Taking the product of the three default percentages assumed above reveals that the common-course redesign strategy could save 8-10 percent of the overall institutional expense budget—while also measurably improving learning outcomes!  Of course, instructional expenses necessarily vary across both disciplines/professions and level of study—undergraduate to graduate.  Nevertheless, common courses often fall short in their outcomes, and the course redesign strategy is an opportunity to improve both their academic outcomes and unit-cost structure in a way that significantly reduces institutional expenses.

How are these performance improvements accomplished?  While there is no one-size-fits-all model for common-course redesign, the National Center for Academic Transformation has aggregated various practices into five basic models.[17] The common denominator is a collaborative effort by a faculty and administrative services team on each course to:

Ensure the academic quality and integrity of the effort.

Plan the redesign, pilot a redesigned section or two, and then implement the successful redesign across all sections of the course.

Learn from the growing body of experience in course redesign when planning and piloting the redesign—for example, by:

• focusing on the course, not its course sections;
• emphasizing active and collaborative (social) learning and mastery feedback assessments:
• assigning learningware and other digital materials for self-study—to supplement or replace traditional text materials:
• customizing to students' unique needs, to the extent possible, guided study and assistance from faculty members and instructional assistants;
• documenting differences in course learning through before-and-after or in-parallel comparative assessments;
• using common assessments—perhaps externally prepared and graded—and other quality-assurance strategies, as appropriate; and
• realigning faculty tasks without increasing faculty labor.

Faculty tasks often are realigned by applying strategies that, à posteriori, happen to increase the student/instructor ratio and, thereby, reduce per-enrollment direct instructional expenses. Such strategies include the following:

• Offload course management functions to a course management system.
• Employ testing software to deliver and grade practice quizzes and required exams.
• Institute team-teaching, in which instructors "divide and conquer" the syllabus instead of taking individual responsibility for the entire syllabus.
• Use lower-paid course assistants for functions that do not require faculty expertise or experience.
• Focus faculty expertise on motivational and integrative activities, difficult subject matter, and interactions with those students who require or desire faculty assistance.

Common-course redesign and flex program and service redesign are not mutually exclusive strategies.  For example, enrollment capacity can be significantly increased by applying both strategies to the cluster of the 20-30 highest enrollment courses to increase faculty capacity through course redesign and classroom capacity through flex redesign.  Common-course redesign focuses on quality and costs, while flex program and service redesign focuses on flexibility/convenience and costs.  Together the two strategies when applied to courses, programs, and other services can improve quality (outcomes), increase capacity and delivery flexibility for the student, and reduce unit expenses—surely a holistic trinity of institutional performance obligations.

[17] Ibid, pages 30-38