Efficient Education Research via the OpenStax Learning Platform

The primary focus will be to build the Labs infrastructure from the ground up over the 5-year period. To this end, the team will proactively recruit relevant stakeholders (researchers with different areas of focus, students and instructors from diverse and underrepresented groups, privacy experts, digital ethicists, human-computer interaction and user experience specialists, and software engineers) to inform design decisions and the Labs research agenda. The team will simultaneously collaborate with the Network teams to learn from, share knowledge with, and foster community in this education and learning science research-practice space.

In Year 1, the team will develop Labs Alpha, the initial version of Labs that will enable researchers to develop their own studies and recruit participants via OpenStax products and institutional partners. Researchers on the team will deploy validation studies in the pretest-to-intervention-to-posttest format, administer measures of individual differences, and assess the privacy and FEAT controls. In Years 2 and 3, the team will develop Labs Beta, an enhanced version that securely connects participants' data on Labs with their data on other OpenStax digital learning products. Researchers will be able to control against individual factors that can be estimated from prior learner data instead of needing to conduct pretests and analyze long-term outcomes in their studies using future learner data in addition to immediate posttests. In Years 4 and 5, the team will deploy the final scaled-up Labs and open it up to a broad researcher community.

OpenStax Labs will be a lightweight research infrastructure that will support a wide range of large-scale learning science studies (that go far beyond mere tweaking of existing functionality of an ed-tech platform) that integrate within the authentic learning workflows of students. First, Labs will enable researchers to recruit students directly from OpenStax users (4.8 million students at 62 percent of all U.S. degree-granting institutions) and 21 partnering institutions reaching 417,000 students, resulting in studies at unprecedented scale and participant diversity. Second, Labs will support a wide range of large-scale learning science studies that are integrated within the authentic learning workflows of students, going far beyond mere tweaking of existing functionality of an ed-tech platform. Third, Labs will protect user privacy and promote fairness, equity, accountability, and transparency by design. Labs will benefit - and benefit from - the millions of students using OpenStax through the integration of new digital learning technology that improves learning outcomes through a rapid research-and-deployment cycle. In the long run, Labs will also broaden the participation of researchers, supporting stakeholders with different levels of expertise (e.g., teachers and administrators) to conduct research on digital learning.