Carnegie Mellon University provides an overview of the OpenSimon toolkit, a range of techniques, tools, content, and code supporting learning engineering. We invite the larger educational community to use and share in this approach to improve learning outcomes for individual learners, while collectively advancing our larger understanding of human learning.
In May of 2019, Carnegie Mellon University launched OpenSimon – a learning engineering community working to improve learning outcomes for individual learners while collectively advancing our larger understanding of human learning. Central to this effort is the release of the OpenSimon Toolkit. This suite of tools, educational resources and underlying codebase includes many of the instruments that Carnegie Mellon’s learning scientists invented for their own research and are being used to improve the quality of courses taught in CMU classrooms today. Altogether, this collection represents more than $100 million in research and development effort.
The larger vision behind OpenSimon is a more integrated and easier-to-use toolkit, used and expanded by a larger community of educators, to drive deliberate, iterative improvements in education. This approach supports educators as citizen scientists and helps people who support them—whether they work in universities or at companies that make educational products— and can provide support that is grounded in the science of learning. This work seeks to improve learning outcomes for individual learners while collectively advancing our larger understanding of human learning.
The OpenSimon toolkit includes a wide range of techniques, tools, content and code, some of which can be useful to classroom educators who want to find out which teaching techniques or content is most effective, instructional designers who want insight into the specific content and design choices, administrators looking to showcase the efficacy of their programs, and others that will be useful to researchers and educational technology product designers. The OpenSimon toolkit includes educational data warehousing and analysis tools, intelligent tutor authoring, platforms for designing, improving and delivering open courseware, a collaborative research platform with advanced learning analytics support, education-specific chatbot frameworks, and discourse analysis software, machine learning components, causal modeling instruments, and proven educational content.
The toolkit is openly available, with individual components being released under open source licenses. Specific components included to date are: DataShop, LearnSphere, Discourse DB, DANCE, Bazaar, Project Listen, Robotutor, Cognitive Tutor Authoring Toolkit (CTAT), Open Learning Initiative (OLI) Platform, Echo: OLI Course Authoring, TETRAD, Social Recommender, the Lightside Workbench and ChemCollective. Also included are sets of libraries and functionality to better combine this diverse set of resources and facilitate the integration of new tools and approaches moving forward. Additional releases will continue as new tools and offerings come about.
During this session, we will provide an overview of OpenSimon, offering one vision for the learning engineering lifecycle and then using the phases of this lifecycle to frame deep dives into the individual components of the toolkit. Participants will be able to offer their insights about where they are in the learning engineering lifecycle through polls and/or surveys. We will offer case studies highlighting the use of these tools to improve outcomes at CMU and at other institutions, while soliciting participants to share their specific educational challenges as a community brainstorm. We will also include specific research case studies that demonstrate the success of closely integrating research with instructional practice. We will invite participants to join the OpenSimon community, with specific opportunities to collaborate and learn more about the tools. Finally, we will solicit community input on how to best continue to structure future work, training, and collaborative events.