MILLBRAE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Cerego, the essential memory management tool, was selected by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a grant finalist in The Next Generation Courseware Challenge. As an integral part of the $20 million+ challenge, Cerego will develop next-generation digital courseware designed to reach more than 1 million low-income students and disadvantaged learners in undergraduate courses by 2018.
Debuting in May 2014, The Next Generation Courseware Challenge’s mission is to rally the world’s most talented online learning teams to create “exemplary” online courseware that surpasses what is currently available to the market. The courses are then intended to meaningfully improve student learning outcomes and influence the trajectory of a student’s higher education experience by tailoring the learning experience using best-in-breed adaptive learning software, publisher content and online learning platforms.
“Students learn best when education is personalized to their needs and goals,” said Daniel Greenstein, director of Postsecondary Success at the foundation. “There is a growing body of evidence that courseware, when integrated effectively by faculty in instruction, can personalize learning at unprecedented scale potentially enabling all students — not just those who are able to attend the most elite, expensive colleges — to get the best and most effective education at a reasonable price.”
StatsPL, which stands for Statistics Personalized Learning, is Cerego’s first offering as part of the Courseware Challenge. The course will leverage Cerego’s patented memory management technology and assessment tools alongside open educational resources and partnered technology platforms. Additional courses similar to StatsPL are expected to follow in summer 2015.
“We’re starting with statistics because it’s one of the most difficult courses for at-risk learners, and because it’s often taught without the use of adaptive learning tools. We find that many students struggle with statistics because the content is typically dense and unengaging. We see a huge opportunity to draw more students into STEM programs if we can make their first experience with this course successful,” said Andrew Smith Lewis, executive chairman and co-founder of Cerego. “StatsPL, our first course out of the Challenge, will introduce a personalized, engaging learning experience that actively contextualizes statistics to help students bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world.”
Initially, StatsPL will be piloted at Columbia College (MO), and over the lifetime of the three-year grant is expected to reach over 100 colleges nationwide, with the hope of reaching 100,000 students in credit-bearing courses. Given the centrality of statistics to other disciplines, StatsPL will also be made available to students in non-statistics courses (with the goal of reaching a further 200,000 students). In total, the Courseware Challenge seeks to improve outcomes for over 1 million students nationwide over the next 36 months.
To make the new courseware a reality, Cerego has strategically partnered with technology providers who will assist with innovative course deployment, open educational resources (OER) providers, and world-renowned educators who will help make courses inspiring and engaging. Current partners involved in the StatsPL project include: OpenStax, Rice University, edX, NYU Create, BBC Worldwide Learning, the SETI Institute, Fabien Cousteau’s Ocean Learning Center, Columbia College and CUNY's Center for Advanced Study in Education.
In addition to the courseware, the grant also will cover new personnel training and support at initial pilot sites for project deployment; allocations will also be set aside to enhance the Cerego platform and to fuel content development beyond statistics.
Cerego is accompanied by six additional finalists in the Next Generation Courseware Challenge. Those companies and organizations include: Acrobatiq, CogBooks, Lumen Learning, OpenStax, Rice University, Smart Sparrow, and Stanford University.
To learn more about StatsPL, or Cerego’s Next Generation Courseware grant, please visit Cerego’s blog at http://blog.cerego.com/.
About Cerego:
Cerego is the essential memory management tool. We partner with great teachers, administrators and institutions to amplify growing minds everywhere.
Our team is comprised of experts in adaptive learning and memory science. Through our core adaptive learning platform, web application and full suite of mobile applications, we have been helping students to enrich their lives, by learning and retaining knowledge more effectively for over a decade.
Cerego is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit: http://cerego.com/