In late June of 1995, while at the annual meeting of the American Society of Engineering Education, Nick attended sessions that focused on the freshman year and how to conduct assessment to demonstrate whether reform efforts were achieving their goals for student learning. He also spent as much time as he could with these presenters, some of whom responded by inviting him to visit their institutions. So it was that he and the other four UMD faculty visited Texas A & M University, where they learned a great deal about what freshman integrated curriculum programs.

Nick explained, We were at Texas on a Friday. It was remarkable to watch these teams of students in class, and to just walk up to them and have them explain why the program was--and was not--working for them. We were impressed with what we saw and we figured, "We can do this at UMD, and maybe do it even better!" On Saturday morning we outlined our proposal to Davis [Foundation]. Then we went to an A&M football game, and came back and finished the proposal. Talk about a bonding experience!

If anyone is interested in doing a program like this, they should go into one of these classrooms and observe here at UMD or at some other Foundation institution.

Knowing that the Davis Foundation insisted on good assessment, Nick decided to also attend the upcoming Frontiers in Engineering conference. There he connected with Gloria Rogers, an assessment expert at Rose-Hulman University and member of the Foundation Coalition, and Karen Frair, a Foundation Coalition leader from the University of Alabama. He incorporated ideas and methods they were using into UMD's Davis Foundation proposal. Nick and his colleagues submitted their proposal on November 15, 1996, and learned by late December that it was funded for $180,000.

During the next 20 months (January 1997 through August 1998), they used Davis Foundation and some campus funding to prepare for their fall 1998 pilot program. During this time, the following important events took place:

• A studio classroom for 48 students was built;

• Ray Laoulache (mechanical engineering) joined the group;

• UMD invited experienced people from Foundation Coalition to help them learn new teaching methods and change management strategies; and

• UMD was invited to participate in the Foundation Coalition's proposal to the NSF for a second five years of funding.

The Foundation Coalition NSF proposal would provide support to UMD for assessment, course development time to expand the IMPULSE approach into sophomore- and junior-year courses, "change management" activities, and travel to conferences where IMPULSE could present their efforts and continue to learn from an emerging national learning community of faculty who were exploring the value of combining technology, teamwork, and decentered teaching. The Coalition proposal was funded as of October 1998. Among other things, this enabled them to engage an assessment specialist, Emily Fowler.

During the fall of 1998, IMPULSE began with an initial cohort of 48 first-semester freshmen who were calculus-ready and had passed the English placement exam^c. In February 1999, when their initial assessment results were available, Pendergrass began a bid to institutionalize IMPULSE within the College of Engineering. This bid succeeded in May 1999, when all but one department adopted a modified version of the program. This meant that some 80 percent of the next cohort of freshmen would enroll in IMPUSE.

In March 1999, aware of the likelihood of expansion, Nick submitted to the Davis Foundation a second grant proposal for the funds for two more studio classrooms. In July 1999, Davis provided another $150,000 for these classrooms. UMD needed one of these to be ready by fall 1999. Due to this challenging implementation schedule, Nick decided he needed to release himself from the role of UMD PI for the Foundation Coalition and focus on getting the classroom built and on other campus-level matters associated with scaling up the IMPULSE program. Thus, he asked Paul Fortier, a member of his department (Electrical and Computer Engineering) to assume the PI role. In summer 1999, Fortier (at the time untenured) agreed, freeing Nick to accept the role of Associate Dean for the college, and focus on the classrooms. Nick remained active in Foundation as a member of its advance planning team.

With the second classroom built in time for the second IMPULSE cohort of 87 students in fall 1999, Nick turned his attention to the third classroom, which they needed by January 2000. They needed this third room for extension of the ideas of IMPULSE into the sophomore and later years of the engineering program. The new room was also needed to provide scheduling flexibility for IMPULSE classes because there were 41 pre-calculus students who needed "trailer sections" of IMPULSE classes in the spring semester. By January 2000, they had three studio classrooms operating.

By fall 2000, IMPULSE was serving 144 new freshmen students, and the IMPULSE leaders found themselves having to compete with other professors for time in the studio classrooms. As Nick explained, "Once the faculty found out what you can do in these rooms, you can't keep them out." Currently, these classrooms are in such high demand that it is difficult for the technical support staff to get in to repair machines.

The original group of IMPULSE faculty realized that it is important for IMPULSE faculty to be very effective with freshmen. They also decided it would be important to continually include new members in their group, both to renew the group with fresh ideas, and to replace people who retired or left for sabbaticals or other reasons. They learned that keeping the group resilient also depends on an effective process for integrating new members. John Dowd provided an effective prototype for integrating new members. Preparing to retire, he hand-picked and trained a successor. The training consisted of co-teaching his course with his successor (Renate Crawford) for a semester before he retired^d.

Nick observed that the resilience of the core faculty is also significantly enhanced by timely changes in leadership. For example, Nick decided that, in order to ensure that the program took on a life of its own, and avoid the phenomenon of becoming too strongly associated with an initial founder, he would step out of the leadership. Of course, once on their own, the new course leaders had to experience some of their own "organizational learning." But it is precisely this kind of experience that enables the new leaders to "own" a program. Fortunately, the continuing faculty already had begun using formative feedback regularly and had learned the importance of getting together every week to discuss new information about the program, and make needed adjustments. As a result, the program is getting better, as demonstrated by student outcomes data as well as the robust group of faculty participants.

At the time this case study was completed (spring 2002), IMPULSE continues to thrive, serving 80 percent of the incoming first-year engineering students plus physics majors. In addition, the IMPULSE faculty and others have begun using many of the methods that have been found successful with the first-year students in their upper-division courses.

d. The effectiveness of the process that Dowd used to hand-off his course to Crawford is affirmed by research on faculty adaptation processes. See Penberthy & Millar, 2002.