About the Initiative
“Improvement in Post Secondary Education will require converting teaching from a ‘solo sport’ to a community based research activity.”
—Herbert Simon
Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is an open educational resources (OER) project. We provide web-based courses based on a detailed, science-based understanding of how students learn.
Goals
- Produce exemplars of scientifically based online courses and course materials that enact instruction and support instructors. Our courses are designed based on learning science research and contribute to that research. See our process and our research pages for more information.
- Provide open access to our courses and materials. Like many open educational resources projects, ours makes its courses openly and freely available. However, our courses are not collections of material created by individual faculty to support traditional instruction. While our courses are often used by instructors to support classroom instruction, OLI online courses are designed to support an individual learner, who does not have the benefit of an instructor.
- Develop a community of use, research, and development that contributes to the evaluation, continuous improvement, and ongoing growth of the courses and materials.
Building a Community of Use
A primary objective of the initiative is to build a community of use for the courses that plays an important role in ongoing course evaluation, development, and improvement.
The courses are developed in a modular fashion to allow instructors to either deliver the courses as designed or to modify the content and sequence to fit the needs of their students and/or their course goals. The courses are dedeveloped by multidisciplinary teams with members from the OLI as well as collaborators from other institutions.
These courses have been broadly disseminated at no cost to independent learners and at low cost to students using the materials in accredited courses.
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