Transcript Document

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 of
higher 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: goaldirected 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
 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
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Other Class Results
 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…
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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 postsecondary education will
require converting teaching
from a ‘solo sport’ to a
community-based research
activity”
Herbert Simon,
Last Lecture Series, Carnegie Mellon, 1998