Seven courseware developers are winning finalists for $20 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for online courseware that helps low-income students in 100- and 200-level college courses with large enrollments.
The goal is to develop courseware that is better than the current options on the market — by quality, price, ability to scale, and adaptability — and to boost the success of more than one million low-income students by 2018.
The Gates Foundation initially asked more than 100 developers for proposals in May, and 51 applications were received — including multiple applications from some groups. In July, the pool of candidates for funding was narrowed to 17 organizations. The projects that win funding will agree to a three-year design, development, and implementation period, including third-party evaluations to measure the impact on students and a broad sharing of lessons learned.
So who are the finalists vying for Gates funding?
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Open Learning Initiative
The Open Learning Initiative at Stanford University is headed by Candace Thille, who moved from the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative last year. Just like the Carnegie Mellon version, the Stanford OLI is grant-supported and pledges to offer online courses to anyone who wants to learn from them or teach them. OLI is housed in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and its online courses and materials are shared openly, designed to support students who don’t have an instructor. It also has a goal of developing a community where the courses can be improved with the help of continuous evaluation.
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