CW Partners with Carnegie Mellon University

As President Obama tours key locations in the US this week to champion higher education accessibility, The College of Westchester continues to find ways to help college more accessible for more students. 

 

In September 2012, The College of Westchester was selected to partner with Carnegie Mellon University and a small group of other colleges across the country in Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (CMU-OLI).  Funded, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The William and Flora Hewitt Foundation and the National Science Foundation, the CMU-OLI project seeks to improve the success of college students in certain “gateway courses”, identified as those that traditionally have high enrollments and are found to be the most challenging to entering students.  Click here for more CMU-OLI details from Inside Higher Ed.

The stated goals of CMU-OLI include:

• Support better learning and instruction with high-quality, scientifically-based, classroom-tested online courses and materials through courses that are designed based on learning science research and, in turn, contribute to that research.


• Share courses and materials openly and freely so that anyone can learn. Courses are designed to support the individual learner who does not have the benefit of an instructor.


• Develop a community of use, research, and development to allow for the continuous evaluation, improvement, and growth of courses and course materials.

The course materials include self-paced, fully illustrated readings, embedded multimedia elements, practice activities, responsive ungraded self-assessment questions, and graded assessments.

As a formal program participant, five CW faculty members participated in a research project evaluating the benefit of using a suite of open source online materials developed by CMU in Statistics, Psychology, and Anatomy & Physiology.  CW’s participation in the project continued through the Winter semester. Over 100 CW students participated in the project, all having agreed to do so as volunteer research subjects through CMU’s institutional review process.  Students in selected CW Gateway Courses taught by the participating faculty were administered a CMU provided pre-test at the start of each course, were assigned to either experimental groups that utilized CMU-OLI materials in the classes or to control groups that did not, and were administered a CMU provided post-test at the end of each course.  Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University are now evaluating the results provided by CW and the other participating colleges.

Several CW courses have been redesigned to make use of CMU-OLI resources with one, the online ‘Human Biology’ course for example, eliminating the need entirely for a course textbook as a way to help reduce costs for students. The College will continue to adopt these materials in the coming year.

According to Dr. Warren Rosenberg, Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty, and CW’s CMU-OLI project coordinator, “Partnering with Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning initiative is one of the many ways that The College of Westchester demonstrates its commitment to fostering student success and helping to control the cost of higher education.”