Evaluation of the Next Generation Courseware Challenge

SRI evaluated NGC projects funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to understand the technology features and implementation practices that achieve positive educational impacts at scale.

The Next Generation Courseware Challenge (NGC) was launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop personalized courseware to improve learning outcomes and postsecondary success, particularly for students from low-income backgrounds and other underserved students. To meet the ambitious social mission of improving outcomes for these student populations, colleges and universities must improve undergraduate teaching and learning using evidence-driven practice. The foundation funded seven organizations developing and disseminating courseware for high-enrollment, lower-division undergraduate courses: Acrobatiq, Cerego, CogBooks, Lumen Learning, Rice University OpenStax, SmartSparrow, and Stanford University.

SRI Education contributed to the success of the NGC initiative by serving as a highly credible and independent evaluation partner. SRI provided the seven grantees with research and evaluation technical assistance in documenting their plans for implementation and coaching on how to capture valid, reliable data on the effectiveness and scale of implementation. Additionally, SRI collected independent data from a sample of participating institutions and performed its own analysis of the student-level data generated by the seven NGC grantees’ impact studies. By synthesizing the lessons learned across the portfolio of projects, SRI helped to understand the technology features and implementation practices that achieve positive educational impacts at scale and inform future foundation investments.

Principal Investigator: Barbara Means