Giving Compass' Take:

• Carnegie Mellon University announced that it will give away digital learning software tools to build on the practice of learning engineering in science classes across higher education. 

• What are the benefits of learning engineering and how will it impact higher education courses? 

• Read more about this powerful education model. 

In an unusual move intended to shake up how college teaching is done around the world, Carnegie Mellon University today announced that it will give away dozens of the digital-learning software tools it has built over more than a decade—and make their underlying code available for anyone to see and modify.

Among the software slated to be released under an open-source license is the university’s pioneering adaptive-learning project, the Open Learning Initiative, as well as a learning analytics platform LearnSphere. Officials estimate that developing the software has cost more than $100 million in foundation grants and university dollars.

The goal of the software giveaway is to jump-start “learning engineering,” the practice of applying findings from learning science to college classrooms.

If it takes off, the effort could result in a free, open-source alternative to a growing number of commercial adaptive-learning and learning analytics tools aimed at colleges. One of the biggest concerns by college leaders about buying such tools from commercial vendors is whether colleges will have access to the underlying algorithmic logic—or whether the systems will be a “black box.”

“What we’re seeing is once something gets pushed out into the market, often the things that made it very, very effective aren’t the things that make it sell,” he says. And when software companies make changes that lead to greater sales, he adds, “often you’re compromising the thing that made the innovation effective in the first place.”

He says the hope is that by running Open Learning Initiative software and other teaching tools as open-source projects developed by universities, they can “keep things rooted in the research that’s driving its effectiveness.”

Read the full article about providing colleges with learning engineering software by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge.