Can digital courseware improve education?

Barbara Means and Vanessa Peters, Agenda, April 1, 2015

As the Postsecondary Success strategy enters its fifth year of personalized learning investments, it is a good time to take stock of what has been learned and to draw implications for future investments. A new report by SRI International (SRI), commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, provides lessons learned from the foundation’s investments in digital courseware over the last five years.
Based on the investments reviewed for this report, it’s clear the foundation strives to produce insights that can shape future investments and uses of technology to enhance student success and higher education affordability. Although there was an overall positive impact of foundation-funded courseware projects on course completion rates, the challenge of reliably achieving positive outcomes at scale remains a major issue. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Pathways Project was the only project that had a positive effect of consequential magnitude. The Pathways project provides insights into what it takes to achieve consistently positive outcomes, but further work is needed to find ways to do so at lower cost to enable faster scaling.

http://www.flexlearnstrategies.net/2015/04/02/can-digital-courseware-improve-education/