This is part four of our Pressbooks Results Series, where we’re sharing the stories of four faculty members who have used Pressbooks Results in their classroom to achieve unique pedagogical goals including reducing withdrawals, empowering faculty, and scaling personalized learning.
Quick Overview
Faculty member: Cameron Ford, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of Central Florida
- Cameron teaches high-enrollment courses (400-800 students) where every student must develop and pitch their own startup idea — an individualized project in a massive class.
- He uses Pressbooks Results to “flip” his classroom: ahead of each class, interactive video content prepares students with foundational knowledge so they can participate effectively in personalized coaching and active learning.
- Autograding saves time and allows Cameron and his GTAs to focus on engaging students individually, while compulsory assessment settings motivate students to study more efficiently and effectively.
Background
At the University of Central Florida (UCF), Cameron Ford faced the challenge of teaching a large, project-based entrepreneurship course to 800 students per semester. He needed a way to ensure that students developed foundational knowledge and engaged with his lecture content with less time and effort spent on check-ins and grading. This would allow him and his graduate assistants to focus more energy on the higher-order personalized learning that he wanted the course to focus on.
To help address this problem, Ford has adopted Pressbooks Results, using it to create interactive, free, and flexible learning content in his very large blended courses.
Course Context and Adoption
Ford’s ENT 3613: Creativity & Entrepreneurship course serves 800 students in the Fall and Spring and 400 in the Summer. The course is centered around helping each student develop their own startup business idea, an undertaking that requires an enormous amount of personalized feedback and attention. Cameron uses a ‘flipped classroom’ model where students are responsible for doing readings and watching recorded lectures asynchronously during the week. They then attend bi-weekly “experience labs” where they work with Cameron and the course’s Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) to develop and get feedback on their larger projects.
With just four GTAs available for his course, Ford needed an efficient way to assess and provide feedback for the asynchronous work students were doing so that he could free up more time and energy for mentoring them on the capstone project: their business ideas. He adopted Pressbooks Results in large part to make the course more manageable for both students and teaching staff by automating more of the assessment for asynchronous parts of the course (the regular reading and lecture watching assignments).
Addressing Key Challenges
Ford used Pressbooks to address several pedagogical challenges:
Enhancing Student Engagement
With large classes and complex material, Ford needed a system that would keep students engaged and accountable. Using a Learn-Practice-Perform model in Pressbooks, he built interactive learning modules featuring over 120 brief, topic-focused videos—typically 6 to 12 minutes long—and 360 embedded questions. To encourage careful viewing and thoughtful engagement, he intersperses ‘check your understanding’ questions throughout the videos, disables fast-forwarding, and records students’ first attempt on each activity in the gradebook. While students can’t skip ahead, they can rewind to review material they didn’t grasp the first time through.
These instructional design choices have increased active participation with the asynchronous elements of his course and helped distribute learning more evenly across the semester.
Scalability for Large Enrollment
The practical realities of managing a course that enrolls 800+ students per semester meant that Cameron needed scalable, automated approaches for some course assessment. Pressbooks Results has enabled Ford to automate many of these formative assessments, provide relevant pre-built feedback without a huge time burden, and to observe and understand individual and class-wide performance in real time.
Another reason Pressbooks Results has become an essential part of Ford’s teaching strategy is that the Pressbooks Results viewer allows students to see exactly which activities they have and have not completed and to make better decisions about how they spend their time and effort during the asynchronous portions of the course:
“The Results viewer has been a godsend for me, because it allows students to monitor their own progress as they’re doing their learning modules.”
Supporting Personalized Learning Paths
Because so much effort is spent in the course helping each student develop and refine their own startup project, Ford needed a flexible system for the other foundational learning essential for the course. By eliminating traditional exams and using Pressbooks’ embedded assessments instead, students can engage with material at their own pace. This not only preserves class time but allows for spaced repetition that fosters greater confidence and deeper mastery of key course concepts.
Impact
Ford observed several measurable benefits from using Pressbooks:
Increased Student Engagement
By using embedded assessments in his lecture videos (via the Interactive Video H5P activity type), students are consistently engaged with asynchronous course content at a much higher rate than before. Because a small portion of their grade comes from their completing these embedded knowledge check assessments, Cameron now has both anecdotal and empirical evidence that more students are not only doing the reading and watching the required lectures, but understanding the concepts and ideas covered.
Enhanced Learning and Skill Development
The video-based, self-paced approach allows students to review content at their own pace. Not only has it helped students develop their foundational knowledge in entrepreneurial skills, it has also reduced student anxiety about the requirements of their end of term projects. Cameron has observed that students now express greater confidence in their ability to apply course concepts introduced by the readings and lectures to their startup projects by the end of the term.
Improved Efficiency and Scalability
Ford’s adoption of Pressbooks allowed him to scale his course effectively while maintaining a high level of personalization and engagement. Automating lower-level assessments through the use of Pressbooks Results frees up more time to provide individualized coaching and feedback on student projects, which he regards as the most important evidence of learning in this course. These efficiency gains have allowed him to scale the course to serve thousands of students annually while simultaneously improving the quality of support he and his GTAs are able to provide on students’ final projects.
With 2,000 students enrolled annually, Pressbooks has become a critical tool in transforming how entrepreneurship education is delivered at UCF.
Watch Cameron’s story on YouTube 👇
More about Pressbooks Results
Are you interested in learning more about how you can enhance student success with Pressbooks Results? Let us know by filling out the form on this page and we’ll contact with you the information you need to get started.
Lead photo by Compare Fibre on Unsplash