The National Center for Academic Transformation

By Sean Scarpiello

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) is one of today’s leaders in reducing costs in education. NCAT is a nonprofit organization that works with colleges to redesign course structures and learning environments in the most efficient manner. Therefore, students excel in learning while the college saves masses of money.

With programs for both 2 year colleges and 4 year colleges, NCAT, led by Dr. Carol A. Twigg, uses its experience and information technology to create the Program in Course Design (PCD). To date, there has been over 150 course redesign projects which have been a huge success. Here are some of the staggering statistics as described by Dr. Carol A. Twigg:

"The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) has worked with more than 150 institutions to redesign a set of core courses since 1999. NCAT works with institutions to break down their instructional model­-mapping who is involved in doing which activities­-to identify how to most efficiently leverage technology, faculty, graduate students, peer interactions and other learning resources, to improve quality and efficiency. NCAT has found that on average, costs were reduced by 37 percent in redesigned courses with a range of 9–77 percent. Meanwhile, learning outcomes improved in 72 percent of the redesigns with the remaining 28 percent producing learning equivalent to traditional formats. Based on a review of the participating institutions, NCAT has identified six redesign models that vary in format, student experience, and use of technology."

Currently, NCAT has proved to be a leader in the fight to reduce higher education costs, without reducing the quality of education and its enjoyment among colleges. There are workshops all across America run by NCAT in order to spread their knowledge about their ideas to reduce education costs.

Source: http://www.thencat.org/whoweare.html