How well do your course materials support student learning? And how can you make them better? Two pioneers of open education share how they use rich data streams from digital learning tools to assess learning content effectiveness and make continuous, data-driven improvements to OER course materials for economics and other disciplines.
During this session, two pioneers of open education will share their collaborative process for making systematic, data-driven improvements to OER course materials, based on three years of classroom practice in online, blended and traditional face-to-face courses, at over two-dozen schools across the country.
It is a little-recognized problem in higher education that learning materials-- textbooks, courseware and other materials--are either not assessed for effectiveness or are assessed using only measures of satisfaction rather than of actual learning gains. With the rich data streams generated by today’s digital learning tools, there are huge opportunities to assess the effectiveness of learning content and make, iterative improvements. This applies particularly to open educational resources (OER), with licensing that permits anyone to revise and remix content without the burden of long editorial cycles in traditional academic publishing.
At the same time, years of learning science research reveal that students learn best by doing as they engage with, and make meaning of, course content through Socratic-questioning, simulations, and other active learning activities. Yet much of OER content remains static text and video, without the interactivity of digital tools and their ability to offer engaging learning activities and immediate, targeted feedback to students on their understanding of a concept.
When digital courseware embodying the findings of learning science is combined with regular assessment of student learning, we start to approach a Holy Grail in educational terms: the promise of learning content that continually improves because it is informed by learning data, and because open licensing supports iterative improvements that strengthen learning design and effectiveness. In this session, we will explain an initiative to do just that.
Learning researcher and Lumen Learning Chief Academic Officer Dr. David Wiley will discuss the work Lumen Learning is doing to identify learning outcomes where students have the greatest challenges in general education courses as revealed by rigorous analysis of a wide range of learner data. Dr. Steve Greenlaw, Professor of Economics at the University of Mary Washington and primary author of the OpenStax Economics textbooks, will explain how a subject matter expert collaborates with learning engineers to understand why students are struggling in each challenging area.
The presenters will discuss specific ways to improve the OER content and assessments associated with these outcomes, in order to measurably improve student success. These interventions include revising content to make it more interesting and engaging for students, as well as adding interactivity, formative practice activities, and other strategies to help students learn by doing. The presenters will share examples of how to use new tools such as H5P that make it easy for anyone to author interactive content and include it in their course. They will also offer observations, feedback and statistical evidence from the classroom about how these data-driven improvements are impacting students and learning.
Throughout the session, attendees with access to a smartphone or other device will have the opportunity to interact with the digital course materials for Macroeconomics and Microeconomics being discussed. They can go hands-on to explore several alternatives for creating interactive content to enhance learning effectiveness of OER. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how data-driven improvements in course materials can enhance student learning, as well as what it feels like to be a student using interactive course materials.