Turning a Large Ship in a Small Harbor: A Large-Scale Transformation of a First-Year Mathematics Program

At the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) we spent the last two years completely redesigning our first-year mathematics courses. Although a need for change was identified before the pandemic, the pandemic amplified issues that were already present and made change even more important. Prior to Fall 2021, our first-year courses used an emporium model in which students spent most of their class time learning mathematics in a computer lab, largely disconnected from their instructors and classmates. To address challenges faced by students in these courses, UNO hired a team of ten faculty members to redesign these courses. As part of this redesign, the team developed a common vision, which included engaging students in class using evidence-based teaching practices, helping students develop growth mindsets through standards-based grading, and forming social support networks for students.
During the past two academic years, we have implemented these changes to "rehumanize" our first-year mathematics courses. Starting in Fall 2021, first-year mathematics courses returned to an in-person format: students were back in physical classrooms with an instructor and learning assistants. For several students, mathematics was their only in-person course, making it crucial to form a sense of community in the classroom. During the 2021-2022 academic year, we primarily focused our redesign efforts on two major courses: Intermediate Algebra and College Algebra. Since then, we have expanded our course redesign to include all first-year mathematics courses below Calculus I. In this presentation, we discuss how our large-scale change effort has attended to the four frames (Bolman & Deal, 2008; Reinholz & Apkarian, 2018) and how we have been able to expand our efforts. We also describe our successes and lessons learned from the past two years of changes and reflect on our plans for the future.