JIME - The Open Learning Initiative: Measuring the Effectiveness of the OLI Statistics Course in Accelerating Student Learning

Abstract

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.

Student Perceptions of College Faculty Who Use OER

“…Lovett, Meyer, and Thille (2008) found students using an open textbook showed a significant gain in scores on the CAOS test when compared to students using a traditional copyrighted textbook in the same course. In a second study, students using an open textbook performed similarly to those using a traditional copyrighted textbook when given only half as much time as students using a traditional copyrighted textbook to learn the material.…”

Learning to Think: Cognitive Mechanisms of Knowledge Transfer

“…Since then the work has greatly expanded in its dissemination-over 500,000 students a year use the Cognitive Tutor Algebra course (e.g., Ritter, Anderson, Koedinger, & Corbett, 2007)-and in its scope-Cognitive Tutors and variations thereof have been created for a wide variety of content, including intercultural competence (Ogan, Aleven, & Jones, 2010), statistics (Lovett, Meyer, & ille, 2008), chemistry (Yaron et al, 2010), and genetics (Corbett, Kauff man, MacLaren, Wagner, & Jones, 2010). Many large-scale evaluations of these courses have demonstrated their eff ectiveness (Ritter, Kulikowich, Lei, McGuire, & Morgan, 2007).…”

Reforming a Large Foundational Course: Successes and Challenges

“…The Carnegie Mellon online statistics course, StatTutor, yielded learning outcomes that were identical to its best in-class learning experience, and significantly better than the national average learning experience: StatTutor students achieved <g> score-type gains of almost twice the national average on the CAOS (Comprehensive Assessment of Outcomes in a first Statistics course) test. 387 Blended instruction (online + in-person) proved to be particularly powerful; in this mode, StatTutor students achieved CAOS <g> scores of about 0.4 (on a scale of 0 to 1), compared to CAOS <g> scores of 0.06 for a control group exposed to lecture alone, and did so in half the time. Research reviews also show that student performance in online and blended learning is as good as or better than face-to-face, based on increases in student achievement.…”