News

Call for Participation: ALT-Placement Project

The Kirwan Center is seeking institutional partners from across Maryland to participate in a Kresge Foundation funded project starting in Spring 2018 that will pilot the efficacy and feasibility of replacing the high-stakes mathematics placement exam process currently in use with a process that empowers students to assess and remediate their mathematics knowledge using adaptive learning tools instead.

Advancing Postsecondary Student Success Through OER Summit

Advancing Postsecondary Student Success Through OER: A Statewide Summit on Open Educational Resources in Higher Education is a day-long summit that will be held on Dec. 8, 2017 and will bring together faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and administrators from across Maryland’s higher education institutions to explore the promise of using open educational resources (OER) to replace costly textbooks with affordable, high-quality learning materials while giving instructors the opportunity to repurpose content to meet their students’ needs.

New Designs for Learning: Games & Gamification Symposium

New Designs for Learning: Games and Gamification gathered instructional designers, faculty, and academic leaders from across the University System of Maryland to explore how games and gamification can reinvigorate courses, boost student engagement, and enhance student learning. The Symposium featured Dr. Karl Kapp as the keynote speaker, and was cosponsored by UMUC’s Center for Innovation in Learning and Student Success and USM’s Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation. 

USM Launches EdX Partnership

The University System of Maryland (USM) has entered into a groundbreaking partnership with edX, the nonprofit online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT in 2012 to increase global access to high-quality education. The agreement is designed to further increase student success, as well as the access, affordability, and quality of higher education in Maryland and around the world.

New report on whether online learning can improve college math readiness

Far too many students in the United States start their postsecondary education without being able to demonstrate the skills and knowledge deemed necessary to succeed in college-level math. Colleges and universities have traditionally dealt with this problem by placing students in full-semester developmental courses for which they must pay full tuition but do not receive college credit. It has become clear, however, that this approach has serious drawbacks, as students who start out in remediation are far less likely to attain a degree.

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