In recognition of that success, Rensselaer has recently received the Hesburgh Award for Faculty Development to Enhance Undergraduate Teaching, the Boeing Outstanding Educator Award, and the Pew Leadership Award for the Renewal of Undergraduate Education. The intellectual foundation of curriculum renewal at Rensselaer is interactive learning. Studio courses emphasize a hands-on, learning by doing approach. The focus is on what the student does and not on what the faculty member does. Studio courses engage the student in various problem solving and active learning sessions that help the student construct their own understanding of course concepts.
Studios go lighter on lectures and heavier on interaction, teamwork, and student discussion.
In general, students take more responsibility for their own learning and much more learning goes on inside the classroom. The movement towards studio teaching began in 1988 with Maple Calculus, an innovative course pioneered by Professor William Boyce that gave students access to high-powered computing and the ability to focus on underlying principles rather than number crunching and the mechanics of problem solving. Math and physics were soon followed by a number of other new, student centered courses. In Biology Professor Harry Roy introduced the studio approach in his undergraduate genetics course. Alan Cutler and Tom Apple created Studio Chemistry.