CAREER: Building an Online Learning for Mastery System That Creates a Student-centered STEM Learning Environment

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The project addresses three major challenges facing STEM higher education in the United States today: educating an increasingly diverse and non-traditional student population, producing at least 1 million additional STEM graduates, and reducing the cost of higher education. The goal of the project is to create a student-centered online learning system that has the the potential to allow every student to select and engage with learning resources that best suit their own backgrounds and learning needs. In this way, the online learning system could provide a personalized learning experience at a large scale. In addition, by enabling instructors to collaboratively design, create, share, and improve instructional resources, the project aims to develop the personalized online learning system without increasing (and possibly reducing) the cost of higher education for students. This online learning system may be most beneficial to first-generation college students, students from rural communities and from groups that are underrepresented in college, adult learners, and others who may be less prepared to succeed in college and who face significant financial or other difficulties in pursuit of higher education. At the core of the project is creation of an Online Learning for Mastery (OLM) system, which will be designed by combining the latest online learning technology with the concept of "mastery learning" design. Mastery Learning breaks down a topic into a sequence of learning modules that each contain formative assessment, instruction, and practice. This approach enables students to move through the material at their own pace. The OLM system will consist of multiple sequences of learning modules, with each module combining instructional resources with formative assessment, allowing students who have already mastered the content to quickly move ahead, while providing struggling students ample support and opportunities to catch up at their own pace. The OLM system has the potential to produce a large amount of data on each student's learning process. These data have better interpretability than what is collected from conventional online learning platforms. The project aims to develop analysis algorithms to extract rich information about student learning behavior and learning difficulties from the data. The data, in turn, will guide instructors and researchers in developing new instructional materials and platform features to help students become better self-regulated and motivated learners. The process is akin to civil engineers designing highway systems and safety features based on analysis of traffic data collected from GPS systems. The data collection capability of the OLM system serves as such a "learning GPS" for both instructors and students. Results from the project have the potential to contribute significant new knowledge to our understanding of student learning behavior in a self-paced online STEM learning environment, and to inform effective instructional designs to facilitate a student's learning process. The project proposes to create two online courses. The first course will be an online introductory college physics course serving as the online component of multiple blended format courses at the University of Central Florida. This course could potentially be shared between multiple institutions including six local state colleges in the Orlando area. The second course will be a development course designed for instructors, introducing them to the latest online learning technologies and research findings related to OLM and mastery learning, while attempting to build a community of instructors for creating, improving, sharing, and reusing OLM modules. This project has the potential not only to increase knowledge about effective online education but also to broaden participation in STEM fields by reducing education cost, increasing accessibility, and supporting multiple pathways to a STEM degree.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.