2018 Learning Impact Awards
Medalist Profiles
Below are the project profiles for the eight medal winners in the 2018 Learning Impact Awards (LIA) competition. View the list of all 26 finalists.
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Blackboard Ally
“Blackboard Ally will help me ensure that my courses are as accessible as possible for my students, save me time, and most importantly help faculty at GVSU to focus on improving student success.”
—Cheryl Kautz, of Grand Valley State University (Source: 2018 LIA Paper)
—Cheryl Kautz, of Grand Valley State University (Source: 2018 LIA Paper)
Learning Impact Trend: Educational Accessibility & Personalization
Issue: Inaccessible course content poses barriers to student success, but institutions and instructors may lack the awareness, resources, and skills to fix content accessibility issues.
Blackboard’s Ally helps institutions support Universal Design for Learning by representing learning content in multiple modalities through the alternative formats including Semantic HTML, Audio, ePub, and Electronic Braille. It automatically scans course materials for accessibility issues, assigns an accessibility score to each content item, and provides detailed feedback and guidance to instructors on how to improve their course’s accessibility. In addition, Ally provides an institution-wide course content accessibility report to help institutions prioritize where to focus, design improved support structures for content remediation, and monitor progress over time. Ally works via LMS integration with 1EdTech LTI and Caliper.
Learning Impact: Blackboard Ally has checked 135m content items in 5.5m courses.
Georgia Virtual Total Learning Architecture
“This is actually one of the most costly and vexing challenges for looking to transition to digital materials…[CASE’s] machine-readable form with unique reference identifiers can be managed and automatically updated assuring everyone uses the same current references."
—Richard Woods, State School Superintendent of Georgia (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
—Richard Woods, State School Superintendent of Georgia (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
Learning Impact Trend: Education Pathways, Portfolios, & Learning Maps
Issue: There is a general, industry-wide need for an open, trusted, consistent, addressable URI and standard, machine-readable format for learning standards and frameworks, that all can freely use to organize, discover, and display learning objects and performance results.
Traditionally, states and other education agencies publish their academic standards and competency frameworks as human-readable documents that must be manipulated to be used by learning technology tools; thus making it hard to track modifications. GaDOE is the first state to publish its academic standards in the 1EdTech Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) format via the OpenSalt open source tool, and can now demonstrate learning content and performance tasks tagged to CASE GUIDs to enable personalized, competency-based learning using content from multiple OER sources in any LTI compliant LMS.
Learning Impact: Until now, standards for learning technology interoperability have not had the benefit of industry support for machine-readable, linked data formats of competency frameworks. The 1EdTech CASE standard addresses this gap. PCG, GaDOE, and 1EdTech are expanding this capability, developing a 50-State CASE Registry to link K-12 academic standards in each state with each other.
Supporting the Selection of Quality Digital Resources: HISD App Toolbox
“I think it is an excellent tool. It saves time and it helps you. You are not taking all the time and effort to look or do research. Somebody else is doing the work for you.”
—Ruth Morales, Houston Independent School District Technology Teacher (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
—Ruth Morales, Houston Independent School District Technology Teacher (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
Learning Impact Trend: Digital Resources, e-Text & Learning App Innovation
Issue: Teachers needed a tool to quickly decipher and select quality digital tools and resources for their students to use in the classroom—outside of the district-endorsed/adopted curriculum, while Houston Independent School District (HISD) needed a solution that improved access to quality learning resources, and provided greater convenience for teachers, parents, and students.
Houston Independent School District’s App Toolbox is a 24/7 accessible, searchable, vetting app solution of hundreds of digital resources—including adopted instructional materials, resource collections, third-party materials, and OERs—to help teachers, administrators, students, and parents determine which digital resources serve their instructional purpose; are appropriate for multiple-age audiences; and adhere to the district’s privacy, safety, and security requirements. Its data analysis tools enable the district to evaluate each digital resource's utilization and effectiveness and provide district leaders with targeted usage for curriculum design and topics. HISD’s App Toolbox ensures that teachers and students have equal access to the district’s approved digital resources.
Learning Impact: Today, the App Toolbox is available to the district’s 12,000 educators and other educators beyond the school district. Utilizing it ensures that teachers and students are accessing resources that adhere to the district’s privacy, safety, and security requirements and contain content that is appropriate for classroom use.
Developing Learners' Soft Skills With Bongo
“I think Bongo makes communications superior in a number of regards…[Students] like to report on something themselves and get feedback from one another. A lot of people who normally don’t interact in class will interact on the platform. It creates an engaging communicative environment.”
—Pete Cardon, University of Southern California (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
Learning Impact Trend: Student Success & Outcomes-Based Learning Support
Issue: According to the Job Outlook 2018 survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, organizations seek candidates with soft skills—communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills more than all other attributes, but there is a significant gap between what skills recent graduates think they have and what organizations believe they are proficient in.
It can be difficult for learners to develop soft skills with a paper-based assessment. Bongo uses a scalable, proprietary video and feedback technology to develop soft skills. Bongo’s video workflows provide soft-skill focused experiential exercises that prepare learners for real-world situations like mock interviews and skill demonstrations. Learners create videos on any device, anywhere; instructors and class peers deliver personalized, time-stamped feedback via text or video. Bongo stores all user-generated videos within the platform, creating a portfolio of student improvement over time.
Learning Impact: Instead of using face-to-face methods to develop learners’ soft skills, instructors save time, money, and other resources by leveraging Bongo’s proprietary video and feedback technology to accomplish this at scale
TAO Assessment Platform in New York City DOE
“TAO is a reliable alternative offered by traditional assessment vendors in the market. Our experience with TAO has broadened our options for digital assessments in the market in the future.”
—G. Anthony Benners, Ph.D., Senior Director, New York City Department of Education (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
Learning Impact Trend: Assessment Enhancement with Digital Technology
Issue: New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) is the largest school district in the U.S., serving 1.1 million students in over 1,800 schools. Because NYCDOE offers a variety of programs to support different educational needs it required a tool to handle its varied assessment needs.
NYCDOE adopted TAO, a free open source platform, because of its scalability, ease-of-use, multiple languages support, and range of interactive assessment options. For example, its Gifted & Talented program placement test involved a series of non-verbal digital questions, where students interacted with puzzle pieces. NYCDOE’s Languages Other than English (LOTE) exams contain speaking, listening, reading, and writing components. It’s difficult to schedule native-speaker teachers for the listening sessions and manage a large amount of paper-based testing materials. TAO’s ability to support multimedia enabled NYCDOE to streamline the listening component of the exam with audio recordings, which eliminated the need to have native speakers onsite. The use of TAO made the administration process smoother and easier, and the students actually preferred taking their test online.
Learning Impact: TAO made it possible to develop innovative test items with ease, and its standards compliance ensured compatibility with other systems. NYCDOE plans to continue leveraging TAO, to broaden their options for more digital assessment programs in the future.
Maplesoft Online Learning Courseware at University of Waterloo
“We have lots of empirical evidence students learn better when they answer questions. Now we have the ability to ask a mathematically sophisticated question, receive a sophisticated answer, grade it, and provide feedback automatically to the students.”
—Stephen Furino, Assistant Dean for Online Studies, Mathematics Faculty, University of Waterloo (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
Learning Impact Trend: Evolution to Next Generation Learning Environments
Issue: Creating effective online education for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses.
Möbius is Maplesoft’s online courseware system designed to meet STEM courses’ specialized requirements. STEM authoring tools create lessons and exercises that enable students to interact with the course content; explore important concepts using interactive applications, visualize problems and solutions; and test their understanding by answering questions that are graded instantly. In addition, Möbius offers other online learning benefits—anywhere/anytime access, textbook replacement with digital content—increasing student access and affordability to the University’s STEM online courses.
Learning Impact: While Möbius has not been in use long enough to draw statistically significant conclusions, available data and anecdotal evidence are very positive. For example, at the University of Waterloo, Möbius use coincides with the best performance by calculus students in more than ten years, with improvements in averages, pass rates, and withdrawal rates.
Using LMS Interoperability to Power and Drive Student-Centered Learning
“The Wayne Learning Hub is integral to their endeavor to provide equitable and efficient access to top-quality content. With the itslearning library powering its initiative, they can provide a personalized learning experience that engages and inspires and engages all students even after the bell rings.” (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
Learning Impact Trend: Evolution to Next Generation Learning Environments
Issue: Provide equitable and efficient access to top quality digital content while giving students the autonomy to make decisions about their learning.
‘Voice and Choice’ is a central tenant of Wayne Township’s student-centered classrooms, and the Wayne Learning Hub, created in 2016, provides equitable and efficient access to digital content and gives student autonomy and ownership over their learning. It leverages the itslearning learning management system’s interoperability and the vendor’s repository of digital content. Benefits include 24/7 accessibility, single sign-on, curated resources in a centralized learning repository, digital community, safe collaborative learning spaces, built-in individualized learning paths, and readily available access for all students wherever they are.
Learning Impact: Not only does the Wayne Learning Hub supports the student-centric learning’s academic objectives, but enabled the Township to save money by sunsetting legacy tools that siphon money from instructional materials allotment budgets while adding OER content.
IM Road Safety Savvy
“All the traffic police officers were able to administer and conduct VR lessons for students with relative ease, and noted that the students were well-engaged in the session, enjoyed the experience, and had good recall of the lessons taught.” (Source: 2018 LIA Video)
Learning Impact Trend: Gaming, Simulation & Immersive Learning
Issue: Teaching road safety to school age children in an engaging, scalable, and safe learning environment.
‘IM Road Safety Savvy’ uses immersive and interactive virtual reality (VR) technology to teach students road safety skills in a risk-free, safe, and controlled environment. The program covers common and potentially dangerous road situations in 360-degree VR videos and includes an interactive VR game with four scenarios that allow students to recall what they have learned and practice critical decision-making skills. The ‘IM Road Safety Savvy’ VR application works with multiple devices and includes a centralized dashboard that can control up to 50 VR devices, guiding the students through the various scenarios concurrently.
Learning Impact: Approximately 400 to 600 students go through the Road Safety VR experience on a weekly basis, meaning that at least 21,000 students have benefited from increased retention and deeper understanding of road safety on a yearly basis.
