As 2020 comes to a close, we’re excited to share that we’ve seen significant growth in the number of users of our content. With a 63% increase from 2019, Lumen will finish 2020 with over 115 million unique visitors to our catalog of openly licensed general higher education courses. The highest volume was seen in October and November, with almost 21M and 18M unique visitors respectively.
Given the economic impact COVID-19 has had on learners worldwide, we weren’t surprised to see more learners utilizing the outcomes-based content openly available in our catalog. Learners worldwide are using our 60+ general education courses in record numbers. Some of the most-used courses include Chemistry, Biology, College Algebra, and Introduction to Psychology, all of which often carry a prohibitively high cost of course materials for students.
According to a report created by Tyton Partners and Bay View Analytics in Partnership with Every Learner Everywhere, 2- and 4-year instructors prioritized decreasing the cost of instructional materials in fall 2020. In fact, one of the recommended actions in the report is to “facilitate the discovery and selection of high-quality and affordable supplemental digital learning tools.” By using only openly licensed content to build our courseware, Lumen is able to support individual learners in a unique and powerful way all while providing students with cost savings.
“Removing barriers to success for all students, regardless of their financial situation, is critical in our current environment. I feel good about partnering with Lumen to provide high-quality effective learning experiences for all students,” says Joe Cooke, Business Department Chair at Santa Fe Community College and author of Lumen’s new Financial Accounting course.
A surge in users of our content is not the only growth we experienced this year. This fall term, our team onboarded instructors from over 400 institutions who are using one of our affordable courseware options, Waymaker or OHM, an increase of 65% over 2019.
As 2020 winds down, we’re looking forward to 2021 and continuing to partner with educators to provide unprecedented learning for all students.