SafeInsights brings together researchers,
educational institutions and digital learning platforms
to enable timely, impactful studies designed to overcome the
challenges faced in education
HOUSTON, April 24,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- OpenStax at Rice University was awarded $90 million
from the U.S. National Science Foundation to build and lead
SafeInsights, a groundbreaking research and development (R&D)
hub for inclusive learning and education research to benefit tens
of millions of students and their instructors across all
educational levels.
SafeInsights will enable extensive,
long-term research on the predictors of effective learning.
According to project leaders at OpenStax, the world's largest
publisher of free, open education resources, R&D is a powerful
tool for advancing education, but it remains difficult to conduct
large-scale, reliable research that yields the strongest results
for students and teachers.
SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the
predictors of effective learning while protecting student privacy.
This five-year project represents the NSF's largest single
investment in R&D infrastructure for education at a national
scale.
"We are thrilled to announce an investment of $90 million in SafeInsights, marking a
significant step forward in our commitment to advancing scientific
research in STEM education," NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said. "There is an
urgent need for research-informed strategies capable of
transforming educational systems, empowering our nation's workforce
and propelling discoveries in the science of learning. By investing
in cutting-edge infrastructure and fostering collaboration among
researchers and educators, we are paving the way for transformative
discoveries and equitable opportunities for learners across the
nation."
Funded through NSF's Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-2
(Mid-scale RI-2) program, which places it alongside other critical
infrastructure for scientific discovery such as telescopes and
supercomputers, SafeInsights is the largest research award in the
history of Rice.
SafeInsights will serve as a central hub for a multidisciplinary
team of 80 partners and collaborating institutions, including major
digital learning platforms that currently serve tens of millions of
U.S. learners. The inclusion of researchers, educators, developers
and students from diverse, representative backgrounds will be a top
priority.
"SafeInsights represents a pivotal moment for Rice University and a testament to our nation's
commitment to educational research," Rice President Reginald
DesRoches said. "It will accelerate student learning through
studies that result in more innovative, evidence-based tools and
practices."
According to national polls conducted by the Data Quality
Campaign, 86% of teachers recognize the importance of research in
effective teaching. However, the majority of teachers must
individually piece together research-informed teaching and learning
strategies, often with limited resources.
Through SafeInsights, the education research community will
generate research-informed insights about teaching and learning for
educators, institutions and learning platforms to use to create
tailored programs, pedagogies and policies that will equip learners
to thrive.
"Education R&D opens up opportunities to better understand
how students learn in different contexts," said Richard Baraniuk, SafeInsights leader, OpenStax
director and Rice professor. "Learning is complex. Research can
tackle this complexity and help get the right tools into the hands
of educators and students, but to do so, we need reliable
information on how students learn. Just as progress in health care
research sparked stunning advances in personalized medicine, we
need similar precision in education to support all students,
particularly those from underrepresented and low-income
backgrounds."
To accomplish its objectives, SafeInsights has a world-class,
experienced team with OpenStax-Rice
University, 40 partners and 39 collaborating
institutions:
- R&D partners with expertise in learning and education
research, open science, technology, student data privacy, community
engagement and project management, including: AEM Corporation,
Arizona State University (ASU), Center
for Open Science, Digital Promise, Future of Privacy Forum,
Georgia Institute of Technology,
Morehouse College, National Network of
Education Research-Practice Partnerships, Tapia Center for
Excellence and Equity in Education, TERC, The University of Chicago, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Washington University in St. Louis and Worcester Polytechnic
Institute.
- Digital learning platforms spanning all age groups, including
lead-partner OpenStax, ASSISTments, EdPlus at ASU, CourseKata,
Infinite Campus, Inc., iSTART, Quill.org, TERC's Data Arcade,
UPenn's Massive Online Open Courses and The WritingPal.
- Thought partners providing implementation guidance,
including ICPSR.
- Collaborating educational institutions, 77% of which are
minority-serving institutions.
By instrumenting large-scale digital learning platforms for
research, SafeInsights will capture a comprehensive picture of the
learning process currently unavailable to researchers, including
information from past academic experiences that can be paired with
what is known about current learning processes, said Baraniuk. For
example, a research study could reveal what strategies are most
effective for middle school students struggling with reading
comprehension in algebra to prepare them for success in high school
and college. SafeInsights makes it possible to conduct
comprehensive research studies while safeguarding privacy, added
Baraniuk. These studies can be replicated and expanded across
different platforms, enabling a deeper understanding of the
multitude of factors that influence learning outcomes, leading to
the development of more effective, evidence-based teaching methods
and tools.
"By design, SafeInsights stringently protects student privacy
through an innovative architecture that makes large-scale
information about learning available for research without revealing
that protected information to researchers," said J.P. Slavinsky,
technical director at OpenStax and executive director of
SafeInsights. Instead, researchers will develop study plans and
analysis software to operate within digital learning platforms.
This software will access learning information through secure data
enclaves to produce aggregate insights about learning. The
aggregate knowledge will undergo careful human oversight to check
that it contains no identifiable student information before being
returned to researchers, ensuring that all data remains secure
within the original platforms and educational institutions, he
said.
Prior awards from the NSF, Institute of Education Sciences
(R305N210064), individuals and philanthropic funders like the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Walton Family
Foundation, Valhalla Foundation and William & Flora Hewlett
Foundation equipped OpenStax with the experience and capacity to
lead this major R&D effort. Looking ahead, SafeInsights will
collaborate with funder networks to leverage this national R&D
infrastructure and grow its reach. To learn more about SafeInsights
and support for its future work, please visit safeinsights.org.
Watch the April 24 news
conference here.
View the SafeInsights feature video here.
About Rice
University
Located on a 300-acre forested campus
in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the
nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice
has highly respected schools of architecture, business, continuing
studies, engineering, humanities, music, natural sciences and
social sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public
Policy. With 4,574 undergraduates and 3,982 graduate students,
Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1.
Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and
lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for
lots of race/class interaction, No. 2 for best-run colleges and No.
12 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated
as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal
Finance.
About OpenStax-Rice
University
As a leading research university with a
distinctive commitment to unconventional wisdom, Rice aspires to
ignite innovative research, excellent teaching and creative
contributions to the betterment of our world. Founded in 1999 as an
initiative for the public good, OpenStax supports the Rice vision
by making an amazing education accessible for all. OpenStax
is the world's most prominent publisher of affordable, open
education resources (OER), created by world-class researchers,
technologists and educators with a passion for the science of human
learning. More information is available at openstax.org.
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