Joel Smith Vice Provost and CIO Director, Office of Technology for Education

New Strategies for Delivering both Higher Quality and Greater Productivity in Higher Education – the Open Learning Initiative

Joel Smith

Vice Provost and CIO

Director, Office of Technology for Education

Carnegie Mellon University

6/23/11

Quality and Productivity - How?

1. By leveraging new sources of knowledge about how humans learn from the learning sciences

2. By changing course creation from a solitary activity to a team process that contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning

3. By providing faculty with greatly improved feedback about the knowledge states of the students in their classes

4. By creating a persistence of many instructional activities that allows for iterative improvement in those activities to make them more and more effective

The Effort: Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI)

Scientifically-based online learning environments designed to improve the quality ofhigher education – through:

-Applying learning science-Team design-Rich feedback loops-Iterative improvement

OLI courses consists of virtual learning environments designed using what we now know about human learning

Example: goal-directed practice and targeted feedback for students

Example: practice synthesizing and applying skills & knowledge

OLI courses provide faculty significantly better feedback about student learning

A team of content experts, cognitive scientists, and technologists have changed the nature of resources available to faculty using OLI materials.

OLI courses provide continuous assessment of student learning in the OLI virtual learning environments with feedback to faculty through the Learning Dashboard.*

*M. Lovett, O. Meyer, & C. Thille, C., “The Open Learning Initiative: Measuring the effectiveness of the OLI statistics course in accelerating student learning,” Journal of Interactive Media in Education (2008), http:// jime.open.ac.uk/2008/14/

Learning activities are instrumented to continuously assess student learning

Feedback to Student

Feedback to Instructor

Results?

Accelerated Learning Results – Carnegie Mellon’s Statistics Course

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OLI students completed course in half the time with half the number of in-person course meetings

OLI students showed significantly greater learning gains (on the national standard “CAOS” test for statistics knowledge) and similar exam scores

No significant difference between OLI and traditional students in follow-up measures given 1+ semesters later

Other Class Results

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Statistics at another college: ~ 33% more content, learning gain in standardized test 13% OLI vs 2% in traditional face-to-face class

Logic and Proofs a large state university: OLI 99% completion rate vs 41% completion rate traditional

Accelerated learning study with Logic and Proofs: An instructor with minimal experience in logic, used the OLI logic course in blended mode. The students obtained high levels of performance on more advanced content not covered in traditional instruction (~33% increase in content covered)

Many more rigorous studies of effectiveness the the various OLI courses…

Quotes

Student Quote:“This is so much better than reading a textbook or listening to a lecture! My mind didn’t wander, and I was not bored while doing the lessons. I actually learned something.”

Instructor Quote: “The format [of the accelerated learning study] was among the best teaching experiences I’ve had in my 15 years of teaching statistics.”

Persistence and improvement

The rich stream of feedback from student learning activities and associated learning (or lack thereof) is used in an iterative process to improve the virtual learning environments for each course

The OLI virtual learning environments persist and they improve based on extensive evidence about what is working and what isn’t.

Instructional Intelligence for continuous improvement

“Improvement in post-secondary education will require converting teaching from a ‘solo sport’ to a community-based research activity”

Herbert Simon,

Last Lecture Series, Carnegie Mellon, 1998