Generally when we talk about goals for educational technology, we talk about one of two things: improving access or improving effectiveness. Rarely do we get an opportunity to talk credibly about an innovation that can move both of those needles at the same time. And yet, I saw just such innovation in Pittsburgh this week at the LearnLab Corporate Partners Meeting. LearnLab, jointly run by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, is not widely known in ed tech circles. However, it’s close cousin OLI is. For example, an independent study by ITHAKA S+R made a splash when it showed OLI could cut instructional time in half and still achieve the same level of effectiveness. Two groups of students across six different public universities took the same introductory statistics class. The first group took a traditional version of the class, with an average of 3 hours per week spent in the classroom. The second group took a hybrid version, where they spent one hour a week in the classroom and some time studying independently with the OLI cognitive tutoring software. So that second group spent one-third of the time in the classroom, which amounts to a very significant cost savings and an opportunity to teach more students for less money. Students themselves spent more time on homework in the second group than the first, but even so, they spent 25% less total time on the class than the ones in the traditional class. And yet, both groups achieved essentially the same competence at the end of the class:
To sum up, OLI was able to teach more students at lower cost and with less time on task from the students yet with the same effectiveness of a traditional class. Another, smaller study with similar traditional vs. cognitive-tutor-hybrid for an introduction to logic course found that while students in the hybrid condition saw a small (though not statistically significant) gap in learning effectiveness relative to their peers, they achieved more than double the completion rate:
OLI is pretty well known in the broader ed tech community. They show up at conferences. The ITHAKA study got lots of play. I find it odd that we have not had a broader conversation about how they have achieved their results. Because the techniques developed by OLI, their colleagues at LearnLab, and their collaborators in other institutions have serious implications for OER, MOOCs, the textbook industry, and really, the future of education.