Partners in Ensuring Equitable Access to Math Courseware

Lumen Learning and The University of Texas at Austin’s Charles A. Dana Center are partnering to increase equitable math success for all college students. Drawing from more than three decades of research and experience, the Dana Center develops and scales effective math and science innovations to support educators, administrators, and policymakers. The Dana Center’s curriculum places an emphasis on strategies for improving student engagement, motivation, persistence, and success. Lumen will offer the Dana Center’s curriculum in a digital platform that provides students with increased opportunities for practice and feedback, and instructors with greater insight into student engagement and needs.

Lumen recognizes that today, race and income are often predictors of how students will persist in courses and is taking actionable steps to better understand and support underrepresented students. Lumen’s CEO, Kim Thanos, shares, “The Dana Center embeds principles of equity and inclusion throughout its curriculum, ensuring that learning materials truly serve the needs of diverse student populations. This aligns perfectly with Lumen’s approach to building and improving courseware for gateway courses. We value having a partner that centers equity throughout the authoring and review process, not as an afterthought.”

This partnership will bring together the Dana Center’s research-backed content with Lumen’s affordable and evidence-based technology platform to support student success in several mathematics pathway courses. Lumen will support institutions and faculty who want to explore and adopt the Dana Center curriculum. Instructors will be able to adopt the Dana Center courses in Lumen’s technology platform, Online Homework Manager (OHM). OHM offers seamless LMS integration, technical support, auto-grading, and the robust features and functionality math faculty rely on to better support their students and gain actionable student performance analytics. OHM was created by educators and provides extensive practice opportunities for students, real-time feedback and support, and is easy to adopt and implement. Additionally, at $25 per student, OHM is significantly more affordable than comparable math courseware from traditional publishers.

Across the country, faculty familiar with the Dana Center courses are eagerly awaiting access to an effective digital tool to complement the content they’re already using. “As I am preparing for another semester of classes, I am reminded why I appreciate the Dana Center’s content so much. The focus on student learning and growth is evident over and over. However, we are not able to maximize our growth without an online platform. It is like we are limping or incomplete not having immediate feedback and resources for my students. I am ready for us to have technology that will be free or inexpensive to complement the curriculum and help my students go deeper in their thinking, processing, and learning,” says Stephanie Cockrell Andrews, professor of mathematics at Lone Star College-Kingwood.

“Our curriculum has been adopted across the nation by faculty who are eager to introduce active learning and real-world applications in their classrooms, and who are impressed with our focus on conceptual understanding. They also appreciate our optional, aligned, corequisite support materials. Lumen’s Online Homework Manager will take our courses even further, by facilitating student learning through immediate feedback and providing evidence of that learning to faculty,” says Connie Richardson, the Dana Center’s Manager of Higher Ed Course Programs.

The Dana Center’s content will be integrated into Lumen’s OHM platform for the following courses:

• Foundations of Mathematical Reasoning (Beginning/Elementary Algebra)
• Quantitative Reasoning (Liberal Arts Math)
• Reasoning with Functions 1 (College Algebra with embedded Intermediate Algebra)
• Reasoning with Functions 2 (Trigonometry)
• Introductory Statistics

The Dana Center OHM courses will be available for use and adoption starting this summer.

To learn more about the partnership or inquire about these courses, please complete this form.