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Traditional transcripts provide basic information about the courses students took: course names, dates of the course, credit earned, and grades.  What traditional transcripts don’t provide is more in-depth information on the skills students learned and their competency in these skills.  In Fall 2016, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) piloted a digital “extended transcript” to better reflect student’s progress and competency of defined learning outcomes.  UMUC is one of twelve institutions around the country to take part in a $1.27 million Lumina Foundation

Completion of college-level requirements in the mathematical sciences is one of the most common and vexing impediments to college completion rates, especially for students from lower-income families and underrepresented minorities, where high-school preparation in mathematics is often insufficient.

Twelve Maryland Public Higher Education Institutions Receive Mini-Grants to Increase the Use of Open Educational Resources

In collaboration with the University System of Maryland Student Council, the USM’s Center for Academic Innovation is exploring the feasibility of adopting open educational resources (OER).

The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) launched the first free online course under the University System of Maryland's online learning partnership with edX, a nonprofit online learning destination founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to increase global access to high-quality education.

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.

Ithaka S+R worked with five campuses in the University System of Maryland to explore whether an adaptive learning product provided by Pearson could be used to offer more accessible, lower-cost summer programs. The Pearson product, MyFoundationsLab, enhanced with Knewton’s adaptive learning engine, aims to personalize study paths for students. Adaptive technologies enable students to identify specific skill gaps and work independently online to address those gaps with interactive instructional materials and assessments.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone--not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs (CAST, 2012). UDL is included in COMAR and Maryland’s Teacher Technology Standards.

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, we have studied a series of initiatives by 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.