The U.S. Department of Education is currently engaged in the process of creating plans for the future of education in America.As part of this process, it is working with leaders in the field to develop a National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) “to provide a vision for how information and communication technologies can help transform American education.”
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) Meets with Bill Gates
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp. and co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation came to Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday, September 22, for the dedication of the Gates and Hillman Centers at the Pittsburgh campus. As part of his campus visit, Gates, accompanied by Foundation Senior Program Officer Josh Jarrett and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Anoop Gupta, met for nearly 90 minutes with the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) team to discuss the past, present, and future of the project as it moves forward under support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. CMU personnel in attendance were Provost Mark Kamlet, Vice Provost and CIO Joel Smith, Director of OLI Candace Thille, Director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center Kenneth Koedinger and OLI Senior Software Engineers John Rinderle and Bill Jerome.
On August 14th, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about the new CC-OLI project. From the article :
"Now Carnegie Mellon plans to work with a consortium of community colleges to set up four "high gatekeeper" courses, defined as classes that have poor success rates but are important to getting degrees. The goal is to raise completion rates by 25 percent in those courses. The courses will be team-designed by community-college faculty experts, scientists who study how people learn, human-computer-interaction specialists, and software engineers."
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Continued Coverage of "Obama's Great Course Giveaway"
The Chronicle of Higher Education posted a follow-up to their article "Obama's Great Course Giveaway" titled "Obama Course-Giveaway Backlash?" From the article :
"The Obama administration has yet to release many details of its online course plan, one small piece of a sweeping community-college assistance package. But officials have repeatedly cited Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative as a potential model. The project builds software-enhanced online courses that track students’ progress and provide them with feedback on problems. If the courses are used in combination with instructors, they can feed information to professors about where students are struggling."
OLI is working on the National Educational Technology Plan. Please give your input here. 
