News

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.

Dr. MJ Bishop delivers keynote address at CELDA 2015 in Dublin, Ireland

(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.

New Report on the Learnings from Course Redesign at the USM

The Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation has released a new report to shed light on how institutions of higher education can make sustainable improvements in who can learn what they learn by the time they graduate. This report details thr learnings from studying a series of initiatives at the University System of Maryland (USM) to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of selected courses.  These redesigns incorporated a variety of learning-centered practices, that is, teaching practices that were chosen and applied using evidence of student learning.

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