7 Questions with Lumen Learning Founders Kim Thanos and David Wiley

• 01/05/23

One of the major focus areas of the new courseware and the new platform, which we're calling Lumen One, is to bring together these different efforts in one place, so that faculty members don't have to go someplace else in order to explore evidence-based practices — there is actually information right there in their teaching environment that's making suggestions, linking them to additional resources. There's a lot that we can do to make faculty professional development easier, and to make it more the way things are done instead of a separate activity that happens outside of the teaching environment.

Wiley: The design question for the courseware on the faculty side is, how can you make teaching with evidence-based practices the path of least resistance? Make it so that doing something less effective would actually take more time — it'd be harder. And the same thing on the student side: How can the system be designed so that using highly effective study practices is the easiest way to use the system?

CT: What's on the horizon for Lumen — once the new courseware comes out, what's next?

Thanos: The pilot version of the courseware is going to be live with faculty and students in January — right now we have 67 sections committed to that pilot. We're very quickly looking to add the other first-level math courses so that we have the full suite — Intro to Stats, Quantitative Reasoning, and College Algebra — and then also looking at how we can use that with other disciplines. We're in development with an Intro to Psychology course and an Intro to Business course, so we can continue to move through the gateway courses.

We also just announced a partnership with InScribe, and we're looking at how we can have strong, vibrant student communities and, looking forward, faculty communities. We think there's a lot of great research to be done about how that peer-to-peer learning experience can support students in the class environment. It's this idea that they can come together and have a community of peers that they're sharing with that's moderated, that's helpful, that's accurate. The core elements that we're trying to address are multifaceted: How do we how do we create belonging for every student in the course? How do we help students have the confidence to ask for help when they need help? Just the simple experience of coming into a community and saying, "Oh, my goodness, that stupid question I have, lots of other people have it too," that's a validating and important experience. And so that whole exploration around how do we move from having great digital materials and some classroom experience, to a larger community of learning and more collaborative faculty community for teaching and learning — there are just a lot of exciting possibilities there.

Wiley: There's this saying in entrepreneurship that you're supposed to fall in love with your problem, not with your solution. And I think Lumen has been a really great example of that: We used OER for a while; we've moved to courseware; we've moved to professional development; now we have this online community work that we're doing. I think the future is deeper and deeper understanding of the problem we're trying to solve, and as we see the different aspects of the problem, what's the next one that we could address? And how would we do that in a way that integrates well and creates synergies with really great courseware and really great professional development and a really vibrant online community for students and for faculty? What would the next piece of that be? It's hard to say. We have to get into the work a little further and see the degree to which we have made progress on the problem, and what's the next piece of it that surfaces as we pull something back. But this continued commitment to really being in love with our problem, and not so enamored with solution, I think there's more of that in our future.