Higher ed teaching and learning materials provider Lumen Learning is partnering with The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) to develop and implement new digital courseware meant to improve student outcomes and focus on eliminating race and income as predictors of success.
Kim Thanos
The courseware, which will be developed by Lumen, will be applied to the course, "Introduction to Statistics", a common college course that many students struggle with, said Kim Thanos, Lumen co-founder and CEO.
The courseware will be a software package of digital resources that can be implemented in an institution's learning management system, such as Canvas or Blackboard, Thanos said.
Lumen received a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop this courseware as part of a broader $65 million initiative from the foundation, Thanos said. She said that addressing issues of race and income being success predictors in the course was a complex challenge, one that APLU seemed a fitting partner for.
“A lot of it comes down to having the right tools, having the right content. But as important or even more important is how the institutions are able to make use of that and how faculty members use effective practices and change teaching practices in order to use those digital tools well,” Thanos said. “And as we looked for potential partners to work with, from our experience, APLU is absolutely the leader in creating innovation with institutions and faculty members that can scale, that can create change and create impact at scale. And so the partnership allows us to come together.”
She said that APLU members that are most actively involved in this are selected because they have a history of innovation and partnership with APLU, "and also because their student profile, their demographic profile matches the target population for this project, which specifically is Black, Latino/Latina, Indigenous, and low-income students."
That's what Lumen Learning and APLU are working together on by bringing those partners into the design process, into the early use pilot groups so that "we can really ensure that the project is meeting the goals and continue to evolve and improve it so that it does," said Thanos.
