Community-engaged Courseware for STEM Success at Two-year Colleges

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by integrating two-year college instructors into the development and improvement of Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) adaptive courseware that will improve student outcomes while reducing the cost for a broad range of gateway STEM courses. Evidence suggests that engaging a larger population of educators and students in the process of data-driven customization, improvement, and expansion of the courseware can act as a multiplier, better situating courseware in the local context and connecting with learners’ prior knowledge. The COVID-inspired pivot to remote instruction has highlighted the potential of active, asynchronous learning activities to improve learning, and has left a larger population of educators open to innovating with these types of educational technologies. The project will build on prior work where educators have engaged with OLI, and lessons were learned on how to best support faculty with integrating courseware into their instructional practice. Based on these prior findings, the project plans to expand these efforts to two-year systems in other states. The project plans to engage students, instructors, and college community leaders to understand the specific needs in terms of policy around the implementation of online learning for underserved STEM learners at scale. This project will involve faculty and staff at 16 two-year institutions in New York and Maryland, reaching at least 50 STEM classrooms, and impacting thousands of learners. The project will improve outcomes for learners in STEM gateway courses through adoption, customization, and learner-contributions to OLI courseware. The project will leverage learner-interaction and authoring data that is captured by the system, and will use analytic methods, made widely available via LearnSphere, to investigate the impact of courseware changes on outcomes for targeted learning populations while simultaneously informing the iterative improvement of courseware by faculty. Specific goals include improving the user experience for these activities, better understanding the impact of these activities on STEM success, especially with regard to traditionally underserved and adult STEM learners. The project will provide tools for customization and learner sourcing, expand open STEM adaptive courseware content, understand the ed-tech innovation policy landscape, and produce policy recommendations for scaling nationally. The project will provide access to OLI professional development (PD) workshops; collecting necessary outcome and demographic data; and collaborating with OLI researchers on analysis. The project will create tools and methods to support faculty to engage in data-driven customization and provide expanded contributions from students to learning materials and insights. Carnegie Mellon University will partner with State University of New York (SUNY) and Maryland community colleges and leaders reaching broad and diverse populations. Lead implementation partners including Harford (MD) and Nassau (NY) Community Colleges will drive core research efforts and facilitate recruitment of faculty in multiple STEM domains. In conjunction with these efforts, leaders from state-wide organizations SUNY OER Services and the Maryland Open Source Textbook initiative will help to disseminate these efforts more broadly throughout their respective state community college communities via existing grant and outreach programs. The NSF program description on Advancing Innovation and Impact in Undergraduate STEM Education at Two-year Institutions of Higher Education supports projects seeking to improve STEM education using innovative and high-impact practices that are evidence-based. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.