Our commitment to supporting faculty

At Lumen Learning, we believe deeply that the contributions made by the learner and the faculty are crucial to the development of effective learning materials. Because Lumen uses open educational resources (OER), we have legal permission to make changes to our content for the betterment of teaching, learning, and student outcomes.

But where do we start? A Lumen course has around 300 learning outcomes, and while we ultimately want to optimize them all, with finite time and resources we have to start somewhere. Lumen begins by using RISE analysis, a learning analytics technique, to evaluate where students are struggling most and prioritize changes to these learning materials and teaching practices.

Workshop design

RISE Workshops can be flexibly designed while maintaining efficacy. We can facilitate virtual workshops over Zoom that work best with at least two 1-hour meetings and independent work in between sessions. We can also facilitate meetings in person on your campus, usually as a 3-hour event. A hybrid format is another possibility.

In any of these cases, faculty will learn how we gather and analyze data, how to use our RISE data dashboard to understand their students’ learning, and what kinds of research-based changes are most impactful. Our team is happy to custom design a workshop that best meets the schedules and needs of your faculty.

What you can expect to accomplish

Lumen welcomes all instructors, faculty, instructional designers, and librarians who are currently using a Lumen Waymaker course to attend the workshop. Ahead of the workshop, Lumen will pull the data generated by your students in their Waymaker courses. Our team will create a custom data dashboard and train participants in how the data is analyzed and how to target changes.

Then, participants will be guided through Lumen’s approaches and tools to making improvements and will be invited to make contributions targeting learning outcomes with which their students are struggling. Ideally, there should be a minimum of 200 students using Waymaker to collect a useful sample of data.

There will be time to work on changes to content and teaching practices in the workshop, and participants can also elect to continue work afterward. If you would like, Lumen will keep workshop participants informed about implementations, testing, and the impact of their suggestions.

Testing and follow-up

We can say we’ve changed OER without measuring the impact of those changes, but we can only say we’ve improved OER when we have measured student outcomes and confirmed that they have actually changed for the better. So we also have built the capacity to conduct A/B testing on our changes.

Following the workshop, Lumen will implement content changes as part of a randomized controlled trial for all students who take the course in a future semester. We will analyze the students’ performance with both the original and the changed versions, and if the changes result in a significant improvement, we will roll out the changes to all students in the course to improve learning for all students. Lumen will provide a follow-up presentation of the results for your faculty.

If you’re a current customer and would like to discuss organizing one of these workshops for your faculty, please reach out to your primary Lumen contact or email our Support Team support@lumenlearning.com.