Mission

The Simon Initiative’s mission is two-fold:

At Carnegie Mellon

• Build a learning engineering ecosystem at CMU.  That is, create the technological infrastructure and human support with which faculty can feasibly use learning science research to improve their educational practice, instrument their educational practice so that they have access to useful data, and analyze that data to improve student learning outcomes.
• Develop the next generation of technology for education by turning existing state-of-the-art research tools into highly intelligent tools that are easy-to-learn and easy-to-use for all faculty.
• Use the Simon Initiative learning engineering approach to overhaul and demonstrably improve several educational centerpiece courses at CMU, including Writing and Communication, Statistical Methods and Introduction to Computer Science.

Globally

Provide accessible tools and methods with which any person or institution can adopt and advance CMU’s approach to learning engineering, improving outcomes for their own learners.