At the 2019 EEP summit, sponsoring participant iDesign shared the iDea book. Contributed under a Creative Commons license, the book is part of the company’s larger commitment to give away useful scholarship instead of T-shirt, bags, or other conference SWAG. The iDea book boils down established research-backed practice into clear language with supporting examples. iDesign gave a presentation on the book at the summit as an example of research can be made more accessible to educators.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Lumen Learning jointly issued a press release announcing their collaboration on an effort to integrate the Lumen-developed RISE analytical framework for curricular materials improvement analysis into LearnSphere, a part of the OpenSimon toolkit.
To be clear, Lumen and Carnegie Mellon are long-time collaborators, and this particular project probably would have happened without either EEP or CMU’s decision to contribute the software that they are now openly licensing. That said, the collaboration was demonstrated at this year’s EEP summit and is being actively promoted to the EEP network.
Michael Feldstein wrote a general interest column in Forbes describing the goal of Carnegie Mellon University’s $100 million OpenSimon learning science contribution in terms that a non-educator can understand.
Once again, Jeff Young at EdSurge does a terrific job of covering the latest EEP developments. Given the number of summits and conferences that were supposedly going to change the world, we appreciate the healthy skepticism that Jeff brings to the story. And yet, even viewed through that lens, we feel pretty good about the way we came out.
Finally, the details you’ve been waiting for! CMU has lifted the curtain on their $100 million open source toolkit, called OpenSimon, which is intended to turn any classroom into a learning science laboratory. As we have previously mentioned, CMU planned to unveil the toolkit at our summit and will be piloting its rollout this year with the EEP network. The intention is not to focus on the software but on the applied learning science methodology that CMU has developed, which they call learning engineering. But you can’t do science with out lab equipment, so they’re giving away $100 million worth of virtual lab equipment for free.
The new news in this announcement is that CMU and EEP will be collaboratively developing some on site learning engineering workshops that EEP will offer to organizations that want to get started learning some foundational but useful techniques. These short courses will also prepare the participants for more in-depth offerings by the university, including a special winter edition of their summer workshop that will be EEP-flavored.
Be sure to check out the web site with the OpenSimon toolkit. This is just a start; there will be much more support to come.