Leader in online learning to join GSE faculty

Since long before the advent of massive open online courses, Candace Thille's project to fuse learning science with open educational delivery, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, has been heralded as one of higher education's most significant and promising developments.

Friday, Thille essentially launched stage two of her research-based effort to expand the reach and improve the quality of technology-enabled education, with word that she (and at least part of her Open Learning Initiative) would move to Stanford University.

Thille and Stanford officials alike believe that by merging her experience in building high-quality, data-driven, open online courses with Stanford's expertise in research on teaching and learning – notably its focus on how different types of students learn in differing environments – the university can become a center of research and practice in the efficacy of digital education.

“The opportunity to get someone like Candace is just thrilling to us,” says Claude Steele, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, where Thille will have her first-ever faculty appointment. “She will complement the strengths we have in studying the effect of context in learning and research on the role of technology in education, and can tie a lot of these things together. She can help us transform what would otherwise be independent, somewhat fragmented efforts into systematic improvement of this kind of pedagogy.”

Some aspects of Thille’s West Coast move remain unclear. Still to be fully resolved are which members of the Open Learning Initiative team, and which of its grants, will remain at Carnegie Mellon and which will shift with her to Stanford. Negotiations are continuing, and officials at the two institutions say they will collaborate and complement each other more than compete.

“It’s kind of like when you graduate a Ph.D. student who you’ve watched develop – you have to be okay with letting them go,” says Mark Kamlet, provost at Carnegie Mellon. “We view her as an emissary of our view of the importance of science of learning, about thinking how to improve education, and we view this as another institution making a statement about the importance of that way of looking at things. And not just any other institution, but Stanford.”

To read the entire story on the Inside Higher Ed website, please visit www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/28/candace-thille-moves-stanford#ixzz2UcC5Npsk.