April 2024
By Avery Ruxer Franklin

OpenStax at Rice University was awarded $90 million from the National Science Foundation to build and lead SafeInsights, a groundbreaking research and development (R&D) hub for inclusive learning and education research to benefit tens of millions of students and their instructors across all educational levels.

According to project leaders at OpenStax, the world’s largest publisher of free, open education resources, R&D is a powerful tool for advancing education, but it remains difficult to conduct large-scale, reliable research that yields the strongest results for students and teachers. SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the predictors of effective learning while protecting student privacy. This five-year project represents the NSF’s largest single investment in R&D infrastructure for education at a national scale.

Through SafeInsights, the education research community will generate research-informed insights about teaching and learning for educators, institutions and learning platforms to use to create tailored programs, pedagogies and policies that will equip learners to thrive.

“Education R&D opens up opportunities to better understand how students learn in different contexts,” said Richard Baraniuk, SafeInsights leader, OpenStax director and Rice professor. “Learning is complex. Research can tackle this complexity and help get the right tools into the hands of educators and students, but to do so, we need reliable information on how students learn. Just as progress in health care research sparked stunning advances in personalized medicine, we need similar precision in education to support all students, particularly those from underrepresented and low-income backgrounds.”

View the full article by Avery Ruxer Franklin at: https://news.rice.edu/news/2024/rices-openstax-awarded-90m-lead-first-its-kind-nsf-research-hub-transformational-learning