**1. Introduction**

Higher Education is facing a crisis. As students and instructors return to in person instruction following the Covid pandemic, the level of student disengagement is concerning. Faculty as well as departmental and college leadership are struggling to find

solutions to the engagement challenges and find ways to engage students and spark interest, in hopes or returning to pre-pandemic level of engagement and motivation. Even students who choose to continue to take online classes out of convenience are not demonstrating the level of engagement that was perceived to be once there. As a faculty developer, my staff and I work with instructors who are coming to the teaching and learning center to find a community of other instructors and professional development staff to brainstorm with and find gold nuggets that can enhance student's learning experiences, motivation, and engagement. How can we foster the creation of learning environments that will engage and motivate students?

In 2006, Derek Bok, in his book, *Our underachieving colleges*, argued that "Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should" [1]. Unfortunately, this feels true even today, maybe even more so today. What does higher education need in order to stay relevant, to be transformed for the benefit of student learning? What sort of innovations are needed? Is the innovation a new tool, a new technique, maybe Artificial Intelligence (AI)? In 2011, Arum and Roska, in their book *Academically Adrift*, using data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), reported that almost half of the undergraduate students showed no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing during their first two years of college [2]. Listening to instructors talk about student engagement and motivation, it would appear we have not made much progress in the past decade.

Since 2011, at Purdue University, we have engaged in professional development, working with instructors from all colleges, to foster the creation of autonomy supportive, student-centered, and engaging learning environments to enhance students' learning and success. The IMPACT program which stands for Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation, was built to address these challenges. It is a cohort-based faculty development program which features a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to promote engagement and student-centered learning and teaching. The IMPACT program has been nationally recognized and featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2018 as one of six innovations poised to change classroom culture and the landscape of higher education. The important innovation of the IMPACT program is not a tool or a technique, it is a focus on human potential and human motivation and fostering the satisfaction of basic psychological needs of students (and instructors).

Efforts to improve undergraduate education should include a focus on what transpires in classrooms across the entire institution, build upon collaborations among many stakeholders, support the entire instructional community through faculty development built around faculty learning communities, and value teaching and learning as a core mission of an institution of higher education. Conceptualized from its inception as a comprehensive, campus-wide, collaborative effort, between multiple key campus stakeholders (Provost's Office, the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE), Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT), Institutional Assessment (IDA + A), and the Evaluation and Learning Research Center (ELRC)), IMPACT aims to empower instructors to create student-centered learning environments by incorporating active and collaborative learning as well as other student-centered teaching and learning practices into the learning environment. Most transformations incorporate a substantial amount of technology, but technology is not the innovation. The use of technology per se is not enough to make a transformation/redesign student-centered. Many transformations and course redesign programs closely adhere to a limited number of redesign models. This was the focus of IMPACT in the beginning, which was modeled against the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) [3].

### *Perspective Chapter: Fostering Students' Learning Experiences in Higher Education – Reflections… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110327*

The close adherence to the NCAT redesign models was perceived as constraining and limiting and discouraged many instructors from engaging in professional development. With IMPACT, we have been able to shift the culture at the institution toward more student-centered practices, and engaging learning environments for students, but providing choices and options to instructors and supporting their motivation. The technologies adopted or the redesign models implemented are simply tools used to create engaging learning environments. They do not drive the success of a redesign or transformation. They are in service of the learning environment, not the focus per se of the innovation. This approach requires us to deeply understand human motivation and the types of environments that can foster students' learning through the satisfaction of basic psychological needs. The way forward in higher education, the innovation, is a commitment to a deep focus on *people* doing the transformation. The *human factor* of course redesign and transformative education. The focus on people, their basic psychological needs, and motivation, is the innovation and the lesson learned from student-centered pedagogy and course transformation.
