Ensuring the quality of teaching and learning has long been a priority in higher education. A particular challenge is to provide a rich, personalized learning experience for students in high enrolment courses. At Carnegie Mellon University, instructors and staff chose to take the unique approach of launching the CMU Open Learning Initiative and using it to accelerate student learning.
Dr. Joel Smith, the initiative’s chief investigator, and Dr. Marsha Lovett, an associate teaching professor and program collaborator, were at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre during Celebrate Learning Week on October 25th to share their experiences with UBC faculty and staff in a two-hour presentation. They began by introducing the Open Learning Initiative (OLI), a growing online repertoire of open courseware that can be accessed for free by the public. The open courseware goes far beyond the standard content included in university textbooks. It contains syllabi, learning objectives, and digital content, as well as special functions such as providing hints and automatic evaluation through quizzes. Currently, there are fourteen courses offered, which are mostly in the fields of science and mathematics, but Carnegie Mellon University is also expanding into other areas such as literacy, communications, cardiology, engineering, French, and computer design.
The technology behind the OLI provides learners with a rich interactive online learning experience, accessible to a wide audience. Novice learners in the community can acquire basic knowledge about different fields without signing up for formal classes. At the same time, the OLI materials are available to be used in association with a more traditional face-to-face offering. The OLI courseware is especially effective when used by instructors in courses that blend face-to-face instruction with online work. For example, instructors can use the OLI to assign homework to complement their classroom teaching, letting students work through algebra problem sets, conduct virtual chemistry experiments, or ask written questions to check the student comprehension of free body diagrams in physics. Instructors can also help struggling students by providing them with a list of specific skills and knowledge they will need to master in order to complete certain tasks. When working through questions with numeric or exact answers, students are also able to receive immediate feedback regarding whether they have completed the assignment correctly.
Dr. Smith and Dr. Lovett then used the OLI-Statistics course as an example to explain how the OLI can increase learning efficiency. A case study was conducted at Carnegie Mellon University comparing two groups of students who were both taking the same statistics course. One group was taking a class consisting only of traditional lectures, problem sets, and readings. The other group attended a weekly lecture while also completing tasks through the OLI. The students in the blended course had only half of the amount of lecture time as those in the regular class, but both had similar scores on their final exams. This suggests that the blended instructional approach that leveraged the OLI resources reduced the time spent by learners and instructors and had a very positive and significant effect on learning. The downside, however, is that OLI courses are expensive to set-up, due to the fact that they must be created, then maintained and continually improved upon. Nonetheless, these course materials can also be reused many times by many instructors, as well as by learners, in the community.
Dr. Smith and Dr. Lovett noted that the OLI courses are works-in-progress that continue to evolve and improve over time. When designing an OLI course, instructors, who are content experts in their respective fields, use their knowledge to develop the course content. Then, they work collaboratively with a team of instructional designers, learning scientists, assessment experts, and technologists to gain different perspectives on their teaching plans and to ensure that the course content is decomposed into specific learning modules. These modules must meet the course learning objectives, and are built to help facilitate student learning. In addition, instructors can access the activity logs of students, which allow them to evaluate the success of their teaching methodologies, spot gaps in their students’ knowledge, and modify their teaching styles and assignments if necessary.
Since its creation three years ago, the OLI has been informally used 350, 000 times. It also has 18,000 registrants using it for credit-bearing courses. It has not only helped community college students improve their knowledge in different fields, but also increased the completion rate of beginner courses in schools, and educated novice learners from the community. In the future, Dr. Smith and Dr. Lovett hope to take the OLI to another level: to increase the quality and quantity of course materials, and to make it more accessible to students with special needs and learners from different countries.
To view the full OLI presentation, please click on the video below:
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To view the Q&A session following the presentation, please click on the video below:
Faculty evaluate students on their achievement of the learning goals, students evaluate faculty members on their teaching proficiency. Periods of equal length are not appropriate for all learning situations. Schools are moving toward the inclusion of another whole dimension of learning, the lateral transmission to every sentient member of society of what has just been discovered, invented, created, manufactured, or marketed.