2007 Learning Impact Award Finalists

Improving performance, quality, outcomes, access, or affordability through the use of technology are goals that are difficult to disagree with. The IMS GLC Learning Impact program seeks to cut through the rhetoric by finding examples worldwide that exude innovative approaches, significant levels of adoption by faculty and students, and, most of all, evidence of improved learning. The comments from the IMS GLC Executive Strategic Counsel above highlight that while there is general agreement in desiring improved learning outcomes, there is a great diversity of opinions, approaches, and measurements. The Learning Impact Awards (LIA) program seeks to provide decision-makers and practitioners with examples that can be considered for applicability to their specific educational scenario.

The Learning Impact program is unique in that it recognizes learning innovation both in terms of the technology used and the educational organization that has utilized it for high impact, capturing the essential elements of innovation, adoption, and learning. The 25 finalists for 2007 include 14 from outside the United States. Three of the finalists represent government-led initiatives, five represent collaborations/use across a system or other group of institutions, two represent community sharing of content, and 15 represent individual institutional initiatives. Four finalists were in the research category, six in the new category, and 15 in the established category.

Several trends are reflected in the LIA finalists:

The importance of integrated learning, collaboration, and research environments.
Significant growth in the use of rich media and the need to effectively deliver and manage a proliferation of such content.
The continued desire to support easier course site authoring by faculty and students, especially in collaborative fashion.
Use of distance learning environments to supplement and improve the classroom experience by providing study aids and additional resources.
Significant new innovations in providing personalized learning through adaptive feedback on math and writing skills development enabling better college preparation.

The finalists represent many exciting applications of technology to improve teaching and learning. A small number of the finalists emphasized measurement and analytics as a mechanism for improving program or institutional performance. It is clear, however, based on the predominant focus on "tools" to enhance the delivery of education that most investments in innovation are concerning inputs as opposed to outputs. This is not to say that there is not a focus on learning outcomes represented in the finalist collection. However, the outcomes are primarily in the traditional form of assumed outcomes as opposed to measured outcomes.

The following brief summary statements describe the primary learning impact as expressed by each of the 25 finalists:

Enables easy development of online assessments from a wide range of test banks resulting in a verifiable savings in faculty time and integration costs in conjunction with greater use of assessments at the course level.
Played a pivotal role in helping an institution transform to being able to offer personalized learning to a diverse multicultural population of otherwise underserved learners and now is a model being adopted by other institutions.
Provided a critical linkage from online courses to library resources through usage of a well-understood construct - resource lists - via an easy to use system that saves time for faculty and library staff as well as addressing copyright issues.
Gives immediate feedback to students on writing skills while keeping the teacher in the loop resulting in a tremendous improvement in teacher productivity while accelerating learning.
Provided online resources across 16 regions that significantly increased interest in subject matter and also reduced the need for private tutoring with a very high adoption rate by students and teachers alike.
Provides a worldwide program for spurring innovation in teaching.
Provided a classroom capture system that enhanced student's study habits resulting in improved student success.
Enabled a very successful online learning initiative that most students across the university take advantage of and is a significant revenue generator featuring centralized support staff to ensure a variety of quality metrics and effective use of formative and satisfaction assessments.
Provides web-based resources to enable high school students to self-assess on college level Math and English skills allowing students to take control of their academic future.
One of the largest scale deployments of an enterprise platform for support of web-based learning resources and collaboration supporting some 75,000 students and featuring integration of custom features and third-party products to support teaching innovation.
Provides an online platform and curriculum for training of radiologists resulting in greater consistency of curriculum, significant savings in instructor resources, and potential for improved learner efficiency.
Provides an easy to use tool for teachers to leverage familiar PowerPoint to create online learning materials.
Provides an analytics platform integrated with the course management system that provides analysis of completion rates, user activity, course success, satisfaction and mastery of learning outcomes.
Provides a portal environment for online community development and convenient self-service access to online resources for globally distributed students and faculty.
An online environment for exchanging best practices among teachers supported by 28 ministries of education and 22 languages.
Provides open access to online courses that can be used as the basis for online courses at other institutions as well as for use by the general worldwide public of learners.
Provides online replay of captured lectures from courses serving the students of those courses as well as making the materials available to the general public.
Provides an authoring environment and distributed content management system for creation of course web sites that features ease of integration with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.
Provides an easy to use data-driven approach for developing collaborative course sites that provides more flexibility than commercial products but is still easy to use.
Provides an Online Academic Management System that facilitates the management of teaching, research and administrative affairs, supporting learner personalization, collaboration, and integrated assessment.
Provides an easy to use authoring tool that uses familiar Microsoft Word authoring and creates WYSIWYG content and assessments consistent with the suite of Common Cartridge interoperability standards.
Provides a research platform that enables researchers and developers to create distributed applications that take advantage of new technologies such as tablet PCs and wireless networks and to develop the collaborative tools and applications for classroom and distance learning applications.
Provides a reporting toolset that utilizes the online learning platform to identify at-risk students so that action can be taken.
A research project that identified how to include the teaching and learning model for a large scale online K-12/Schools segment deployment by including collaborative learning, access to auxiliary resources, and integrated assessment.
Provides a centralized cyber-infrastructure that enables academic research on managing and delivering rich media content resulting in greater incorporation of media competencies into the teaching and learning process.