• "What kinds of new resources did you need?"

• "What were the nitty-gritty tasks and problems you faced when you were just getting started?"

• "How did you deal with the stresses that come with change?"

We also asked them for advice they would give to others who are about to embark on this path--things they would have appreciated knowing before they got started. Drawing on their responses to these questions, we present IMPULSE faculty insights and advice on how to implement the kind of learning environment they have developed. We start with the personal resources and processes for learning from colleagues across the nation that the IMPULSE faculty believe are crucial for "getting going." We then consider technical resource issues, which can pose major problems for faculty at many institutions. We finish by presenting a set of issues pertaining to the cultural and institutional factors that shape faculty teaching and student learning practices.

A. Processes for Getting Going

1. Personal Resources

Leadership
So far, we have presented the key players in the IMPULSE program as if they performed similar functions. In fact, they had different roles. Nick Pendergrass played the key leadership role in conceptualizing, funding and administering IMPULSE. The other members of the group--John Doud, Raymond Laoulache, Renate Crawford, and Robert Kowakczyk--took care of the classroom and curriculum issues.

As the leader of a program of this type, Nick had valuable personal resources. He drew on his two positions within the university--member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the College of Engineering-- to promote this program^a. We also learned that Nick has charisma and vision, and is an astute leader. For example, he orchestrated one of the key processes that enabled this change at UMD, the formation of a working group of faculty across many disciplines who already had demonstrated a strong interest in reform^b. As one of these instructors, Bob Kowalczyk (mathematics), explained, "I think what brought me into it was that I'd been using technology and teaching mathematics for quite a while, and when Nick talked about this new kind of idea--using technology with engineers and even a computer classroom, that sounded very exciting to me." (For more on Nick's role as a leader, see Discussion 3. The role of organizational savvy. Additional insights into the role of leadership in launching this program can be found in Discussion 1. History of the IMPULSE Program.)

Reform-ready, technology-savvy frame of mind
Key personal resources that we noted among all the IMPULSE faculty are a remarkable willingness to cooperate with each other, and a strong desire to accommodate the engineering program.

Interest in integration across disciplines
Another important personal resource that characterizes the IMPULSE faculty is their interest in integrating topics across physics, math and engineering. For example, Bob Kowalczyk (mathematics) explained:

Another thing I like about this program is the integration of topics between physics and engineering. In the traditional classroom, I'm over there in the other building and I teach the topics without regard for how and when students use them in other courses. But with IMPULSE, I get together with the physicists, and sort of know what they are teaching that needs calculus. So I can redesign the calculus curriculum and the syllabus in such a way that the topics I teach now are in step with what physics is doing. Engineering is also becoming more integrated with calculus. But it's not an easy task to integrate all these subjects.

These reformers' commitment to the integrated curriculum of IMPULSE is also evident in their wholesale reorganization of the content they teach. Bob Kowalczyk described how he adjusted topic order in his syllabus to meet the needs of engineering students taking introductory physics:

In the third week of the semester, students are using vectors in physics. Now, in traditional calculus, we don't teach vectors until third semester calculus. So in the past engineering students wouldn't see vectors in calculus until their sophomore year. But of course they'd been using vectors in physics all along as freshmen. It never made sense, but we never did anything about it. So now, if you look at my syllabus, in the second or third week I'm skipping from chapter one to chapter ten, and doing vectors with the engineers: we're talking about dot products, cross products, components of vectors, and applications. The students are getting the content from a calculus point of view and go into physics and use it right away. So it's not like we are teaching them in the abstract.

In the traditional calculus course we'd spend most of the first semester doing differentiation; we'd do all of the rules and applications. Well now, we do some of the differentiation rules and by week six, we're starting integration; the students need some integrals in physics. So in the new syllabus, we do a little bit of differentiation, then we introduce integrals and do a little bit of integration, so the physicists can use it. And then we return to differentiation again including the more advanced rules and applications.

2. Learning from colleagues across the nation and from each other

Academic institutions are very traditional enterprises. Even in disciplines like engineering that are generally very responsive to technological changes, wholesale curriculum changes are difficult to achieve. Getting educational institutions to undertake change not only requires leadership and other personal characteristics (such as a reform-ready technology-savvy frame of mind), but also the establishment of organizational processes that can get the project going and sustain it. Key among the organizational processes that the UMD faculty identified as critical for them is a period of preparation during which they learned from colleagues across the nation.

The IMPULSE faculty identified the following reasons why learning from colleagues across the nation is critical for launching a program such as theirs. External expertise:

• often lessens the probability of personal/departmental conflicts and jealousy, and thus increases the chance that new reform ideas will be adopted;

• validates new methods that are being promoted;

• shortens the trial and error period for designing a successful curriculum to act as the backbone of program;

• enables faster adjustment to the challenges of implementing a truly integrated curriculum and team-based pedagogy; and

• enables adapters to make more informed decisions when designing expensive new technology-based classrooms.

For more on this topic, see Discussion 4. How learning from external experts was critical when getting started. See also Discussion 1. History of the IMPULSE Program.

B. Material Resources

1. Special project funding

See Discussion 1. History of the IMPULSE Program, for information about the external funding, and special internal support that the IMPULSE faculty obtained in order to launch this program.

2. Technical Resources

Implementing a program like IMPULSE at UMD, where students perform experiments, and then capture, analyze and graphically represent their data, requires significant technical resources. We consider the (1) hardware, (2) software and (3) technical support resources that these faculty needed to achieve their pedagogical objectives. We address these three topics separately, although in many cases, they are connected.

Hardware
Nick explained that the move to a studio classroom environment entailed a heavy initial hardware investment but also enabled a fundamental change in how basic physics, math and engineering material is learned in IMPULSE, a change that showed promising outcomes in student learning (see the section on Outcomes), and positive changes in classroom management activity for the instructors. He made this point as follows:

It is a fundamental philosophical change to move from laboratories that had 12 students to ones that have 48. And it's remarkable how this works. Physics education researchers have discovered that students learn better when you tell them to work with each other, to question each other, and to ask a question only when the team cannot solve its own problem. And with teams, you have 12 pretty well organized problems coming at you, rather than 48. So it's not the same classroom management problem. What's remarkable is the students are getting a very personal experience. They believe that they're better connected with the instructor. We've picked this up in some of our surveys.

You have to get the resources for the equipment for 48, but it's worth it--I went through the numbers: You abandon the lecture-recitation- lab design, and you lose all the scheduling nightmares that go with it--80 to 150 students in the lecture, 24 in each recitation, 12 in each lab. In its place you put 48 students in each studio class. We will merge the class and lab and meet four hours per week like the RPI model. It will be team-based, and we will put the instructor in there with the undergraduate TA and they'll go around and help. The philosophical change meant that we had to equip 12 tables serving 48 students as opposed to four stations in a 12-student lab. That involved a bigger initial investment.

In the early stages, there were technical challenges for faculty who were expected to be "Jacks and Jills of all trades" and have answers for any problems, technical and otherwise. They had learned by observing at RPI that having a faculty member and an undergraduate teaching assistant in room at all times was critical.

The number of technical problems declines over time, but it is still necessary to have a strategy for coping with equipment failure in the steady state. To accomplish this, the IMPULSE instructors use spare equipment to keep the classroom running and bypass the notoriously slow university repair process. Nick explained that when every seat in the class is occupied, every piece of equipment must work. And to work around the slow university repair processes, they arranged for a spare computer for each of the classrooms so that they can just replace defective equipment. "It takes five minutes to pull out the tables, plug it in and put it back together. The hard part is to keep the spare from becoming somebody's machine." While this approach works fairly well, particularly if the classes are not enrolled to capacity (48), it is still necessary to anticipate irritating and expensive problems with the hardware^c.

Another central hardware-related issue is the need to keep the equipment current. In order to be able to minimize loss and be able upgrade their systems at modest cost, the IMPULSE faculty chose to use desktop, rather than laptop, models^d.

Software
The studio classrooms computers are loaded with the mathematical and engineering software packages (e.g., AutoCAD, Maple and Mathlab) that are used in the IMPULSE program. The effective functioning of IMPULSE depends on effective management and upgrading of the software on all these computers. This management work, including clearing hard drives and loading software onto individual machines (which are connected to an NT server), is done using Ghost, a program that permits the creation of an image from a standard computer configuration, including the operating system and applications. With Ghost one can easily copy this image to one or more machines. At UMD, Ghost allows technicians to, as one interviewee put it, "take an entire room completely down and back up with everything on the hard drive replaced in seven minutes. So now we can do it every two or three days."

If managing the application and operating system installation is cost efficient, keeping the application software current is not, and it is not easy to find the resources to purchase upgrades. As Nick explained, upgrading AutoCAD alone requires a substantial financial commitment--"$4,000 or $5,000 a year, or every time they do a major upgrade." Nick was worried about how to cover these costs, especially when the concept of the program itself was one he was still selling to the administration. The technicians working in IMPULSE also were concerned. They knew of no plans to cover future costs for updating the hardware and software, and for providing sufficient staff support were not adequate. Given the heavy reliance on experimental and computer-based equipment of this program, this could jeopardize long-term sustainability^e.

Technical Support
At UMD, the shift from a lecture-recitation-lab approach to a studio-type classroom was not accompanied by an increase in technical support. Over the last few years, as IMPULSE grew from a one-studio classroom to four, the technical support remained the same. Raymond Laoulache (mechanical engineering) expressed his frustration about this, stating that with program growth, they need a technician whose time is dedicated full time to the program--someone to "troubleshoot the computers immediately, and load software immediately." Other IMPULSE instructors felt that the equipment so far had been pretty reliable, although they knew that this might be due to the relatively newness of the studios. Overall, the growth of the program was stretching the capacity of the technical support staff^f. This situation was made more worse by the fact that often technicians only have the 10 to 15-minute time period between classes to intervene and act on an equipment failure.

C. Organizational & Cultural Issues

The implementation of IMPULSE at UMD entailed not only a fairly drastic shift in instruction processes, but also involved integration across different disciplines. Such an effort carries many challenges at organizational and cultural levels. Here we consider "culture change" challenges and opportunities that the IMPULSE faculty encountered, and how they responded to them. In particular, we present the challenges/opportunities associated with (1) territoriality and resistance to change, (2) rewards, and (3) adapting to team- and assessment-based teaching. For a more in-depth understanding of these issues, see Discussion 6. Changes in the instructor role.

1. Resistance

The IMPULSE program at UMD has the support of the majority of the College of Engineering and Mathematics Department faculty and relevant members of the administration. As expected, however, the attention and publicity generated by the program brought with it resistance and resentment on the part of some faculty. Political situations of this type frequently are encountered when implementing significant changes, and often pose major obstacles. As one IMPULSE faculty member explained:

I think that among many faculty members, there's gratitude because this program is getting so much attention in the high schools; it's incredible. I get a call from guidance counselors periodically, different ones. "What's IMPULSE? I've got a senior all excited and talking about it because they heard about it from one of your students." You can't pay for that kind of advertisement. But at the same time there are some people who are very threatened that this should be working and would love to see this fail.

Indeed, while the program has achieved an impressive close collaboration among some engineering, physics and mathematics faculty, adoption of IMPULSE reform methods is not unanimous. For example, within the College of Engineering, the Department of Civil Engineering has elected not to participate in IMPULSE. We did not have an opportunity to talk with a civil engineering faculty representative, and the faculty and administrators with whom we talked carefully chose their words when asked about the civil engineering position on IMPULSE. For example, one faculty member said: "Civil has its own intro course. They like their course and see no reasons to put their majors in IMPULSE." When asked if he would consider the civil engineering faculty "passive participants" in IMPULSE, this faculty member answered in a manner that suggested emotional tension was involved in adopting the program. He said, "Yes. And that gets into a whole set of the problems of trying to get one of these things going. That part was truly amazing; I still have a few emotional scars from that experience."

A potential adapter of IMPULSE methods may ask how to proceed in a way that minimizes conflicts among colleagues. While fundamental reforms like IMPULSE will likely generate friction stemming from a departure from the institution's established processes, Nick Pendergrass identified the ability to quickly move IMPULSE out of the experiment stage into a more permanent format as the one crucial factor leading to its success. Based on his observations at other institutions, he stated that prolonged stay in the pilot stage is likely to lead to polarization of the faculty^g.

2. Tenure and other Rewards

The workload involved in teaching in the program presents an on-going challenge. The participating faculty with whom we spoke all reported a significant increase in workload. Bob Kowakczyk said:

There's a lot more work in this kind of teaching and departments have to be made aware of this. If they can't come up with some kinds of incentives, as the program expands and more people get involved, some faculty may be reluctant to participate, to do this. But I find the extra work is worth it when I see the rewards and students doing better. I mean that's what we're here for, right? So I think I get my rewards from the improvement in learning.

At UMD, the effects on tenure and promotion associated with participation in a reform program like IMPULSE depend on the department. In the math department, participating in the program is considered a sign of creative pedagogy and is generally supported^h. In engineering, the ability to become heavily involved in teaching-related activities seems dependent upon first achieving tenureⁱ. Renate Crawford, an untenured assistant professor in physics at the time of our interview, was unsure of how her department would view her participation in IMPULSE when reviewing her for tenure.

Another type of reward is release time to develop or improve courses. Renate Crawford's department gave her small amounts of "assigned time units" to work in the IMPULSE program. However, the amount of assigned teaching units is less than the actual time spent on the courses, as faculty are constantly being asked to evaluate, review and make changes to the curriculum^j.

3. Adapting the Team-based Studio Approach

The IMPULSE faculty faced another challenge when implementing collaborative methods in the classroom. They initially felt that they were not prepared to help students work effectively in teams^k. In order to learn how to use a team-based computer-dependent studio approach to teaching, the IMPULSE faculty had to:

• learn to work together

• integrate assessment into all aspects of the program

• come to terms with the "coverage" issue.

Once they made these adjustments, the IMPULSE faculty found that using collaborative methods definitely resulted in richer and more frequent interactions among students and between students and instructors^l. The instructors also noted that the close working relationships among all parties in the IMPULSE program lead to much better advising of students. As one of the technical support people explained, because they are working together with a cohort of 48 students, the professors are able to identify problems with groups or individuals at an earlier stage than with the traditional lecture arrangement. Thus they are more able to intervene in real time and provide options, like tutoring, for students experiencing difficulty with the content^m.

For more on how the IMPULSE faculty met the challenges of learning to use a team-based computer-dependent studio approach to teaching, see Discussion 7. Learning how to use a team-based computer-dependent studio approach to teaching.

4. Ensuring Sustainability

We asked the IMPULSE faculty to tell us what things would have made the implementation process easier "if only we had known that at the outset." Here we present several of their valuable "lessons learned" in bullet form.

• Secure support at all levels of the institution

• Plan a way to survive turnover in faculty

• Get training from colleagues elsewhere in the nation.

• Make the learning problems evident to departmental colleagues, but be diplomatic!

• Make adaptations as necessary to suit your students.

For a discussion of these lessons, see Discussion 8. Tips for ensuring sustainability.