Learning Tools

Carnegie Mellon and Lumen Learning Partner on Evaluating Learning Materials

• By Rhea Kelly
• 04/17/19

Carnegie Mellon University's Simon Initiative, a cross-disciplinary effort to develop a "learning engineering ecosystem" for improving student outcomes, is teaming up with open courseware provider Lumen Learning to "share tools for developing, evaluating and continuously improving evidence-based learning materials." Through the collaboration, the Simon Initiative will integrate the RISE Framework (a tool that uses analytics to identify poorly performing learning content) into its educational effectiveness toolkit. For its part, Lumen will "help build awareness, implement and support faculty members' use of next-generation learning tools developed by both organizations."

The Simon Initiative's toolkit comprises learning tools, research methods, software and content developed by the university. Last month, Carnegie Mellon announced it would make the toolkit openly available to the education community over the coming year.  

"Using the RISE Framework together with methods developed and shared by CMU, we're able to empirically validate what's effective and what's not effective at supporting learning," said David Wiley, co-founder and chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, in a statement. "These insights empower faculty to spend their limited time making improvements to learning materials where they will have the most impact. We're incredibly excited to use and contribute to CMU's toolkit as part of a growing network exploring new ways to continuously improve learning materials."

"Ed tech innovation must become more connected to research insights as they unfold, rather than untethering learning technology from scientific breakthroughs about how people learn," commented Norman Bier, executive director of the Simon Initiative. "CMU continually breaks new ground in learning engineering. Robust, mission-aligned partnerships, like our work with Lumen Learning, allow us to accelerate the research and innovation cycle, scaling up access to new approaches while using the toolkit to maintain strong connections to evidence-based design."