By: Dr. David Wiley, Co-founder and Chief Academic Officer, Lumen Learning

Lumen is deeply committed to eliminating race, income, and gender as predictors of student success in US higher education. Each and every student, regardless of their race, income, or gender, is capable of succeeding when they are supported effectively. And at Lumen, we are working to provide every student and each instructor with the pedagogical supports they need to be successful.

In 2022, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided Lumen with substantial funding in support of this vision. This generous grant allowed Lumen to update and improve our equity-centered design process, leading to significant improvements to our content and assessments as well as a new software platform for supporting students and instructors as they engage in the teaching and learning process. The new courseware offering that resulted from this work is called Lumen One, and the first subject is Introductory Statistics.

Equity-Centered Design

We define equity-centered design as “the practice of purposefully involving historically marginalized and resilient communities throughout a design process with the goal of allowing their voice to directly affect how the solution will address the inequity at hand” following Kwak (2020). This principle is sometimes expressed as “design with, not for.” As we created Lumen One, we involved students and faculty throughout the process of drafting platform features, content designs, and assessment approaches.

One of our key strategies for designing with students, instead of for them, was the creation of two User Testing Centers (UTCs). Through partnerships with Santa Ana College and Rockland Community College, two Minority Serving Institutions, the UTCs trained 13 student interns to complete user testing research cycles with more than 140 of their student peers. Using a variety of research techniques – from empathy interviews and cognitive interviews to prototype testing and interactive co-design sessions, the interns helped Lumen understand the answers to questions like: What’s the reality of students’ lives and academic experiences today? How might students solve the problems they experience in their gateway courses? What’s interesting, relevant, and engaging to them? What definitely isn’t? What would students change if they could?

Examples of Equity-Centered Designs

Students taught us many valuable lessons through their work with the UTCs. One of those lessons is that there’s nothing that students find universally interesting and relevant to their lives. This recognition led us to co-design data analysis practice in Introductory Statistics that has a greater chance of engaging students by including multiple datasets. This gives each student a chance to choose a topic to analyze that’s meaningful to them. We call these Choose Your Own Dataset activities.                                                         

Students also told us that they frequently need to hear a concept explained multiple times by multiple people. This typically leads them to search YouTube for additional perspectives on challenging topics. However, surfing YouTube presents a number of challenges. Different instructors use different language to describe the same concepts, making them more difficult to understand. And the YouTube algorithm always suggests unrelated videos that easily distract students and waste their time. Understanding the underlying desire for additional perspectives as well as the challenges presented by using YouTube for this purpose, we recorded three different instructors with different perspectives and life experiences explaining key concepts throughout the course. This allows students to get a range of perspectives on challenging ideas without the confusion and distractions of YouTube.

 

In another example, students told us they strongly wish that instructors better understood them as individuals and appreciated the obligations they have outside of class, like working full-time or caring for an aging family member. Many students long to feel a genuine connection to their instructors and to feel seen and supported. To help bridge this gap between instructors and students we co-designed an Introduce Yourself activity for students and a corresponding instructor dashboard. This provides faculty with information like students’ preferred names and pronunciation, preferred pronouns, academic majors, year in school, and obligations outside of class.

As a final example, we heard loud and clear from students that they don’t enjoy reading long monolithic blocks of text. This complaint actually aligns very well with research about what makes for effective studying. Specifically, research consistently shows that engaging in interactive practice with immediate feedback is dramatically more effective at promoting learning than reading or watching video.

(And this effect of doing interactive practice is causal, not merely correlational.) This student perspective combined nicely with another consistent bit of feedback– that students hate having to purchase a calculator or special mathematics software in order to do homework for their classes. We brought these ideas together in a co-design that significantly reduces the amount of passive reading and video watching that students do in the course. In place of reading and watching, students engage in significantly more interactive practice, including with an online statistics tool that is integrated directly into the course materials at no additional cost.

 

Equity isn’t Just a Process – It’s Also Results

It’s often said that equity is a process, and I agree with the call to action underlying that idea. But equity must also be about results. For example, if Lumen’s equity-centered design process doesn’t facilitate equitable outcomes for students, then our process still needs work. We recognize that there are likely many cycles of continuous improvement between us and the audacious goal of eliminating race, income, and gender as predictors of student success. With Lumen One Introductory Statistics available for broad adoption this fall, we’re excited to evaluate our initial progress towards this goal, publicly share what we’re learning, and continuously re-design Lumen One with – not for – students and faculty across the US in pursuit of equitable outcomes. 

Interested in Learning More?

Hear what your peers who’ve adopted Lumen One have to say during a webinar on October 26th at 2:00 p.m. ET.

Register here: https://info.lumenlearning.com/exploring-lumen-one-in-the-classroom

References

Kwak, J. (2020). How equity-centered design supports anti-racism in the classroom. https://www.everylearnereverywhere.org/blog/how-equity-centered-design-supports-anti-racism-in-the-classroom/