Open Education 2016

Founded at Carnegie Mellon University with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Open Learning Initiative is a now fifteen-year-old open educational research project. Leveraging CMU's traditional strengths in technology, the learning sciences and cross-disciplinary collaborations, OLI was initially conceived as a science-based exploration of how the affordances of technology and lessons from learning science can be leveraged to demonstrably enact instruction for learners. Designed to simultaneously improve learning and facilitate learning research, OLI courseware has been widely recognized for Its role in supporting students and instructors, and for it's success in discovering and improving approaches to engineering learning. Since that founding, the use and creation of OER has been more than a simple element in the OLI approach; open has been foundational in OLI's mission and principles, and is essential part of OLI's vision for research, community and the continuous improvement of courses.



This session will reflect on these first 15 years, providing an overview of OLI's history, with a high level look at the OLI's approach, results and key successes; the session will also consider failures and lessons learned. Key themes in this retrospective include: specific challenges of open in higher education; economics and sustainability; discoveries; community development; and supporting tools and technologies. A key focus: the "ÖO' in OLI. How fully has OLI participated in and lived up to open education's vision and ideals? What has been the result of the interplay between OLI's open and scientific agendas?



After considering OLI's history, the session will then look ahead, discussing OLI's current state and projects and longer-term strategic goals and future plans. Key to these plans are contributions to the tools, technologies and infrastructure that will support the next generation of open education; a continued, thoughtful participation in open education; a more forceful leadership role at the intersection between OER, data and analytics; strong push in realizing OER potential to improve outcomes through continuous improvement; the ongoing role of open education in driving and benefiting from scientific discovery.



The remainder of the session will solicit reactions from the audience on lessons learned, future plans and points of intersection with trends and participants in open education.