Since 2002, Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative has taken a science-based approach to the creation and improvement of open, online courses that have demonstrably improved learner outcomes and improved educational productivity. The Community College Open Learning Initiative (CC-OLI) has been a multi-year effort to build upon the success of that approach by targeting community college courses with high enrollment and low success rates. Teams of community college faculty have joined in this community-based research project for the development, dissemination and evaluation of 4 gatekeeper courses, all with the goal of increasing student success by 25%. Faculty from hundreds of institutions have now been involved in the development, use and evaluation of courses in Statistics, Anatomy Physiology, Biology and Psychology.
This session will offer an overview of the results of the CC-OLI project, presenting results from the formal evaluation study, as well as lessons learned in the development, improvement, dissemination and study of these courses. Specific topics include:
A review of the course development process—how do we scale multi-institution, team-based course creation?
A look at dissemination – how do we promote adoption of these and other OER?
A discussion of faculty use – what can be done to best support faculty in successfully incorporating these types of materials into their practice?
Evaluation study results – where and how were the courses and tools effective in contributing to student and faculty success?
Recommendations for future studies– what have we learned about the challenge evaluation work in this context?
The future – what’s next for the Open Learning Initiative?
After a decade and $100M US in foundation funding, an incredible amount of high quality open educational resources exist which are only rarely used in formal settings. The situation feels very much like it did with open source software a decade ago. At the turn of the century, almost everyone had heard of open source and was interested in potentially saving money and improving the stability and quality of their technology offerings, but very few institutions had either the bravery or the capacity to run systems for which there was no formal training and no technical support. Red Hat stepped into this vast pool of curiosity and caution with training, technical support, and other services that put adopting Linux within the reach of a normal institution.
Lumen is trying to do exactly same thing – step into the deep pool of curiosity and caution around open educational resources with the faculty training, academic leadership consulting, technical and pedagogical support, learning analytics services, and other pieces necessary to put adopting OER within reach of a normal institution. In the past year we've worked with dozens of secondary and post-secondary institutions and learned many - sometimes painful - lessons.
In this presentation we'll review our first year of lessons learned, including what works, what not to do, and how our business model has evolved over our first year.
