What is N-Gen Course Redesign™?

The University of North Texas is in the sixth year of a nine-year journey to transform large enrollment undergraduate courses by engaging and enabling faculty members to design, apply, and assess innovative instructional techniques. Click here for a brief history of course redesign at UNT.

UNT’s Next Generation Course Redesign™ Project entails both a process and products.  The N-Gen process is a carefully choreographed series of events involving an expanding N-Gen Community of Practice. Through this process, N-Gen Faculty Fellows are identified, trained, nurtured, and mentored.   N-Gen Senior Faculty Fellows, in turn, mentor the next cohort of faculty in the redesign process.

The N-Gen Project also results in classes that have been redesigned, evaluated, and revised utilizing a “never ending redesign” process.  Courses that meet the rigorous standards of the N-Gen process are designated N-Gen Courses and qualify to bear the N-Gen logo brand. 

While each N-Gen Course is unique, they all contain certain characteristics: Each N-Gen course strives to:
  • Target higher level learning Student Learning Outcomes
  • Emphasize deep versus surface learning
  • Increase student engagement
  • Promote cognitive development
  • Enable students to learn in a challenging and diverse environment
  • Develop a positive attitude toward the academic subject
  • Be delivered at the same or lower cost per student as the “traditional” course

N-Gen Instructional Strategies/Delivery Formats

Each of the three instructional strategies/delivery formats brings its own strengths to the learning environment and is used for specific purposes.

The lecture is used to:
  • Create interest and motivation and provide assurance that the students can be successful
  • Clarify and expand upon rather than deliver content
  • Model the acquisition of knowledge that is idiosyncratic to that field, e.g. how does a historian/chemist/sociologist approach a research question?
  • Present the most likely concrete and lower level concepts to scaffold  learning of the most difficult higher level concepts
The online environment is used to:
  • Acquire lower level learning to free up time for in-class experiential learning
  • Chunk content to overcome working memory limits
  • Provide low stakes assessments, such as quizzes, for practice and confidence building
  • Provide psychomotor experiences such as drag and drop exercises
  • Provide concrete experiences that are guided and efficient
Experiential learning can range from simple group projects to true problem-based learning (PBL). This strategy is used to:
  • Introduce an emotional component
  • Analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information
  • Present and defend newly acquired hypotheses
  • Provide collaborative, cooperative, and academic controversy activities that encourage thinking critically from multiple perspectives

Theoretical Foundation of N-Gen Course Redesign

The N-Gen course redesign approach has as its foundation research conducted in the last decade on the role of the brain in learning.  This research tells us that learning is, at its essence, a biological change.  The formation and maintenance of the complex neural networks necessary for deep learning is encouraged by collaborative learning because:

  • Collaborative learning provides the brain with the means to explore new information in a problem-solving situation.
  • The brain is social and learning with others is beneficial.
  • Working with others tends to elicit emotions which can strengthen neural networks.
  • Collaborative teamwork toward a goal stimulates the brain connections.
  • Supportive collaborative work tends to be non threatening which facilitates the use of frontal cortex higher-level thinking.

Erlauer, L. (2003). The Brain-Compatible Classroom. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Zull, J. E. (2002). The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus.