Thanks to funding they received for being a finalist in the Bill & Melinda Gates’ Next Generation Courseware Challenge, Cerego plans to develop their cutting edge statistics STEM course as a cross “between personalized learning solutions and real-life statisticians in an effort to make it much more approachable and enjoyable,” Smith Lewis said.
In an effort to make the course more engaging to students, Cerego will implement sections focusing on “statistics in action,” where students will be able to learn about concepts using examples of their choice from a host of specific topics including sports statistics, underwater exploration, and exoplanet searches, to name a few.
This tactic aims to elevate the course into a truly personalized experience, as well as a highly collaborative one, and Smith Lewis hopes it will “inspire students to notice interesting fields” in statistics that they may not have sought out beforehand.
More than merely a supplement, StatsPL is being developed to play a major role in introductory statistics courses, with features that could help lecturing teachers more easily grasp how their students are doing in the course, said the company.
So far, partners for the development of the courseware include OpenStax, edX, NYU Create, BBC Worldwide Learning, the SETI Institute, Fabien Cousteau’s OceanLearningCenter, and CUNY’s Center for Advanced Study in Education.
Cerego hopes StatsPL will be fully completed by 2018. The first beta rollout is expected as early as next fall, where the course will be piloted at schools affiliated with the Columbia College network.
If StatsPL is a success, Cerego hopes they can take what they learn from the course and make personalized learning into a generalized model that can then be applied to other 101 courses in the future.
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