The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is an open educational resources project atCarnegie Mellon University that began in 2002 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OLI creates web-based courses that are designed so that students can learn effectively without an instructor. In addition, the courses are often used by instructors to support and complement face-to-face classroom instruction. Our evaluation efforts have investigated OLI courses' effectiveness in both of these instructional modes -stand-alone and hybrid. and Spring 2006 studies, we collected empirical data about the instructional effectiveness of the OLI-Statistics course in stand-alone mode, as compared to traditional instruction. In both of these studies, in-class exam scores showed no significant difference between students in the stand-alone OLI-Statistics course and students in the traditional instructor-led course. In contrast, during the Spring 2007 study, we explored an accelerated learning hypothesis, namely, that learners using the OLI course in hybrid mode will learn the same amount of material in a significantly shorter period of time with equal learning gains, as compared to students in traditional instruction. In this study, results showed that OLI-Statistics students learned a full semester's worth of material in half as much time and performed as well or better than students learning from traditional instruction over a full semester.

Education and education research are experiencing increased digitization and datafication, partly thanks to the rise in popularity of massively open online courses (MOOCs). The infrastructures that collect, store and analyse the resulting big data have received critical scrutiny from sociological, epistemological, ethical and analytical perspectives. These critiques tend to highlight concerns and/or warnings about the lack of the infrastructures' and builders' understanding of various nontechnical aspects of big data research (eg seeing data as neutral rather than as products of social processes). These critiques have primarily come from outside of the builder community, rendering the conversation largely one‐sided and devoid of the voices of the builders themselves. The purpose of this paper is to re‐balance the conversation by reporting the results of interviews with 11 data infrastructure builders in higher education institutions. The interviews reveal that builders engage deeply with the issues the critiques outline, not only thinking about them, but also developing practices to address them. The paper focuses the findings on three themes: designing a productive science, navigating ubiquitous ethics and achieving real human impact. Researchers, policymakers and infrastructure builders can use these accounts to better understand the building process and experience.

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Response to KozmaKozma's analysis of the NETP in terms of the economic development rationale for educational reforms is consistent with the thinking of the Technical Working Group. He makes explicit the connections between the transformations in learning environment design that are recommended by the Plan and its underlying economic rationale, and he provides an encompassing set of indicators that informatively augment the NETP. In his review, Kozma highlights analyses of how information and communications technology (ICT) has contributed to macroeconomic shifts from a manufacturing to an information economy and microeconomic changes in business organization toward greater collaboration and coordination of workers. He also points to corresponding alterations in the skills required in many jobs and in skills called for in contemporary society, and to the growing misalignment of largely peripheral school uses of ICT today with emerging learner uses of ICT outside school; the latter, in their social and pervasive nature, are closer to the uses of ICT in business. In his comments on the NETP sections on learning, assessment, teaching, productivity, and infrastructure, Kozma accurately summarizes our efforts in the plan, for each of these interdependent system components, to re-orient educational system strategies and uses of ICT toward the patterns of usage and activity structures found in highly productive work settings, such as 'collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, and multimedia communication within the context of complex, real world problems'.Kozma recommends conducting large-scale research on technology-based classroom practice using nationally representative samples to enable policymakers to better understand progress toward productive uses of ICT in education. Our Technical Working Group also observed the need for such studies, but we did not incorporate this observation in the NETP, as we were charged not with developing a comprehensive set of research priorities, but instead with articulating specific grand challenge research problems, progress on which would be instrumental to achieving the vision developed in the NETP.

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