Reading Research on Learning: In Pursuit of the Holy Grail

In Pursuit of the Holy Grail

Chapter 13

Dr. David Wiley, Co-Founder, Chief Academic Officer

This chapter reviews Bloom’s classic 1984 article on the “2 sigma problem.” Personally, I find this article to be one of the most inspiring pieces of writing on education of all time. The article isn’t inspirational in a way […]

Reading Research on Learning: What You Know Determines What You Learn

What You Know Determines What You Learn

Chapter 6

Dr. David Wiley, Co-Founder, Chief Academic Officer

This chapter is about Ausbel’s 1960 paper on “advance organizers” (and no, it’s not “advanced organizers”). The key insight of this paper is that “the single most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows.” Or, as Kirschner […]

An Update On Our Community-Driven Continuous Improvement Efforts

Bob Bodily, PhD, Director of Data Science & Research

In January of 2020, we started an experimental community-driven continuous improvement project with a few of our Waymaker courses. This was the continuous improvement process we followed:

  1. We added a “Contribute!” button to the bottom of every content page.
  2. […]

Supporting Teacher-Student Relationships to Improve Student Learning

By David Wiley, PhD, Chief Academic Officer and Robert Bodily, PhD, Senior Data Scientist

A substantive body of research demonstrates the incredible impact teachers can have on student learning when they know where their students are in the learning process and adapt their teaching to meet their learners’ specific needs. These adaptations […]

A Framework for Continuous Improvement of OER

By David Wiley, Chief Academic Officer

The potential of the “data revolution” in teaching and learning, just as in other sectors, is to create much more timely feedback loops for tracking the effectiveness of a complex system. In a field where feedback is already well established as a vital process for both […]