7 Questions with Lumen Learning Founders Kim Thanos and David Wiley
Thanos: One of the advantages that we have as a company is the ability to see what's working and not working for students in each stage of the learning process as they're moving through a course. We use a lot of different systems and tools to be able to track that: Some of them are really looking at more quantitative analysis, and some of them are more of a user testing kind of analysis.
So often, faculty members and institutions can't see what's happening in terms of student learning until something hits the gradebook, but then it's really too late to influence that grade. And a lot of times, institutions don't have eyes on that until you get to the final grade in the course. So part of what we're paying attention to is being able to have earlier eyes on the moment that it's first clear that students are less engaged or not understanding something specifically — especially something that's going to be built on throughout the course. Even with the new statistics course, we're doing much more pretest work to make sure that the students have the prerequisite knowledge they need to be successful in the course, and if they don't, to be able to remediate that immediately, where it's a small chunk of prerequisite knowledge that's needed for any given week in the course. You don't have to remediate for all of the K-12 education experience at once. You just need to say, "If the student can remember these three things, then it will make them successful this week." One of the real advantages of digital learning tools is that the student usage data and the student learning data are just replete with great information on what we can do better and what students really need.
Wiley: We jokingly refer to that data that comes through at the end of term as autopsy data — it's great at helping us understand what happened, but it's too late to take any meaningful action. At the same time, particularly in this new statistics course, we're not trying to do anything predictive. We're not trying to get out ahead of things and put ourselves in the situation where predictive algorithms might be reifying some bias. That's exactly the kind of thing we're trying to work against with the course design. But there is a lot of real-time data that's available to students about their own learning that they can see and they can reflect on and they can think about, as well as dashboards for faculty that are providing them with real-time information — not predictive, but also not at the end of the term. Just right-when-you-need-it, right-in-the-moment information about who's struggling now, who can I reach out to now, who there is still time to influence, so that we're not talking about data that comes in too late.
CT: I know that Lumen has a big focus on faculty development with your Circles product. Why is faculty development an important part of the equation?
Thanos: If we're going to impact student learning, there are really only two changes that we can create: One is changing student behavior, and the other is changing faculty behavior. And so the faculty development side of this is two things: How can we ensure that the tools that are available to faculty members encourage effective practices, but also one of the major constraints in terms of improvement and innovation in education is just faculty time — especially with the large number of adjunct faculty members who deliver these courses. So the second piece is, how can we develop tools that allow faculty members — who might not have time to explore and really invest in understanding how to use evidence-based practices — to do it super quickly and very easily. Both of those are really important.
The approach we use for Lumen Circles is strengths-based. And one of the most common reactions that we hear from faculty members as they learn more about evidence-based practices is, "Oh, I've been doing this all along. I just didn't know there was a name for it." Once that comes together, then faculty members get really creative about how they build on what they're already doing well, build on things that are already strong practices, and connect some of those pieces together.