7 Questions with Lumen Learning Founders Kim Thanos and David Wiley
CT: How do you select the individual colleges and universities to work with on co-designing the courseware?
Thanos: It's always a bit of a balance for us. There's a group of institutions that we've worked with successfully in the past, and we were specifically looking for minority-serving institutions, because we knew there would be a large number of students that were in the target profile for this grant. We've had a really positive collaboration with the State University of New York system. SUNY's actually our largest customer. And so we talked to the system office about the different minority-serving institutions in SUNY and they identified Rockland Community College as one that might be a great target for this, and so we've done some really good work with Rockland. We've worked with Santa Ana College in California very successfully in the past and have found them to be great collaborators. And then we also created a partnership with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, which has a lot of positive history and experience driving innovation, helping support the use of innovative tools and teaching practices with an eye toward achieving impact at scale. And so [APLU Vice President for Digital Transformation for Student Success] Karen Vignare and the team at APLU helped us identify some of their very strong partners that also had large numbers of students in this target profile. Georgia State University is one of those that came to us through APLU, as well as the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Florida International University. It really rounded things out nicely for us to be able to tap into the experience and perspective of a different set of institutions with a different history of innovation.
CT: When you're working with so many different institutions and evaluating the impact on student success, that's a very data-intensive process. How does that work, integrating the data from all those sources?
Wiley: There are questions that we can ask and answer using our own data from inside the system. But there are some questions that you can only ask and answer in collaboration with partner institutions. And out of all the parts of the process of developing the content, building new technology, all of that, the part of it that actually is the most complicated is working with institutions on data-sharing agreements and getting access to the kind of data that is necessary to be able to do the analysis that you want to do. In this particular case, the Gates Foundation made a separate grant to Digital Promise, which is doing the formal evaluation of the work that we're doing to answer the question: Have we been successful in eliminating race and income as predictors of student success? Yes or no? You probably don't want to ask us that question — you want to ask a third party that question. And so Digital Promise is designing a research study and they have an advisory group of people they've been working with. They'll be partnering with the institutions to get the access to the data that they need to be able to ask and answer the relevant questions around whether race is still a predictor of success, whether income is still a predictor of success, at the end of the process.
You're right, it's very data-intensive. This isn't a question that you want to answer with four or five anecdotes. This is a question that you want to answer with a randomized controlled trial with several hundred faculty at institutions all across the country, which is the kind of study design that we understand Digital Promise is working on.