DELTA Grants Inspire Recipients to Improve Learning Experiences for Students

Many DELTA Grants recipients have used their awards as an opportunity to partake in projects to benefit the NC State community and beyond. Two recipients have shared their experiences with DELTA to inspire others.

Bringing Students Together

Catherine LePrevost was a recipient of a blended learning grant for the 2016-2017 DELTA Grants cycle. This grant gave LePrevost the opportunity to lead a project to develop a new course, AEC 592: Agricultural Chemical Risk Assessment.

The goal of this project was to allow graduate students in online programs to interact with graduate students on campus. From her experience teaching in the Professional Science Master’s Online Program, LePrevost met many working students that had rich experiences to share, but students were separated from each other by their online environment.

“I thought that it would be a really great opportunity, especially around this particular topic, agricultural chemicals, to have those students from the online program interacting with students who were on campus.”

LePrevost and her team were able to develop an application with animations for the course, which is called Neuron-to-Neuron Normal and Toxic Actions. While the web application was designed for students in the course, efforts are underway to disseminate the resource broadly, including to high school and college instructors looking for high-quality, web-based materials to support online learning during the pandemic.

AEC 592 has been offered twice since its development, and LePrevost has learned much from her experience with the project’s creation and implementation. LePrevost considered her experience working with a diverse team, including co-instructor W. Gregory Cope and DELTA instructional and media designers, on this challenging project to be valuable to her.

“I appreciate those hard conversations we had around conference tables as a team trying to figure out how best to represent something or how best to talk about something because even though it felt like hard work at the time, it has ended up being one of the things that makes the course more successful and the materials more successful.”

Additionally, the experience with instructional and media designers LePrevost gained through this project proved helpful when she had to adapt to an online course design in response to the pandemic.

The efforts LePrevost and her team have made have been appreciated by students, which is reflected in the overwhelmingly positive feedback from students that have taken the course. Results from an assessment of the web application completed by students in the course showed that 89% of the students said the animations helped them to effectively compare normal and toxic actions while 95% of the students said it improved their understanding of the
modes of action for the various insecticides.

Rethinking the Design

Sarah Khan was a recipient of a critical path course redesign grant for both the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 DELTA Grants cycles. This grant has allowed Khan to take part in a two-year project to redesign one of the most important courses in the Poole College of Management.

The goal of this project was to convert BUS 340: Information Systems Management, which is a course requirement for all business students at NC State, into a hybrid course. This means the course was redesigned to allow students to spend some class time in person and some class time online, providing greater flexibility and better learning outcomes for the course. The redesign effort focused on addressing problems regarding pedagogical design, student collaboration and content of the course.

Khan and her colleagues had made efforts to convert the course into a hybrid design prior to this project, but the team was only able to effectively respond to the demands for the change through the DELTA grant.

“There was more of a need because of the increasing demand for the course and a necessity of operationalizing it as quickly as possible,” Khan said. “As soon as I saw [the DELTA Grants announcements] I knew that I had to do it.”

Khan has taught the course with the hybrid design for a few semesters already, and the implementation of the project has taught her the importance of the instructor’s role in course design and how such projects can benefit instructors themselves.

“Such projects can make instructors independent in implementing their new ideas to make the course successful in the future.”

Sharing Their Discoveries

Taking part in the course redesign project inspired Khan to share what she learned, both inside and outside of NC State. The conversion of the course to a more flexible design proved to save faculty time to prepare content for the course instead of spending time designing the course. The new design also provided adaptability as it allowed students and faculty to adjust quickly to the changes in instruction during COVID-19. Khan encourages instructors not only to use the information from this project to create more hybrid courses but also to collaborate on projects of their own.

“Investing in a flexible design and spending time to overhaul the course accordingly is worth it, and don’t be afraid to jump into such projects,” Khan said. “Secondly, share your experiences. Whatever works, whatever doesn’t work, share it with peers, so they can benefit from it as well.”

LePrevost also wishes to extend the reach of her project as she and her team hope to publish a manuscript for biology teachers at the high school level and beyond. She realized through her course development project that NC State has a great number of resources available that instructors should take advantage of.

“Part of the reason I feel really strongly about getting these tools out to other teachers is because I had been looking for those sources and could not find them, and now we have these high-quality resources that have been tested and refined through a couple of rounds of courses,” said LePrevost.

Working with a Team

Both LePrevost and Khan are thankful for their experiences with their DELTA Grants teams.

LePrevost keeps in touch with her team as they write the project’s manuscript, and she is appreciative of their eagerness and investment in the project.

“I feel fortunate that [the team] has such diverse expertise, but also, they were so excited about the project, and that made the whole experience much more exciting,” said LePrevost

Khan was also grateful for her team’s drive and productivity that made the course redesign a success.

“We had a very solid project plan from the team… and everybody was given a task, and they were done with their task when they were supposed to be, so we were on track,” said Khan.