7 Questions with Lumen Learning Founders Kim Thanos and David Wiley
A lot of times there's a product philosophy that is the impetus for a company, but we've been more focused on identifying the range of solutions that are needed in order to create better learning results for students in gateway courses, more equitable results for students in gateway courses. That's given us an opportunity to explore a lot of different aspects of that and identify which new solutions we can bring into that work. And that allowed us to do some things differently than we would have if we were just trying to be a different kind of publisher. It never occurred to us that we were starting a publishing company — and we still would say we're not. But we also didn't come at this saying we want to start a software company. We came at it saying we want to address the challenges of success and equitable success in gateway courses. So that's been a really fun aspect of the experience — this continual questioning, exploring, researching, understanding what others are doing, how we can build on it, what we're doing well, what we're not doing well.
CT: I know that creating equity-centered courseware for Introduction to Statistics, one of those gateway courses, is a big part of Lumen's work right now. Could you tell me a little bit about that initiative and how it came about?
Thanos: The Gates Foundation had opened up an application process and invited us to apply for a grant that was specifically around creating an Intro to Stats course and thinking about the content, the learning design, and the technology in which it would be delivered, in order to improve success for all students, but specifically to eliminate race and income as predictors of success in the course. If you look at performance in Intro to Stats courses, it's very clear from the data that there is significant variability in success rates, and that race and income are in fact predictors of success in that course. So when David and I first started brainstorming about how we could come at that problem set with the resources to be able to really redesign things for a step-function improvement, we got incredibly excited about that.
It has been very challenging work. And I say that in a really positive way. It's been the kind of work that stretches and grows everyone on the team in different directions and in ways that that really make you your best self but also can be very challenging. We've been able to bring together a diverse network of partners that's been able to help us and guide us through that grant process. We expanded our team to have a more diverse set of perspectives in the team, leading the team, leading the design work, working with minority-serving institutions, with both the faculty and student populations, to have a co-design process where we had students at the table telling us what they needed. As a partner, the Gates Foundation always brings a lot of research to the table, and they commissioned a lot of research to understand issues and opportunities more deeply. So we had a chance to really delve into: What are the root causes that create these inequities? Which of those root causes can we influence? Which of those root causes do we need to find another way to overcome?
In the past, we thought about content as a textbook replacement, and then the technology as being an opportunity to provide practice and feedback. And as we've looked at what we need to support students and faculty members with this different lens, we're bringing a much broader range of student supports and faculty supports into the toolset — so that there are many different ways that faculty and students can engage with each other, ways that faculty members and students can engage as communities with the materials, ways they can see themselves and actually help shape and craft those learning experiences.