Improving student retention has been a hot topic for both mission- and sustainability-related reasons. There are so many different experiments and approaches being undertaken that it can be hard to tell what works and what to pay attention to. Tyton Partners, using a clever mixed method research approach, has identified institutions that are having a real impact on student success and discovered some common characteristics. Thursday, May 21st at 2:00 PM ET.

March 11th, 2020: Educational technology has the potential to innovate pedagogy, but the focus on instructor and student perceptions of tools, and the lack of rigorous and relevant evidence of effectiveness has resulted in false starts and frustrations. In 2017, with the development of their next generation platform Achieve, Macmillan Learning established an innovative approach to demonstrating efficacy.

February 20th, 2020: Colleges and universities face a surprising new skills gap within their own ranks: instructional designers. With instructional design job postings increasing by as much as triple, the demand for trained instructional design professionals is far outpacing supply. Higher education is facing a shortage of talent—and evidence-based practice in learning sciences and technology—to navigate a complex new landscape of online and digital learning. To tackle this challenge, Instructional design firm iDesign recently announced its LX Pathways initiative, to help learning experience design professionals gain skills through a new program developed to help close the skills shortage in qualified instructional design professionals.