$2.5M from US Dept of Ed funds 21st-century open-resource learning project
A $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education is funding a major collaboration to improve education. The Consortium for Open Active Pathways will use technology to increase the availability of college-level educational materials. Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College is the lead unit in the consortium which partners ASU with three of America’s largest community college systems: the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, Miami Dade College (Florida) and Ivy Tech Community College (Indiana).
COAP aims to benefit 100,000 students through access to open educational resources — OER — that provide students with better learning outcomes than traditional textbooks while saving them millions of dollars. OER are freely available academic materials that can be downloaded, edited and shared to better serve all students.
Embracing online education
Ariel Anbar is the principal investigator for the COAP project. A President’s Professor at ASU, Anbar is on the faculties of MLFTC, the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences. He is also director of ETX, ASU’s Center for Education Through eXploration, which will lead COAP. Anbar says he became interested in OER as a way of improving online education.
“In the last decade, we've gone from higher education looking skeptically at online teaching to embracing it,” Anbar says. “But what we embraced in the first wave of online learning is a virtualization of the passive, lecture mode of instruction where the focus is content, content, content. I want to use digital technology to improve the quality of how we teach across the board, taking the principles we call active learning — constructivism, learning by doing, those kinds of things — and bringing them into the online world through open educational resources.”
Anbar calls the resulting offerings “active OER.” He says the idea of COAP is to produce not only active OER modules but also a tool that enables an instructor to assemble a package of those and other openly licensed digital materials into a suite of resources. “So they could have a sort of virtual textbook,” Anbar says, “a no-cost digital textbook available to students that includes some of these active modules and is also available in print form for a low cost.” But he says active OERs should be more than online textbooks. They can provide a suite of resources encompassing the entire body of intellectual material for a course, and all of it open for access, editing and sharing.
“When you say textbook, that evokes just reading,” Anbar says. “But when you're in the digital realm working with open resources you can do all sorts of things beyond the text, taking maximum advantage of the digital medium. And ‘active’ means digital resources that involve simulations that are interactive but also adaptive. The learner doesn’t just move something around in the simulation but actually gets prompting feedback that guides them to success.” Anbar calls this feedback guided active learning or digital tutoring, a system provided by the Smart Sparrow platform, another partner in the grant.