1. April 2, 2013
Associate Director, User Experience
Open Learning Initiative
Bill Jerome
@billjerome
2. oli.cmu.edu
“Improvement in post secondary
education will require converting
teaching from a solo sport to a
community based research activity.”
Herbert Simon
Nobel Laureate & CMU Professor
3. oli.cmu.edu
One Complexity for Instructional Productivity:
Baumol’s “Cost Disease”
“A half hour horn quintet calls for the expenditure of
2.5- man hours in its performance, and any attempt
to increase productivity here is likely to be viewed
with concern by critics and audience alike.” (1967)
4. oli.cmu.edu
A false dichotomy for post-secondary
education
Low Quality,
Hi Productivity
Hi Quality,
Hi Productivity
Low Quality,
Low Productivity
Hi Quality,
Low Productivity
Quality
Productivity
Many, with Baumol,
assume higher
education has only
these two options
5. oli.cmu.edu
Why a learner-centered approach?
Learning results from what the student
does and thinks and only from what the
student does and thinks. The teacher can
advance learning only by influencing what
the student does to learn.
Herbert Simon, 2001
It’s not teaching that causes learning.
Attempts by the learner to perform cause
learning, dependent upon the quality of
feedback and opportunities to use it.
Grant Wiggins
President, Center of Learning Assessment
7. oli.cmu.edu
What is the Open Learning Initiative?
Scientifically-based online learning environments based on the
integration of technology and the science of learning with
teaching. OLI is designed to simultaneously improve learning
and facilitate learning research.
8. oli.cmu.edu
An approach to
designing, developing,
delivering and improving
learning experiences
• Science of Learning
• Evaluation
• Improvement
Science
• Platform
• In-course Affordances
Technology
• Team-based Development
• Communities of Research and Use
Teams
• Capture
• In-course Use
• Iterative Improvement
• Research
Data
14. oli.cmu.edu
(Semantic) Data Analytics
• The driving forces behind the timely, actionable information are
the result of rich data analytics
• Real-time modeling
• Post-processed “Big Data” to drive research and iterative
improvement
• Next steps include making real-time data available to learning
engineers
Join discussion about semantic data : http://mfeldstein.com/if-you-like-learning-could-i-recommend-
analytics/
17. oli.cmu.edu
Accelerated Learning Results
• 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 the amount of time spent studying statistics
outside of class
• No significant difference between OLI and traditional
students in follow-up measures given 1+ semesters later
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).
18. oli.cmu.edu
Other Class Results
Large Public University: OLI Online vs. traditional. OLI
99% completion rate vs 41% completion rate traditional.
Community College accelerated learning study in Logic:
An instructor with minimal experience in logic. Students
obtained high levels of performance on more advanced
content (~33%) not covered in traditional instruction.
OLI stoichiometry course: The number of interactions with
the virtual lab outweighed ALL other factors including gender
and SAT score as the predictor of positive learning outcome.
21. oli.cmu.edu
Applications to Graduate Programs
• Carnegie Mellon’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction degree
• Multi-disciplinary professional masters program
• Need to develop background for certain members of a cohort
• Fully online utilization of OLI’s previously developed
Introduction to Statistics
• Development of all new course in Media Programming, also
delivered online prior to attending.
Free versions of the these courses available at http://oli.cmu.edu
22. oli.cmu.edu
Applications to Graduate Programs
• Many more projects and companies aiming to develop online
graduate programs
• Increase capacity of existing programs
• Create new programs that do not include residential
component
• The decision to measure and evaluate the pedagogical
effectiveness of these online components is a conscious one
24. oli.cmu.edu
Learning Engineering
A work in progress:
The development, evaluation and improvement of the processes,
methodologies, and educational technologies that lead to
predictable, repeatable development and improvement of learning
environments which leverage learning science and the affordances
of technology to address instructional challenges and create
conditions that enable robust learning and effective instruction.
26. oli.cmu.edu
A Historical Comparison
• There is a need to develop the field of Learning Engineering in
order to build better online learning environments in effective ways
• Comparison to software crisis of the 1970s
• Software Engineering Institute founded at CMU in 1984 as a
response to this growing problem
• The problems aren’t that different in scale for higher education
28. oli.cmu.edu
Interesting Times
• David Stevens (Udacity Co-founder):
“I think the top 50 schools are probably
safe. There’s a magic that goes on inside
a university campus that, if you can
afford to live inside that bubble, is
wonderful.”
• John Hennessy (Stanford President):
“There’s a tsunami coming…I can’t tell
you how it’s going to break, but my goal
is to surf it, not just stand there.”
29. oli.cmu.edu
Software Engineering Institute
Our Vision
• Leading and advancing software and cybersecurity to solve the nation's toughest
problems
Our Mission
• To advance the technologies and practices needed to acquire, develop, operate, and
sustain software systems that are innovative, affordable, trustworthy, and enduring. We
achieve our mission through :
• Research – advancing the science and practice
• Collaboration – bringing together and building on work found in industry,
academia, and government
• Development and Demonstration – maturing promising technologies and practices
and demonstrating their utility through trial application and prototypes
• Transition – propagating proven technologies and practices through publication,
standards and other venues
30. oli.cmu.edu
Learning Engineering
• Learning Engineers at OLI
• Research
• Collaboration
• Development and Demonstration
• Transition
• OLI’s team of learning engineers are not great enough in number to
solve the system wide problem, we need graduate programs to develop
the field and the practitioners
• No, you can’t have ours
31. oli.cmu.edu
Learning Engineering
• There is a need to develop the processes, methodologies,
technologies
• There is a need to evaluate the effectiveness of these
• There is a need for in the field, starting yesterday
• Graduate level programs to develop the above and those who will
do the work in practice.
32. oli.cmu.edu
Next Steps
• CMU Launching Learning Science and Engineering Professional
Masters Program this fall
• OLI collaborating with program
• More work at CMU
• Furthering the discussion
• Expect posts on e-Literate and oli.cmu.edu in the coming weeks
• Another large effectiveness study being conducted this semester
34. oli.cmu.edu
“Changing circumstances
mandate that we shift the focus of
higher education policy away
from how to enable more students
to afford higher education to how
we can make a quality
postsecondary education
affordable.”
- Clayton Christensen
35. oli.cmu.edu
Not only is there a need to seek entirely new
approaches, insights and models, but that need
is urgent. New approaches offer scalable
processes that help colleges lower cost-per-
degree and make significant improvements to
student learning outcomes and retention rates.
Insights from the science of learning
combined with advances in information
technology and alternative models of
course design, implementation, and
evaluation show promise in supporting
traditional higher education to change
the production function and meet the
seemingly impossible challenge.
-Candace Thille, Director OLI
36. oli.cmu.edu
I was one of ten university presidents
invited to the White House to meet with
President Barack Obama and Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan to discuss a
critical issue: how to reduce costs and
improve the productivity of U.S. higher
education. The other presidents there
represented some of the nation’s largest
public university systems (Maryland, New
York, and Texas among them).
I was there because Carnegie Mellon
is the leader in creating technology
for education.
-Dr. Jared L. Cohen, CMU President
37. oli.cmu.edu
I am not a futurist but rather a maddeningly practical
person who rarely has visions—and when I do they are
usually the result of having had a bad meal! But let me
put such predilections to one side and ask you to join me
in imagining, just for a moment, how the intelligent
harnessing of information technology through the
medium of online learning might alter aspects of
university life as we know it. Can we imagine a university
in which:
• faculty collaborate more on teaching (with technology
serving as the forcing function)?
• faculty devote more of their time to promoting the
“active learning” of their students and are freed from
much of the tedium of grading
• students receive more, and more timely, individualized
feedback on assignments
• technology extends the educational process
throughout one’s life through the educational
equivalence of booster shots? And, ideally:
• a university in which institutional costs and tuition
charges rise at a slower rate?
Focus is on learning, not teachingAllows for application of science
Nearly a third of the world’s population is under 15. This is going to create a wave in higher ed that will peak ~2025. If we’re going to keep teaching students as we always have, that means we’ll need to build 4 major universities every week. For the next 15 years.Sir John Daniels: “Nearly one-third of the world’s populatin (29.3%) is under 15. There arecurrently 158 million people enrolled in tertiary education(UNESCO figures). Projections suggest that participation will peak at 263 million in 2025. Accommodating the additional 105 million students would require more than four major universities(30,000 students) to open every week for the next fifteen years.”
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