty,” Nadler said. “(But, with the new system,) instructors, no matter where they are will have access to new approaches and what we are doing.”

Nadler said she hopes that instructors will be able to effectively share anything from lesson plans to new concepts to new techniques for teaching the course.

The other six courses whose Top 25 proposals were accepted as of April of 2007 include, CSA 141 and CSA 148 - Personal Computer Application and Business Computing, GEO 101 – Global Forces, Local Diversity, MIS 235 – Making Information Systems Fun, From a Students' Perspective, PSY 111 – Introduction to Psychology, MKT 291 – Principles of Marketing and THE 191 – Theatre Appreciation.

Stonewater said that despite the new learning techniques, retraining of instructors will not be necessary, although a summer workshop is in planning.