Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with state agencies and national affinity groups, will establish a consortium of community colleges that will enact a large scale, systems-change process that increases efficiency in the way instruction is developed, delivered, evaluated, and continuously improved. The overarching goal is to demonstrate a 25% higher rate of course completion for students from vulnerable populations, with a focus on gatekeeper courses critical to graduation success. Within three years, the Community College Opening Learning Initiative (CC-OLI) will scale to 40 community college partners and will reach an additional 50-100 classrooms.

Principal Investigators: Candace Thille and Marlene Scardamalia

The OLI pedagogy and technology is designed to support and evaluate individual learning of content and  practices in complex domains. The Knowledge Forum pedagogy and technology developed by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter is designed to support and evaluate group knowledge building (Knowledge building is a process of sustained idea improvement fostered by communities in which participants take  responsibility for the advancement of community knowledge). We will integrate the two pedagogies and technologies in an exemplar OER so that teachers and learners can participate in both environments simultaneously and so that we can collect a single data store of their use in the integrated environment. As the integrated environment is used to support teaching and learning, we will use the OLI and Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology (IKIT) analytic tools to evaluate the ways in which the integrated approach improves both individual learning and group knowledge building. There are many and important related research issues. For example, if learning is enhanced for a few students, do their contributions to the collaborative space enhance the work of the group; how can we assess growth and spread of ideas; can we keep ideas alive and improving in a worldwide open community?

The teachers using the integrated OER will receive fellowships for their participation in the use and evaluation research. OLI and IKIT technical staff will integrate the learning and data collection environments.

Outcomes on the specific OER level:
1. A resource that exemplifies a combined pedagogical approach of fostering individual learning and group knowledge building
2. Data on the effectiveness of the specific OER in improving teaching and learning.
3. Data on the conditions for effective travel of the OER.
4. Capacity building in the areas of new pedagogical approaches, evaluation and design for the teachers using the integrated OER.

On the network level:
1. A learning environment that facilitates the simultaneous participation of learners in individual knowledge building and group knowledge building practices.
2. Contribution to OLnet’s collection of evaluation methods, data analysis tools and design practices.
3. Contribution to OLnet’s evaluation data collection.
4. Analytic tools for visualizing both individual knowledge gain and emergent processes of knowledge building over time.

Principal Investigators:  Christian Schunn and Mellisa Patchan

The current project evaluates the OLI Logic and Proofs course ( L&P), specifically testing the hypothesis that use of L&P in a hybrid instructional mode (online instruction combined with reduced and strategically targeted face-to-face instruction) can lead to accelerated learning, either in the form of more content learning within the same amount of student time or the same content learning within a shorter time period of student time.

Before beginning the evaluation experiment, we conducted a context analysis to determine the real market of the Logic & Proofs course: what kinds of universities tended to teach this overall course, what content tended be covered, and what kinds of tools for proof construction were already being used. Overall, L&P-like content is taught in a majority of universities in the US, but with some variation by university type. Further, L&P contains some content that many courses did not cover. Thus, the applicability of the course is high, and the opportunities for acceleration via more content coverage also exist.

The evaluations are being conducted in two phases. First, two evaluations have been conducted at a large public tier-one institution, showing that face-to-face instruction produced equivalent learning outcomes to online-only instruction. In addition, online instruction appeared to result in a much lowered attrition rate, providing efficiencies for students of another form.

The current evaluation is being conducted of accelerated learning at three institutions, each representing different types of institutions, using different forms of acceleration and evaluation logics suited to the context (e.g., random assignment to condition vs. natural experiment, more content in equal time vs. equal content in less time).

Principal Investigators:  Candace Thille and Patrick McAndrew

OLnet: Network to Support Sharing Methodologies and Evidence on the Effectiveness of OER

The aims of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Open Educational Resources (OER) program in 2007 were stated as to: 1. Sponsor High-Quality Open Academic Content; 2. Break Down Barriers to Open Educational Content; and, 3. Encourage People Worldwide to Use Open Educational Resources.

The resulting OER movement has been successful in promoting the idea that knowledge is a public good, expanding the aspirations of organizations and individuals to publish OER.

The Open Learning Network  (OLnet)  aims to extend this cultural shift, to evaluate the impact of OER on teaching and learning and to facilitate transformative educational practices. Those aims are achieved by developing the links among the design, use and evaluation of OER. OLnet provides the infrastructure and builds capacity for a community concerned with improving OER design and applying methods for assessing robustness of OER.

The approach of OLnet is to build structures and activities to nurture the growing pool of OER and associated services, developing a complementary infrastructure to investigate and report on the issues around OER deployment and evaluation. OLnet takes the opportunity to go beyond isolated, individual views of OER effectiveness, by aggregating data, sharing evaluation know-how, and mediating dialogue and debate within the community.