Carnegie Mellon University
June 27, 2019

CMU, Lumen Learning Partner Delivery and Support of Evidence-Based Courseware

Jason Maderer
Two leading providers of evidence-based learning materials, Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and open education innovator Lumen Learning, today announced plans to provide coordinated delivery and support for OLI courseware. Through this partnership, OLI's historical strength in learning engineering is complemented by the Lumen Team's expertise in how to deliver, promote and support learning materials implemented at scale. Going forward, faculty and organizations can adopt OLI courseware with support from Lumen Learning to assist with courseware selection, onboarding, training, course setup and ongoing usage.

"Every day we hear from faculty members that what matters most is the success of their students, and this is a driving factor in which course materials they select," said Kim Thanos, CEO of Lumen Learning. "Like Lumen's own courseware, OLI courses are designed around proven principles for what helps students learn effectively. Through this partnership, we're excited to provide professional development and support to help more faculty members discover and teach effectively with these OER-based courseware tools."

As part of Carnegie Mellon's Simon Initiative, OLI operates as an applied-learning science laboratory, using data and research insights to develop, test and improve course materials in a variety of subjects. With this research focus, the OLI courseware adoption process has depended on faculty members to figure out for themselves how to try out, implement and use OLI courses. This partnership will provide guidance and consultations to faculty members and institutions implementing OLI's learning tools.

Initially the partnership will focus on two well-regarded OLI courses, General Chemistry and Anatomy & Physiology, with other OLI courses expected to follow. Lumen's standard pricing for OLI courses will match that of adopting through OLI directly. Today's announcement builds on over a decade of collaborations between members of the Lumen and Simon Initiative teams, including participation in the Next Generation Courseware Challenge, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Most recently, Lumen and the Simon Initiative announced a partnership to integrate an analytical tool used to identify poorly performing learning content into OpenSimon, a new educational effectiveness toolkit announced recently by Carnegie Mellon.

"At OLI, we want to see better learning tools being used by more students and faculty members, on a wider scale," said Norman Bier, director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. "This partnership helps OLI, Lumen, and educational institutions remove barriers to effective adoption of our course materials and accelerate educators' ability to innovate with courseware grounded in learning science research."

OLI is joining Lumen in its strategic relationships with key institutional partners such as the State University of New York (SUNY) and the University System of Maryland, which are both working to expanding awareness and adoption of the evidence-based courseware. Through these partnerships, OLI and Lumen will provide improved tools for courseware discovery, orientation, training and professional development to help faculty members successfully adopt and teach with OLI courseware. Additionally, the partners will deepen their collaboration on efficacy research and applying learning science insights to continuously improve courseware design and better support student learning.