Heavy Lifting Design Scalable and Sustainable Online Initiative to Increase Access (Keith Hampson)
1. heavy lifting
keith hampson phd
keith@acrobatiq.com
Acrobatiq (A Carnegie Mellon University venture)
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2. “cost disease” and the “iron triangle” that results
costs
Baumol, William; William Bowen (1966). Performing Arts, The Economic Dilemma: a
study of problems common to theater, opera, music, and dance. New York:
Twentieth Century Fund.
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3. online as a solution?
“A single teacher can reach hundreds of
thousands of students. That completely changes
the economics of everything. The marginal cost
of an extra student reaches zero.”
–Daphne Koller
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5. Acrobatiq (A Carnegie Mellon University Venture)
• Courseware and Learning Analytics
• Objectives
• Financially sustainable
• More rapid innovation
• Reach
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CMU
Acrobatiq OLI
6. Acrobatiq (A Carnegie Mellon University Venture)
• More than 20 university-led, non-profit research papers have
examined the efficacy of the instructional model on learners in
multiple types of institutions
• Samples
• Students in the hybrid format had comparable or better learning
gains and took 25% less time to achieve the same outcomes
than those in traditional, face-to-face courses.
• In U.S. community colleges, students using the courseware
covered 33% more content in the same time as their peers in
traditional courses and achieved a 13% learning gain, compared
to 2% by peers in traditional, face-to-face courses.
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7. RFP requirements: overt and less so
• Overt
• Courseware
• $20 million between selected recipients
• 1 million learners (split between 5), over 3 years.
• X number of “courses” built
• Personalization
• Bring down costs
• Evidence-based
• Cater to low-income, at-risk student populations
• Not-so-overt requirements . . .
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13. partnerships
• Courseware, alone, is insufficient
• Partners
• input on design of applications
• localize curriculum / authoring capacity
• implementation and promotion
• integrated student and faculty support systems
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14. partners: criteria
• Ambition
• History of serving low-income students
• Evidence of innovation (esp. business model innovation)
• Capacity (and willingness) to scale
• The selection process
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20. courseware: individual learner differences
• Use the individual difference measure for a given learner to drive
specific pedagogical choices and strategies (e.g., for a low working
memory capacity learner, shape problem context richness more
carefully and sensitively as a function of learning).
• Examples
• working memory capacity
• reading comprehension level
• processing speed
• goal orientation
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21. issues raised
• Scalable, ambitious online institutions (and the impact
on the rest)
• The role of this type of funding model in stimulating
innovation
• Shared courseware
• Merger of software and content
• The perceived failure of existing resource models (failure
to fully leverage digital media)
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