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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.

The Maryland Open Source Textbook (M.O.S.T.) initiative is seeking proposals for a new High-impact OER Mini-Grant program to strategically support Maryland public institutions’ efforts to adopt/adapt Open Educational Resources (OERs) or scale OER adoption.  Learn more about how to apply.

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. 

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.

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.

The survey conducted by the Kirwan Center on directors of academic-technology centers at 163 colleges and universities is featured in an new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education

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(Adelphi, Md., Oct. 26, 2015) – William E. Kirwan Center Director MJ Bishop set the direction for the 12th annual International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age, revisiting instructional message design’s objectivist learning theory and transmission-oriented communication theory foundations, discussing current trends and issues being raised in the literature, and exploring ways the field might continue to serve as a “linking science” between learning theory and instructional practice. In her keynote address, Dr.