2018 Horizon Report Webinar: Adaptive Learning and OER at Scale

Editor's Notes

• #3: Hi, I’m Jeremy Anderson, the Deputy Chief of Academic and Administrative Technology at The American Women’s College, which is a branch of Bay Path University located in Massachusetts. Since inception in 2014, TAWC has followed an access mission. OER and no-cost learning materials decreases the price to students and allows us to provide content on the first day. This is critical as we serve non-trads and diverse populations, most of whom come from lower SES.
• #4: Also embraced adaptive learning as part of a First in the World grant from the US Dept of Ed. Hypothesis is that adaptive learning will improve immediate course performance and long-term success in terms of persistence and graduation rates. We’ve implemented the Realizeit platform with an institutional brand of KnowledgePath. In KP, we break each course into a series of 70 to 100 core concepts. Each concept is presented as a 20 minute activity in a learning map. What you see here is part of a concept map for one week of an English course. We’ve focused on our high enrollment courses and core curriculum – so math, English, humanities, intro sciences – to achieve biggest impacts. Also building vertically in psych and business programs.
• #5: The trends of courses that use OER/no cost and adaptive have tracked together. This is by design. Adaptive learning requires granular content tied to specific competencies. To get enough content in a short time span, we love the remix, retain rights of OER.
• #6: We’ve worked with OER and low-cost content providers to secure the content for these implementations. Ed Map’s CURATE service also has been invaluable as they’ve paired their research team of librarians with our SMEs. Our SMEs also curate their own OER and craft hundreds of questions for each adaptive course.
• #7: All of this requires the development of new competencies and shifting of traditional roles. We designed training stacks of competencies for SMEs, faculty, and staff. The competencies map to job roles, so the more competencies you get, the more you can do at the college. Faculty who want to teach an adaptive course, for example, need to learn how to use analytics and dashboards to facilitate learning rather than direct it. We similarly orient students in a learning experience called SOUL Connect. They get prepared for the self-direction and self-regulation that happens in adaptive courses. We communicate, communicate, communicate and offer ongoing training through webinars, videos, and a website that we embed in every adaptive course.
• #8: We measure the efficacy of the implementation in a number of ways. First is students’ cost savings since we’re serving an access mission. Last AY we saved students $176,000 Anticipating around $350,000 of savings this coming year as we roll out OER and adaptive courses to 4000+ coursetakers
• #9: We also care deeply about the learning experience. Students overwhelmingly felt more engaged in adaptive courses than in more traditional online courses at the institution.
• #11: They also reported self-perceptions of improved learning. We will be collecting and analyzing this data more formally for our final grant report.
• #12: One thing students particularly like is that we can provide multiple representations of each concept. Struggling students also receive automatic remediation from pre-requisite concepts. Faculty can step in to provide guidance, too.
• #13: Which is why faculty also are enthusiastic about how the system changes the way they can interact with students. Overwhelmingly, the theme is “intentional interventions,” which they see as a stark contrast to a course where they don’t know what students are/not learning until a discussion or final assignment.
• #14: Our next step is to begin to host our OER within a content management system. We’ve identified Pressbooks. They have a big footprint in the OER marketplace and are developing. For internal purposes, we need a way to distribute our content in a variety of ways for our students and faculty, whether in the LMS, adaptive system, or PDFs. We also want to increase sharing to other institutions who are interested in building from what we’ve curated.
• #15: Next steps in the industry are to open more content, including adaptive courses, to other parties. This is what’s going to allow us to scale across the industry at lower costs to institutions and lower prices to students. Using adaptive platforms also will allow students’ competencies and learning maps to move with them between institutions and employers. Major overhaul of traditional credentialing. HIGHER ED ECOSYSTEM CHALLENGE???
• #16: They also reported self-perceptions of improved learning. We will be collecting and analyzing this data more formally for our final grant report.