Campus Technology Insider Podcast December 2022
Listen: Reimagining Courseware from an Equity-First Perspective
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello, and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
Earlier this year, Lumen Learning announced a partnership with Howard University to help develop equity-centered learning solutions for a new statistics course and platform. The goal: to develop more effective and culturally relevant courseware for minority and low-income students and improve outcomes in gateway courses. Howard faculty and students are providing feedback throughout the courseware development process, such as how specific courseware features might be used and best practices for supporting faculty in their courseware implementation. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Dr. Morris Thomas, assistant provost for digital and online learning and director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning & Assessment at Howard, and Kim Thanos, founder and CEO of Lumen Learning, about developing courseware with an equity-first perspective, giving students multiple pathways to success, building in support for faculty, and more.
Here's our chat.
Welcome to the podcast! So I think we could start kind of at the beginning, and I wanted to ask what brought Howard University and Lumen Learning together to tackle the need for equitable courseware in higher education.
01:36
Kim Thanos: We had started working together with Howard University, well, Dr. Thomas was doing work with his team around some professional development for faculty. And in that we were using our, our professional development platform, it's called Lumen Circles. And we really saw an opportunity to improve the framework that's used in that platform to create more experience for faculty members to engage around creating inclusive learning environments, creating belonging in the learning environment. And so we reached out and asked whether, whether Dr. Thomas would like to be a partner with us in enhancing that framework. And that was the first project we did together, and we just saw so much value and benefit that came from the breadth of experience that he brought from his work across the Howard faculty members. So when we had the chance to engage with a group of partners around equitable courseware, really, Howard was a logical partner to reach out to and had a lot to bring into that conversation. And I think when we started that conversation at first, and Morris, you can share about this, we said we'd love to have you involved in this project. This is this focus population for the project. And he said, we're not your right, your correct partner, like we're not the right partner for this, for this role. And so we took a look at that. But I think there was a distinction there that might be worth mentioning, Morris, if you want to talk about that a little bit.
02:55
Morris Thomas: Sure. Lumen and Howard, Lumen has been a great place for our faculty to have some professional development opportunities. And Lumen's professional development circles, which are called Lumen Circles, are centered around best, evidence best practices in teaching and learning. So Lumen is very much steeped in that. And that's very much why we were there because we are aligned with trying to make sure that the teaching and learning practices that we have are evidence based, they're grounded in research, they're grounded in things that are, to have our learners at the center. And so that is another reason why the partnership was there and why we have been engaging Lumen, Lumen Learning, with having our faculty to engage in that. And our faculty do report high satisfaction with that. But to Kim's second point about the population, initially, and Kim you may have to remind me as well, though. Initially, what the population it was mentioning students who were either first generation, low income students.