What Michelle Albin understood about algebra was enough to convince her to major in communications. Unfortunately, Albin admits that her algebra aversion is partly to blame for a career that, until recently, just didn't add up. After graduation from the University of Missouri at St. Louis (UMSL), she held a succession of post-graduation jobs - all unfulfilling and few having anything to do with her degree.

She has the right formula now, though, and it all started with a visit to a local drugstore to get a prescription filled. While there, Albin saw a "help wanted" sign and applied for a job as a pharmacist's assistant. She got the job, and it turned out to be her true calling - so true, in fact, that she re-enrolled at UMSL as a prepharmacy major - even though it requires a strong math foundation. Fortunately for Albin, the university's algebra program had also been reinventing itself during her absence.

The agent of change was the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), an upstate New York think tank that has helped 60 colleges and universities across the country redesign an array of courses - from psychology to statistics, pre-calculus to Spanish.

Headed by former EduCom Vice President Carol Twigg, NCAT traces its beginnings to the mid-1990s, a period when forward-thinking institutions across the higher-ed spectrum recognized emerging technology as a tool to overhaul tradition-bound methods of teaching and learning.

"I think people are convinced that change is necessary," says Twigg. "The problem is they don't know what to do, and they don't have any alternatives to the way it has always been done. Our goal is to create models to show them how things can be done differently."

Twigg and her colleagues use technological know-how to plot this alternative route. As any student enrolled in a revamped course will attest, NCAT throws out the book - and in some cases, the lecture hall, too.

The results are impressive:

• At the University of Central Florida (UCF), small, software-enabled learning groups solved a severe space crunch caused by a shortage of classrooms for an introductory course in American government. Students in the NCAT-engineered program demonstrated a marked improvement in academic achievement. In addition, UCF expects to save $68,000 annually because of reduced demand on the university's infrastructure.
• At the University of Southern Maine (University`SM), students in an introductory psychology course save time, attend fewer lectures and come to class better prepared by taking required quizzes online. NCAT reports that students enrolled in USM's online program study more - and have scores averaging 10 percent higher - than their counter-parts in the traditional, lecture-oriented program.
• At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT), students in a redesigned intermediate Spanish course have 24-hour access to course materials, receive personalized e-mail feedback from instructors and are required to be physically present in class just once a week. The result? Test scores are up and costs are down. NCAT says the changes have resulted in savings of $110,000 a year, allowing UT to enroll more than 500 additional students in the Spanish class.

Twigg is quick to deflect NCAT's success back to the colleges and universities that have welcomed the center to their campuses. NCAT is simply a facilitator, she emphasizes; the real credit for institutional change rests with the institutions themselves.

"You have to let the people in the institutions make the decisions," Twigg says. "We give them the principles and the ideas and show them the tone they need to set in order to make the right decisions. All we do is streamline the process."

NCAT is now embarking on its most ambitious project yet: A systemwide makeover of selected courses for the University of Maryland system.

To see what lies ahead, Maryland's administrators, faculty and students can look to St. Louis - and Michelle Albin. Her transition from a twice-flunked math-phobic undergraduate to a student who moved beyond algebra to calculus can be traced directly to NCAT's arrival at UMSL in 2003. At that time, Albin represented the majority of first-year algebra students (55 percent) who were failing the course. Teresa Thiel, biology professor and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, wonders what percentage of those students - despairing of never fulfilling the math requirement - departed UMSL and college, never to return.

"We had students walking off after failing algebra, and we don't know what happened to them," says Thiel. Technology may have been the key to the two-year renovation of math education at UMSL. But the software program used in that renovation was just a small component of what amounted to a cultural transformation on the St. Louis County campus. The biggest change? All but eliminating the traditional lecture.

Michelle Albin attended lectures three times a week the first two times she took algebra. By her own admission (one supported by the two failing grades she received), she didn't learn a thing. For her third attempt, Albin's attendance in the lecture hall was required just once a week. On the other two days, she and her classmates reported to UMSL's new, state-of-the art mathematics laboratory to receive one-on-one tutoring from professors and teaching assistants. Between visits, she was expected to prepare by following a software program, accessible from home, that walked her step-by-step through every equation. When she stumbled over the online instructions, she found help from humans in UMSL's math learning center simply by raising the red flag attached to each of the center's work stations.

The new algebra curriculum gave Albin a full week to complete homework assignments, and the tireless software worked with her on every problem until it was solved.

Under the old system, all students were expected to learn at the same pace. "Well, nobody can just pour information into your head," Thiel points out. "And, furthermore, this is math. There's only one way to learn math, and that's to do it."

Carol Twigg agrees. "Obviously, the old model worked to a certain extent," she says. "But the old model was developed when a minority of students went to college." Today, with college becoming a necessity for a broader swath of the population, new models are needed. "The old techniques of lectures, reading a book and taking a test don't work as well," Twigg says. "Technology is growing in higher education. It's part of an evolution."

In some ways, that evolution clearly benefits students who are self-starters.

"I've always learned better by myself because when I sit in class I don't always pay attention," says UMSL business major Loequishia Lomax. "I'm a hands-on kind of person. I need to DO it to learn it."

So does Albin, it turns out. She admits now that she never liked lectures and was always reluctant to speak up in class. "I felt embarrassed about asking a teacher 10 times to help me with a problem that I just didn't understand," she says. "But my computer never gets annoyed with me."

As it happened, there was a faction at UMSL that was somewhat put off by the changes: faculty members who were intimidated by technology that they believed devalued their contributions and perhaps threatened their jobs.

Thiel is sympathetic. "It's a whole new way of teaching," she points out. Although the reforms caused an initial and understandable frustration because software didn't always work as advertised, the change soon gave the program much-needed uniformity. At a school where six different instructors once taught algebra six different ways, the new system got everyone on the same page, says Thiel.

In retrospect, she sees that forcing faculty to approach a well-worn subject in an entirely new way was the academy's equivalent of tough love. Thiel admits that some holdouts remain. "They still believe the lecture is the best way to teach students and are resistant to the idea that a computercan teach just as well," she says. Still, with each successive semester, Thiel sees additional members of the staff coming around.

Citing what she calls a "textbook case of faculty resistance" to curriculum transformation at UMSL, Twigg characterizes the staff's acceptance of NCAT's reforms as nothing less than an "I've-seen-the-light moment."

Senior Lecturer Shahla Peterman, the instructor who springs into action when a red flag rises above a work station in the math learning center, doesn't miss lectures in the least.

"In class I used to ask students for the correct answer," Peterman recalls. "When no one raised their hands, I'd go down the list and call out a name, and they'd ignore me. This is much better."

The numbers prove it. The completion rate for students in the algebra course barely topped 50 percent before NCAT's changes were incorporated; 74 percent now pass. In addition, NCAT estimates that the new curriculum has cut the cost of educating each algebra student from $170 to $119, a 30 percent reduction. The bulk of the savings, says Thiel, comes from cutting the number of lectures - a move that has allowed UMSL to double the size of each algebra section - from 35 to 70 students - because classes get team coverage in the new $350,000 math learning center. Reform hasn't caused the dismissal of one faculty member, although attrition has reduced the staff ranks, and adjuncts are playing a larger role in teaching algebra.

To Thiel, though, the real economic gain isn't realized on campus. "One thing that can't be measured is the loss of a student who flunked algebra," she says. "If students can't succeed at math, then it limits their ability to contribute to society. But math is a major reason that students don't succeed, and this (system) is keeping more of them here. I don't know how you put a dollar value on that."