Introduction
OLI is an open educational resources project that began in 2002 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Like many open educational resources projects, ours makes its courses openly and freely available. However, our courses are not mere collections of material created by individual faculty to support traditional instruction. While our courses are often used by instructors to support classroom instruction, our goal is to create courses that enact instruction that is, to create complete online courses from which learners can learn even if they do not have benefit of an instructor or a class. Our courses are developed by teams of learning scientists, faculty content experts, human computer interaction experts and software engineers. They are the product of a community-based research activity.
The Academic Intersections Journal is about the intersection of technology, scholarly and creative works, and the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education. This article is about that same intersection and describes how OLI uses technology to deliver theoretically informed instruction that instantiates teaching and learning goals and simutaneously uses technology to collect data on student learning that informs the next iteration of the course and the underlying learning theory.
The integration of Theory and Practice
We begin an OLI course development project by studying the teaching and learning challenges in the domain under development. Our studies include literature reviews, reviews of existing artifacts of student learning, classroom observations, lab studies and/or classroom-based studies. Each of the course descriptions on the following pages includes a discussion of some of the domain specifcic teaching and learning challenges the OLI course is designed to address
In all OLI courses, we begin our design by articulating a set of student-centered measurable learning objectives and we design the instructional material to support students to achieve the articulated objectives. Our instructional activities include small amounts of explanatory text and many simulations which capitalize on the computer’s capability to promote interaction and to display digital images and video. Many of the courses including formal logic, statistical reasoning and chemistry include virtual labs that promote flexible and authentic exploration and problem solving. A hallmark of all OLI courses is the frequent opportunities we provide students to assess their own learning and receive context-specific and targeted feedback on their work.
Following the discussion of the centrality of feedback loops to our work, you will find descriptions and examples of our use of learning theory and feedback loops in the design of the OLI engineering statics and OLI chemistry courses.
The integration of theory and practice that is at the heart of OLI depends on the participation of a diverse community of developers, teachers and learners. As you read through this article, think about the role you might play in improving postsecondary education as part of a community-based research activity.
First published on Jul 06, 2007.
