Lumen Learning/Gates Grant Evaluation Committee
Served on the Gates Grant/Lumen Learning evaluation committee to help guide the development of and to evaluate an open resource educational platform. The project started in August 2014.
As part of a Gates Foundation educational grant, seven Salt Lake Community College members attended a meeting sponsored by Lumen Learning of Portland, Oregon. The purpose of the meeting was to work on the development of a platform to deliver high quality Open Educational Resource materials to students at a fraction of the cost of traditionally-published material. The group spent President’s Day weekend in downtown Portland, identifying and arranging content and determining the features the new platform should include. SLCC’s team joined others from Broward College, Carnegie Mellon University, Cerritos College, the Kellogg School of Management, Pittsburg State University, Santa Ana College, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, Tidewater Community College, the University of Maryland University College, and the University of Mary Washington.
Industry experts attended from BBC Worldwide Learning, Clark Aldrich Designs, Inclusive Design Research Centre, Lumen Learning, and Online Learning Consortium. The teams developed courses for Principles of Marketing, Introduction to Business, Microeconomics, and Macroeconomics. Lumen’s initiative is to gather open source materials and deliver them in a mastery model. Under this model, course learning objectives are separated into learning modules that include reading and other content, self-tests, adaptive guidance, and a final assessment for mastery of the learning objective. Students work at their own pace, as guided by their instructor. The work of building the tool is separated into content, which is directed by faculty subject matter experts, and the platform, as built by Lumen’s staff.
The course and platform building process has been in progress since late summer 2014. The courses were scheduled to be live and ready for testing Fall Semester, 2015. The materials developed were impressive, and the hard work of those involved was clearly marked in the results. The cost of the materials per student was higher than anticipated, and our team decided against its integration in our curriculums.