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How technology is shaping learning in higher education

About the authors.

This article is a collaborative effort by Claudio Brasca, Charag Krishnan , Varun Marya , Katie Owen, Joshua Sirois, and Shyla Ziade, representing views from McKinsey’s Education Practice.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a shift to remote learning overnight for most higher-education students, starting in the spring of 2020. To complement video lectures and engage students in the virtual classroom, educators adopted technologies that enabled more interactivity and hybrid models of online and in-person activities. These tools changed learning, teaching, and assessment in ways that may persist after the pandemic. Investors have taken note. Edtech start-ups raised record amounts of venture capital in 2020 and 2021, and market valuations for bigger players soared.

A study conducted by McKinsey in 2021 found that to engage most effectively with students, higher-education institutions can focus on eight dimensions  of the learning experience. In this article, we describe the findings of a study of the learning technologies that can enable aspects of several of those eight dimensions (see sidebar “Eight dimensions of the online learning experience”).

Eight dimensions of the online learning experience

Leading online higher-education institutions focus on eight key dimensions of the learning experience across three overarching principles.

Seamless journey

Clear education road map: “My online program provides a road map to achieve my life goals and helps me structure my day to day to achieve steady progress.”

Seamless connections: “I have one-click access to classes and learning resources in the virtual learning platform through my laptop or my phone.”

Engaging teaching approach

Range of learning formats: “My program offers a menu of engaging courses with both self-guided and real-time classes, and lots of interaction with instructors and peers.”

Captivating experiences: “I learn from the best professors and experts. My classes are high quality, with up-to-date content.”

Adaptive learning: “I access a personalized platform that helps me practice exercises and exams and gives immediate feedback without having to wait for the course teacher.”

Real-world skills application: “My online program helps me get hands-on practice using exciting virtual tools to solve real-world problems.”

Caring network

Timely support: “I am not alone in my learning journey and have adequate 24/7 support for academic and nonacademic issues.”

Strong community: “I feel part of an academic community and I’m able to make friends online.”

In November 2021, McKinsey surveyed 600 faculty members and 800 students from public and private nonprofit colleges and universities in the United States, including minority-serving institutions, about the use and impact of eight different classroom learning technologies (Exhibit 1). (For more on the learning technologies analyzed in this research, see sidebar “Descriptions of the eight learning technologies.”) To supplement the survey, we interviewed industry experts and higher-education professionals who make decisions about classroom technology use. We discovered which learning tools and approaches have seen the highest uptake, how students and educators view them, the barriers to higher adoption, how institutions have successfully adopted innovative technologies, and the notable impacts on learning (for details about our methodology, see sidebar “About the research”).

Double-digit growth in adoption and positive perceptions

Descriptions of the eight learning technologies.

• Classroom interactions: These are software platforms that allow students to ask questions, make comments, respond to polls, and attend breakout discussions in real time, among other features. They are downloadable and accessible from phones, computers, and tablets, relevant to all subject areas, and useful for remote and in-person learning.
• Classroom exercises: These platforms gamify learning with fun, low-stakes competitions, pose problems to solve during online classes, allow students to challenge peers to quizzes, and promote engagement with badges and awards. They are relevant to all subject areas.
• Connectivity and community building: A broad range of informal, opt-in tools, these allow students to engage with one another and instructors and participate in the learning community. They also include apps that give students 24/7 asynchronous access to lectures, expanded course materials, and notes with enhanced search and retrieval functionality.
• Group work: These tools let students collaborate in and out of class via breakout/study rooms, group preparation for exams and quizzes, and streamlined file sharing.
• Augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR): Interactive simulations immerse learners in course content, such as advanced lab simulations for hard sciences, medical simulations for nursing, and virtual exhibit tours for the liberal arts. AR can be offered with proprietary software on most mobile or laptop devices. VR requires special headsets, proprietary software, and adequate classroom space for simultaneous use.
• AI adaptive course delivery: Cloud-based, AI-powered software adapts course content to a student’s knowledge level and abilities. These are fully customizable by instructors and available in many subject areas, including business, humanities, and sciences.
• Machine learning–powered teaching assistants: Also known as chatbot programs, machine learning–powered teaching assistants answer student questions and explain course content outside of class. These can auto-create, deliver, and grade assignments and exams, saving instructors’ time; they are downloadable from mobile app stores and can be accessed on personal devices.
• Student progress monitoring: These tools let instructors monitor academic progress, content mastery, and engagement. Custom alerts and reports identify at-risk learners and help instructors tailor the content or their teaching style for greater effectiveness. This capability is often included with subscriptions to adaptive learning platforms.

Survey respondents reported a 19 percent average increase in overall use of these learning technologies since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Technologies that enable connectivity and community building, such as social media–inspired discussion platforms and virtual study groups, saw the biggest uptick in use—49 percent—followed by group work tools, which grew by 29 percent (Exhibit 2). These technologies likely fill the void left by the lack of in-person experiences more effectively than individual-focused learning tools such as augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR). Classroom interaction technologies such as real-time chatting, polling, and breakout room discussions were the most widely used tools before the pandemic and remain so; 67 percent of survey respondents said they currently use these tools in the classroom.

About the research

In November 2021, McKinsey surveyed 634 faculty members and 818 students from public, private, and minority-serving colleges and universities over a ten-day period. The survey included only students and faculty who had some remote- or online-learning experience with any of the eight featured technologies. Respondents were 63 percent female, 35 percent male, and 2 percent other gender identities; 69 percent White, 18 percent Black or African American, 8 percent Asian, and 4 percent other ethnicities; and represented every US region. The survey asked respondents about their:

• experiences with technology in the classroom pre-COVID-19;
• experiences with technology in the classroom since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic; and
• desire for future learning experiences in relation to technology.

The shift to more interactive and diverse learning models will likely continue. One industry expert told us, “The pandemic pushed the need for a new learning experience online. It recentered institutions to think about how they’ll teach moving forward and has brought synchronous and hybrid learning into focus.” Consequently, many US colleges and universities are actively investing to scale up their online and hybrid program offerings .

Differences in adoption by type of institution observed in the research

• Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges and universities made the most use of classroom interactions and group work tools (55 percent) and the least use of tools for monitoring student progress (15 percent).
• Private institutions used classroom interaction technologies (84 percent) more than public institutions (63 percent).
• Public institutions, often associated with larger student populations and course sizes, employed group work and connectivity and community-building tools more often than private institutions.
• The use of AI teaching-assistant technologies increased significantly more at public institutions (30 percent) than at private institutions (9 percent), though overall usage remained comparatively higher at private institutions.
• The use of tools for monitoring student progress increased by 14 percent at private institutions, versus no growth at public institutions.

Some technologies lag behind in adoption. Tools enabling student progress monitoring, AR/VR, machine learning–powered teaching assistants (TAs), AI adaptive course delivery, and classroom exercises are currently used by less than half of survey respondents. Anecdotal evidence suggests that technologies such as AR/VR require a substantial investment in equipment and may be difficult to use at scale in classes with high enrollment. Our survey also revealed utilization disparities based on size. Small public institutions use machine learning–powered TAs, AR/VR, and technologies for monitoring student progress at double or more the rates of medium and large public institutions, perhaps because smaller, specialized schools can make more targeted and cost-effective investments. We also found that medium and large public institutions made greater use of connectivity and community-building tools than small public institutions (57 to 59 percent compared with 45 percent, respectively). Although the uptake of AI-powered tools was slower, higher-education experts we interviewed predict their use will increase; they allow faculty to tailor courses to each student’s progress, reduce their workload, and improve student engagement at scale (see sidebar “Differences in adoption by type of institution observed in the research”).

While many colleges and universities are interested in using more technologies to support student learning, the top three barriers indicated are lack of awareness, inadequate deployment capabilities, and cost (Exhibit 3).

Students want entertaining and efficient tools

More than 60 percent of students said that all the classroom learning technologies they’ve used since COVID-19 began had improved their learning and grades (Exhibit 4). However, two technologies earned higher marks than the rest for boosting academic performance: 80 percent of students cited classroom exercises, and 71 percent cited machine learning–powered teaching assistants.

Although AR/VR is not yet widely used, 37 percent of students said they are “most excited” about its potential in the classroom. While 88 percent of students believe AR/VR will make learning more entertaining, just 5 percent said they think it will improve their ability to learn or master content (Exhibit 5). Industry experts confirmed that while there is significant enthusiasm for AR/VR, its ability to improve learning outcomes is uncertain. Some data look promising. For example, in a recent pilot study, 1 “Immersive biology in the Alien Zoo: A Dreamscape Learn software product,” Dreamscape Learn, accessed October 2021. students who used a VR tool to complete coursework for an introductory biology class improved their subject mastery by an average of two letter grades.

Faculty embrace new tools but would benefit from more technical support and training

Faculty gave learning tools even higher marks than students did, for ease of use, engagement, access to course resources, and instructor connectivity. They also expressed greater excitement than students did for the future use of technologies. For example, while more than 30 percent of students expressed excitement for AR/VR and classroom interactions, more than 60 percent of faculty were excited about those, as well as machine learning–powered teaching assistants and AI adaptive technology.

Eighty-one percent or more of faculty said they feel the eight learning technology tools are a good investment of time and effort relative to the value they provide (Exhibit 6). Expert interviews suggest that employing learning technologies can be a strain on faculty members, but those we surveyed said this strain is worthwhile.

While faculty surveyed were enthusiastic about new technologies, experts we interviewed stressed some underlying challenges. For example, digital-literacy gaps have been more pronounced since the pandemic because it forced the near-universal adoption of some technology solutions, deepening a divide that was unnoticed when adoption was sporadic. More tech-savvy instructors are comfortable with interaction-engagement-focused solutions, while staff who are less familiar with these tools prefer content display and delivery-focused technologies.

According to experts we interviewed, learning new tools and features can bring on general fatigue. An associate vice president of e-learning at one university told us that faculty there found designing and executing a pilot study of VR for a computer science class difficult. “It’s a completely new way of instruction. . . . I imagine that the faculty using it now will not use it again in the spring.” Technical support and training help. A chief academic officer of e-learning who oversaw the introduction of virtual simulations for nursing and radiography students said that faculty holdouts were permitted to opt out but not to delay the program. “We structured it in a ‘we’re doing this together’ way. People who didn’t want to do it left, but we got a lot of support from vendors and training, which made it easy to implement simulations.”

Reimagining higher education in the United States

Takeaways from our research.

Despite the growing pains of digitizing the classroom learning experience, faculty and students believe there is a lot more they can gain. Faculty members are optimistic about the benefits, and students expect learning to stay entertaining and efficient. While adoption levels saw double-digit growth during the pandemic, many classrooms have yet to experience all the technologies. For institutions considering the investment, or those that have already started, there are several takeaways to keep in mind.

• It’s important for administration leaders, IT, and faculty to agree on what they want to accomplish by using a particular learning technology. Case studies and expert interviews suggest institutions that seek alignment from all their stakeholders before implementing new technologies are more successful. Is the primary objective student engagement and motivation? Better academic performance? Faculty satisfaction and retention? Once objectives are set, IT staff and faculty can collaborate more effectively in choosing the best technology and initiating programs.
• Factor in student access to technology before deployment. As education technology use grows, the digital divide for students puts access to education at risk. While all the institution types we surveyed use learning technologies in the classroom, they do so to varying degrees. For example, 55 percent of respondents from historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and universities use classroom interaction tools. This is lower than public institutions’ overall utilization rate of 64 percent and private institutions’ utilization rate of 84 percent. Similarly, 15 percent of respondents from historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and universities use tools for monitoring student progress, while the overall utilization rate for both public and private institutions is 25 percent.
• High-quality support eases adoption for students and faculty. Institutions that have successfully deployed new learning technologies provided technical support and training for students and guidance for faculty on how to adapt their course content and delivery. For example, institutions could include self-service resources, standardize tools for adoption, or provide stipend opportunities for faculty who attend technical training courses. One chief academic officer told us, “The adoption of platforms at the individual faculty level can be very difficult. Ease of use is still very dependent upon your IT support representative and how they will go to bat to support you.”
• Agree on impact metrics and start measuring in advance of deployment. Higher-education institutions often don’t have the means to measure the impact of their investment in learning technologies, yet it’s essential for maximizing returns. Attributing student outcomes to a specific technology can be complex due to the number of variables involved in academic performance. However, prior to investing in learning technologies, the institution and its faculty members can align on a core set of metrics to quantify and measure their impact. One approach is to measure a broad set of success indicators, such as tool usage, user satisfaction, letter grades, and DFW rates (the percentage of students who receive a D, F, or Withdraw) each term. The success indicators can then be correlated by modality—online versus hybrid versus in-class—to determine the impact of specific tools. Some universities have offered faculty grants of up to $20,000 for running pilot programs that assess whether tools are achieving high-priority objectives. “If implemented properly, at the right place, and with the right buy-in, education technology solutions are absolutely valuable and have a clear ROI,” a senior vice president of academic affairs and chief technology officer told us.

In an earlier article , we looked at the broader changes in higher education that have been prompted by the pandemic. But perhaps none has advanced as quickly as the adoption of digital learning tools. Faculty and students see substantial benefits, and adoption rates are a long way from saturation, so we can expect uptake to continue. Institutions that want to know how they stand in learning tech adoption can measure their rates and benchmark them against the averages in this article and use those comparisons to help them decide where they want to catch up or get ahead.

Claudio Brasca is a partner in McKinsey’s Bay Area office, where Varun Marya is a senior partner; Charag Krishnan is a partner in the New Jersey office; Katie Owen is an associate partner in the St. Louis office, where Joshua Sirois is a consultant; and Shyla Ziade is a consultant in the Denver office.

The authors wish to thank Paul Kim, chief technology officer and associate dean at Stanford School of Education, and Ryan Golden for their contributions to this article.

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Macmillan New Ventures Acquires Sapling Learning

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NEW YORK , November 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Macmillan adds STEM interactive homework and learning solution to portfolio.

Macmillan New Ventures , a technology innovation division of Macmillan Publishers, Ltd., today announced the acquisition of Sapling Learning , a leading provider of interactive homework and learning software for the higher education and high school in the areas of science, economics and other STEM disciplines. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Macmillan will preserve Sapling Learning's headquarters in Austin, Texas and expand the existing team of 96 employees. Moving forward, Macmillan will provide Sapling support to scale operations, and investment to extend into new disciplines.

"Sapling Learning has developed a powerful learning solution based on instructional assessment and student progress monitoring that results in improved learning and retention," said Troy Williams , president of Macmillan New Ventures. "Macmillan New Ventures' mission is to find and accelerate proven technology solutions in education that are making a real difference in the core mission of the educational endeavor - helping students learn more and learn faster. Sapling has a product that demonstrably increases student achievement in contrast to a lot of what we see in edtech - companies with attractive features and software but no clear data that student outcomes are improving."

Over 800 schools and universities have adopted Sapling's online interactive homework and instruction system.  Sapling has experienced explosive growth, tripling sales last year, and is on target for similar growth this year. Part of the reason for Sapling's dramatic growth is the fact that a number of peer-reviewed studies have shown that students who use its interactive homework solution experience from one-half to more than a full letter grade in performance improvement.

"Macmillan New Ventures has been extremely supportive of our technology, vision and our team. We're proud to join Macmillan and be a part of continuing their tradition of delivering excellent learning experiences," said Dr. James W. Caras , Sapling Learning Founder and CEO. "The students have always come first and with Macmillan supporting our brand we can reach new students at a scale that wasn't possible before. For example, one of our core features is that we are textbook-agnostic; Macmillan New Ventures will continue to support and help us grow our efforts with other publishers, as they have with their other portfolio companies that also work with non-Macmillan content providers."

Sapling is the second acquisition by Macmillan New Ventures in the past six months, adding to a strong portfolio of proven, innovative education technology companies. In May, Macmillan New Ventures acquired EBI MAP-works , a leading student success and retention platform. Sapling also joins i>clicker , a leading student response system, and PrepU , an adaptive learning platform, in the Macmillan New Ventures portfolio.

Macmillan New Ventures' acquisitions are part of a broader investment in start-up business at Macmillan Publishers, Ltd., one of the largest and best-known international publishing groups in the world and part of the privately owned media group, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH. Under CEO Annette Thomas's direction, it's science, academic and education group has invested in three innovation divisions over the past two years: Digital Science, which specializes in providing software solutions for scientists; Digital Education, which invests into and builds consumer-focused educational services, and Macmillan New Ventures.

Macmillan's more established businesses - Macmillan Education, Palgrave, Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Higher Education - have all built strong brands and an enviable track record for editorial excellence by taking a content-led, technology enabled approach. It is the fusion of the disruptive technology start-up businesses with the editorially rich established players that enables Macmillan to evolve its overall business and fuel quicker access to new markets and new opportunities.

About Macmillan New Ventures

Macmillan New Ventures discovers and develops innovative and proven technologies and new products that drive learning outcomes and engagement. Part of global media company Macmillan, the New Ventures division pushes the boundaries of where, when and how learning happens - teacher to student; student to teacher; and peer to peer. For more information, visit http://www.macmillannewventures.com .

About Sapling Learning

Sapling Learning is a leading interactive homework and assessment software for high school and higher education sciences. Founded in 2004, Sapling Learning focuses on providing students with rich, discipline specific interactions to promote engagement and comprehension in challenging problem-solving disciplines such as chemistry, physics, biology, engineering, and economics. Sapling Learning is the only solution that provides seamless integration of rich learning elements for both creating and learning scientific material. For more information, visit http://www.saplinglearning.com .

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Created and supported by educators, sapling learning’s online homework drives student success and saves educators time., proven student success.

Passionately crafted content and powerful targeted instructional feedback are the drivers of a homework system that does more than monitor progress or assign grades.  Sapling Learning has been found again and again to improve student performance by a full grade point. Peer-reviewed studies confirm that Sapling Learning drives student success.  

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A key factor that sets Sapling Learning apart from other online homework systems is our commitment to educator support and platform ease of use. We match educators with a Sapling Learning Technology TA – a Ph.D. or master’s-level subject expert -- who provides collaboration, software expertise, and consulting to tailor each course to fit your instructional goals and student needs.  

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Sapling Learning helps educators easily manage courses--from auto-graded assignments that feed into the gradebook to easy to use analytics allowing to improve retention. Student results can be analyzed quickly to diagnose topics of weakness in the course and new assignments and quizzes can be assembled from a large library of relevant and customizable questions. 

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Sapling Learning’s TEKS feature has been particularly useful to Jill Clay, a chemistry teacher in the Dallas/Fort Worth area .

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Lecturer Rebeccas Shapiro's general chemistry students achieve superior results with Sapling Learning. 

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Chemistry Professor Bahram Moasser inspires students to spend more time on homework with Sapling Learning.

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Sapling Learning is a provider of interactive homework and assessment software for high school and higher education sciences. The company has focused on providing students with rich, discipline specific interactions to promote engagement and comprehension in challenging problem-solving disciplines of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering. With all its products, it provides the level of seamless integration of rich learning elements for both creating and learning scientific material. In November 2012, Sapling Learning was acquired by Macmillan. The valuation of Sapling Learning was undisclosed. Other terms of the deal were not released.

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Apr 25, 2022

Unmudl, an Arlington, VA-based provider of a Skills-to-Jobs ™ marketplace, raised USD 1.275M in Seed funding. The round was led by Stand Together Ventures Lab, with participation from WGU Labs; Christopher L. Curran, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Tyton Partners; James Caras, Founder of Catalyst Education and Sapling Learning; Holly Sparkman, Partner of Rorie Sparkman & Engel LLC; Stephanie Boone, Founder and CEO of Wondercide; and Dr. Kirpal Singh, psychiatrist, and philanthropist.

Sapling Learning Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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Sapling Learning was founded in 2005.

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Sapling Learning's headquarters is located at 2215 Exposition Blvd, Austin.

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Sapling Learning's latest funding round is Acq - Fin.

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Sapling Learning raised a total of $2.5M.

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Investors of Sapling Learning include Macmillan New Ventures and NLM Capital.

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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Sapling learning v24 release notes.

• "Include excluded or in-progress grades" option:  When this option is set to "yes" for a category, in-progress scores (ie, green scores) will be included in the overall average for that category. Normally green scores are not  included in the overall average.
• More Information on Participants: Instructors can now see the Username and ID Number settings for students in their courses.
• Instructor Edit Participant Data: Instructors can now edit the First Name, Last Name, and ID Number of students in their courses.
• Instructor Reset User Password: Instructors can now quickly reset the passwords of students in their courses. A possible temporary password is automatically suggested, or you can choose your own passwords for your students. We highly recommend giving different passwords to any users you reset, and only using this feature very sparingly.
• Instructor Export Participant Roster: Instructors can now export a class roster from the Participants report.
• Instructor Upload Fixes to Roster: Using the exported roster, instructors can upload fixing to the roster for their course. The "Sapling UserID" field is used to identify the student, so be sure not to change this for any students; if you change it to another student in your course, those students will swap all work within Sapling.
• Instructor Easily Remove Students: You can now remove students who don't belong in your course from the Participants report. When appropriate, the students will receive a refund or Sapling credit (the refund/credit part does not apply to the high school server).
• Instructor Easily Add Former Students Back to Course: You can now add students who were formerly in your course back from the Participants report. Note: This may not apply to students removed before this feature was implemented (they likely will not be listed as Former Students).
• High School: Instructor Create New Users: On the high school server, if you have fewer users in your course than your allotment, you can create new users up to that allotment. If you do not have this feature available, contact your TechTA for help (they may need to set your user limit for existing courses).
• Group Assignment Date Settings:  We updated how "available from offsets" and "due date extensions" are stored and used by the system, making it easier to configure special offsets for a specific assignment for a specific group. Now, if a student later adds to that group, that offset will apply for that assignment for that user.
• Full-Sequence Bookstore Cards: We now have the ability to accept full-sequence (two-semester, three-quarter, etc) access codes. If you would like to have a full-sequence card available in your bookstore, talk to your sales rep.
• Further Vector Module Improvements: Several features were added to the Vector Diagrams Module to allow the Physics team to ask more questions involving these diagrams.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Changes to facebook connect, friday, december 2, 2011, site outage, 12/2/11, tuesday, november 22, 2011, sapling learning v1.23 release notes.

• There's now a "forgot password" link when users link their Facebook account to their Sapling account.
• We now warn instructors if you try to lock an assignment, since this rarely happens on purpose (locking prevents student scores for that assignment from saving the the gradebook; this can be useful if you want to temporarily stop gradebook updates, but it's confusing if you do it accidentally).
• Due date extensions and available from offsets will no longer misbehave when instructors in timezones outside of Central try to set them.
• Removing a due date or available from date from an assignment now removes its corresponding extensions or offsets.
• We fixed a bug that caused extended due dates to sometimes fail to appear in the student Activity Sidebar (dates instead would show as, for example, "11//2011").
• Hand-Graded Activities now show due dates and grade information on the main course page.
• We fixed a bug in the unpaid student cleaner, so they should finally disappear from your gradebook.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Sapling learning v1.22 release notes.

• Instructors can now Switch role to... Student  (at the top-right of the main course page) in their courses without being asked to pay.
• We made some fixes to the Clock, available to instructors under Turn editing on,  then Add... under Blocks at the bottom-right, then Clock. This displays the server time adjusted to the user's timezone, and verifies that users have their timezone and institution set properly.
• Instructors can add available from offsets and due date extensions for groups on a per-assignment basis, making it easier to add multiple extensions at once. This is in the same interface as the other offsets and extensions .
• Unpaid students will now be removed from courses two weeks after the grace period ends. Such students will be cleared out of current courses over the course of the next day or two (since we did not have this cleaner in place when the grace periods ended for this semester's courses, there are more students than usual for the system to clear out).

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Sapling learning v1.21 release notes.

• Due Date Extensions and Available From Offsets: We fixed a rare bug that resulted in students having two copies of extensions or offsets for the same assignment (which made it difficult for you to update their due dates or available from dates).
• We toned down the screen reader popup. Hopefully it will be less annoying now. We've started work on a replacement that will make it completely unnecessary while keeping us in compliance with disability laws.
• We made some improvements on the Vector Diagrams Module, coming soon to Physics content near you.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Sapling learning v1.20.1 release notes, sapling learning v1.20 release notes.

• Your mouse pointer will no longer disappear at the left edge of the Sidebar.
• In the Sidebar, due dates and available from dates will now always display the correct times to students (they were off by an hour or two in some circumstances).
• When you set a new due date or available from date on an activity, group offsets and extensions will now properly apply.
• When you create a new individual due date extension after the due date, that assignment will properly re-open for that student.
• Students on the High School server can no longer accidentally break their password.
• We also released an update to our behind-the-scenes course-creation system on the High School server.  

Friday, October 14, 2011

Sapling learning v1.19 release notes.

• Monday: saplinglearning.ca  (next major release: 10/24)
• Tuesday: saplinglearning.com   (next major release: 10/25)
• Wednesday: hs.saplinglearning.com   (next major release: 10/26)
• Easier Facebook connection for existing users.
• We now show "Institution" on user profiles, rather than "City, State" and "Country."
• Better validation of registration forms to avoid some common issues.
• Changes to the available profile fields on our high school servers.
• Improvements to our beta Anywhere Activities (assignments that can be embedded within books or on web pages, etc).
• Interface improvements to the assignment Sidebar.
• Improvements to the due date view in the assignment Sidebar (but this has a bug that will be fixed Monday; if the due date in the Sidebar doesn't match the due date on your course page, the due date on your course page is the correct value).
• Screen Reader text for text areas (we know it's kind of annoying right now, bear with us; we had to get something in place for our visually impaired students, we'll clean it up a bit in our next major release).
• Your TechTA can now reset assignments for individual students (they used to have to go through a more complicated process to do so).
• Your TechTA can now change the score on an individual question for an individual student (again, they used to have to put in a request for this to happen).
• Your TechTA can now reset an individual question for an individual student, to allow them to try again (all three of these features will eventually be made available to instructors, after the TechTAs help me find any remaining kinks).
• You can now set up an "Available From Offset" for assignments, making assignments available for certain groups or individual students later or earlier than others. This could be used to make a post-lab assignment available to each section of a lab after their lab session, for example, or to let one student into an assignment early.
• We updated the "Uncategorized" setting on your Activities and Due Dates page to "Default," to make it clearer what that category is for.
• Assignments Stats now show an Average for each student.
• We fixed a bug making it difficult to reuse images in questions you author.
• We made a number of changes to our Vector Diagrams module for physics (although we still have a few more fixes to make to finalize this module).
• You can now import assignments from previous courses (or from your current course, if you want to duplicate an assignment). Your TechTA can walk you through how that works.
• We added a "Clock" block, which you can find under "Turn editing on" and then in the "Blocks" drop-down at the bottom of the rightmost column. This block shows the current server time, adjusted to the user's time zone setting. It also warns students if their time zone doesn't match their institution's time zone, and allows them to quickly fix it.
• We also made a number of behind-the-scenes changes to course settings to make it easier for your TechTA to create your course.
• The friendly faces staring down from the top of every page are much smaller on the main page (after you log in), and we removed them from every other page. You can now see more of your course without scrolling.
• We made several improvements to the payment system. Unfortunately, a typo in these changes currently prevents many of you from using "Switch role to Student," but we will fix that issue in our next major release.
• We fixed and updated several things on the "landing page" (the part of the site you see before you log in).
• We made several tweaks to the database to speed up some things.
• We made numerous bug fixes.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Sporadic site slowness, 8/29, thursday, august 4, 2011, sapling learning v1.18 release notes.

• Instructor Quick-Edit on Activities and Due Dates: Instructors can now edit all of the settings (except "Description") for every assignment in your course at once from the "Activities and Due Dates" page. This should be helpful if you want to change the policies for several assignments at once, for example. We also added a "Save All" button on that page to commit all of your updates (the changes you made don't "stick" until you click the individual save icon for each one or the "Save All" button at the bottom).
• Subject and Term: We now explicitly track the Subject and Term (1st semester of  2, 2nd quarter of 3, etc) for courses, so that we can offer better statistics in future updates.
• Name Changes: Users can now request name changes after account creation. We changed this to a by-request system to help combat a way we knew might work for cheating purposes, but which it doesn't look like any students had discovered; now they'll never get a chance.
• User Institution Settings: On sign-up, we now ask users to choose their Institution (college, university, etc) instead of to tell us their City, State, and Country. We're putting this in place to allow us to streamline the account-creation and course-selection process for the Spring. We'll also start suggesting the appropriate timezone to users based on their institution to help avoid a rare but annoying issue (when students select the wrong timezone and are therefore told the wrong time for due dates).
• Cleaner Login: The Canada server received the Facebook login fixes and the updated login-box look.
• New Payment System:  We completed overhauled the back-end to handle payments in our system. This will allow us to make several improvements (such as the multi-course discounts described below). The thing you're most likely to encounter right now is that we can upload rosters to enroll students in a course even with for-pay courses now.
• Easier Refunds: We updated our refund system to make it easier for us (or even instructors) to grant refunds to students. After we get a few more safeguards in place, we'll also be able to open up self-directed refunds to students (so they'll be able to request a refund within 60 days of purchase and receive the refund immediately).
• Grace Periods: Students now have two weeks to use most courses for free before they have to pay. We hope this will make things easier for students who later drop the course (they can simply use the course without paying if they aren't sure, then only pay when they've made their final decision).
• Multi-Course Discounts: We can now offer a discount for students who purchase multiple quarters or semesters of a course at once (for example, for $29.99 courses, students can purchase two semesters at $49.99 and save $9.99).

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Sapling learning v1.17 release notes, tuesday, may 31, 2011, sapling learning v1.16 release notes.

• Web Help & Videos Drawer: We've added another drawer to the Activity Sidebar, containing a web search tailored to the subject of the assignment (general chemistry, biochemistry, etc) and the topic of the question (stoichiometry, SN1 reactions, etc). If we don't have anything specific in our Help With This Topic drawer, hopefully the web can help students out. This drawer is disabled if you disable resources for the assignment.
• Better Data Structure: This won't be visible yet, but we've made another improvement to the way we store student responses for assignments. This will allow us to streamline some things in the future (and speed up load times), and to produce much more detailed reports about how students performed on assignments. Once we finish crunching the existing data into this new format (it's happening in the background over the next week or two), we'll show you a preview of what this new format will allow us to show you.
• Facebook Connect Improvements: We've made our Facebook Connect integration easier to use. This should clear up any problems users have had using Facebook to log into the site. Note: We don't share any information with Facebook, we only  use it to make creating accounts and logging in faster and easier.
• Course Institutions: We've added a formal "Institution" setting to the settings for each course. This will be invisible to you (your TechTA set it already), but it will allow us to make it easier soon for students to find your course.
• Better Scrolling: We removed the extra horizontal scrollbar in the gradebook, letting the scrollbar at the bottom of your browser window do the work. It looks a little ugly right now if your gradebook extends into the right margin, but we wanted to get the functionality in place right away. We'll clean up around the edges in an upcoming release.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Sapling learning in canada, friday, april 29, 2011, post mortem: what happened during the amazon outage.

• During the maintenance, someone made a typo, pointing some of their servers to the wrong back up location. This caused the copying of the data to fail, so, each time something changed on a website, that website and the drives it was on locked up. It also caused the system that lets us restart our server to fail, causing our site to stay stuck offline during our few-second switch.
• Since the servers weren't able to reach the drives they thought they should reach while copying, they reported that something was wrong with those drives. If something is wrong with a drive, Amazon automatically takes that drive offline until they can inspect it and see what was wrong. Many, many drives were reported as broken, so all of those drives went offline. Amazon didn't have enough reserve capacity to handle this drive outage, causing their servers to run out of space.
• They're implementing more automation and other safeguards to stop the typo from occurring in the first place.
• They've already added a lot of reserve capacity, and are adding more. My guess is hard drive salespeople in Virginia, where the servers are located, made a lot of money that day selling high-capacity drives to Amazon.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Sapling's cloud computing choice, update on site availability.

8:54 AM PDT We'd like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it's difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We're starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Sapling learning for high school, monday, march 28, 2011, sapling's digital content ecosystem.

• Tuesday, 9:15 AM, Disney's Grand California Hotel, Trillium B: Microcontent publishing: A new model for development and dissemination of educational support materials (p. TECH-99 of the on-site program, talk 1340)
• Tuesday, 3:30 PM - 6:00 PM, Anaheim Convention Center, Room 211A: Independent Online Homework and eBooks (a workshop on editing and earning royalties for content in our online homework and eBook system) (p. 29 of the on-site program)

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Sapling learning v1.15 release notes.

• Activity Sizing: Activities will now properly size to fit your browser window.

• Back-end Improvements: The database structure in which we store activities has been greatly improved. The improvements may not be immediately obvious, but we can now continue to improve the speed at which activities save and load. 

• Improved Conflict Resolution: It is possible, under certain conditions, for the activity editor to get "out of sync," for example if multiple people are editing the assignment. We've improved the checks the activity editor does when you make changes to eliminate the issues this can cause.
• Authoring Bug Fixes: For those of you who write content for your courses, we hope we've tracked down the last of the issues that cause you to have to log out and back in sometimes while editing your content. If you continue to have issues while authoring, please let me know . 
• Cleaner Extension Interface: Adding due-date extensions for groups of students should now be considerably less confusing.

• Introducing Anywhere Activities: Last month I mentioned that we had a new feature in the works to allow Sapling Learning assignments to be embedded on any webpage. This feature is now ready. We do not yet have an instructor interface implemented to give you the code to add to your page to use these, but, if you have a use for them, let me know and we can get you started. The instructor interface for creating these links (similar to embedding a YouTube video) will be available in a future release.
• Instructor Editing of Anywhere Activities: When you embed an Anywhere Activity on your site, if you're logged in with your instructor account, you'll be able to edit that activity wherever you have it embedded (rather than returning to SaplingLearning.com to edit it). You'll also be able to jump right to the gradebook or assignment statistics to see how your students are doing on that activity.

• Facebook Connect Account Creation: Students can now use Facebook Connect to quickly create their accounts using their information from Facebook (such as name and location).
• Facebook Connect Login: Students (and instructors) can also connect their Sapling Learning accounts to their Facebook accounts, speeding up the login process.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Data mining: student performance by os, monday, february 21, 2011, data mining: 6 things i learned from student login times, monday, february 14, 2011, three years of saplinglearning.com, monday, february 7, 2011, unconventional wisdom: general chemistry.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Seedling: anywhere activity, monday, january 17, 2011, sapling learning v1.14 release notes.

• Introducing the Activity Sidebar: In November, I mentioned we were working on the Activity Sidebar. The first version of the Activity Sidebar will be available in this release. The Sidebar currently contains up to three drawers (depending on your course and assignment settings): Assignment Information (always present, open by default), Subject Resources (present if enabled and present for this subject), Technical Support and Bug Reports (always present). We'll add more drawers in coming releases.
• Student Self-Enrollment in Groups: Students can now add themselves to course sections, using a special enrollment key (password) to indicate which group they should be in. This makes it much easier to manage multi-section courses.
• Group Due Date Offsets: You can now set up a "standing extension" for a group. For example, if you have lab groups that meet on Monday and Wednesday, you can give everyone in the Wednesday section a two-day extension on every activity, automatically.
• Grades:  We shortened the length of assignment titles in the gradebook, cutting down on the need for horizontal scrolling.
• Extensions: Better error-handling (mostly for old, mis-set extensions that were hard to edit).
• Profile Pictures: You can now upload profile pictures again.
• Spacing of PayPal Payment Box: The PayPal box had a big gap above it where the enrollment key box goes when needed. That space is now gone.
• Sorting Module: A rare bug in the sorting module caused images to very occasionally fail to load. This bug has been fixed.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Sapling learning physics.

• Student Success
• Academic Life

Report: Teaching Online Students to Self-Regulate Learning

New research suggests that short skill-building activities can motivate self-regulated learning among learners taking courses remotely.

By  Ashley Mowreader

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Online learners may need help learning self-regulated learning skills. Here are two online interventions that can support them.

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The availability of online courses has jumped since the COVID-19 pandemic forced remote instruction. In fall 2022, 30 percent of undergraduate students were enrolled in distance education classes exclusively and 60 percent were in at least one distance education course, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics .

A recently published study from the Postsecondary Teaching and Technology Collaborative evaluates the effectiveness of two strategies to improve online community college students’ skills. Researchers found that exposure to reflection exercises and informational videos had a positive relationship with students’ engagement on the learning management system for planning and assessment.

The background: In online education, students’ ability to self-regulate their learning is critical because they’re often expected to work independently and exert control over their own learning journey, compared to face-to-face instruction, according to the report. Prior research has also pointed to a positive relationship between self-regulated learning and students’ outcomes in an online environment.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) skills include time management, metacognition and effort regulation. Interventions that promote these skills include online training modules, prompts, self-assessment and peer support opportunities.

The study, authored by researchers from Columbia University and SRI International, seeks to understand how learners from historically marginalized populations at broad-access postsecondary institutions respond to interventions, as they had yet to be studied.

The study: Researchers analyzed two strategies (videos and prompts) implemented across two semesters (fall 2022 and spring 2023) at a community college in northeastern U.S. categorized as a minority-serving institution. Three instructors participated in the experiment, each teaching multiple sections of one or more fully online STEM classes.

The first intervention, a three-part video series, consisted of short clips designed by educational researchers and instructors to introduce students to SRL in general and one specific skill to attempt. Each video addresses one SRL mindset or practice, some strategies to develop the skill, and an activity for the student to consider their own practices.

The prompts, or short-answer questions, asked learners to plan for the upcoming week, monitor their progress or reflect on their understanding of course concepts.

Instructors received materials and a suggested timeline for administrating the strategies, as well as encouragement to make adaptations according to their course content.

To evaluate the impact of the intervention, researchers examined students’ online behavior on the learning management system. The full sample included 231,462 actions (clickstream data from the LMS) performed by 141 students across 10 sections within four courses.

The results: Student data revealed a positive relationship between the videos/prompts and students’ SRL behavior, meaning viewing and engaging with the interventions pointed to improved learning skills. Students who engaged with both strategies had a strong correlation to engaging with course information. Those who worked with the prompts were more likely to participate in strategic planning and evaluation, and those who engaged with the video were also likely to improve strategic planning, as well as effort regulation.

Among student sub-groups, first-generation students had stronger improvements after being exposed to the prompts, compared to their continuing-generation peers, as did women compared to men (though less prominently).

Supporting Online Learner Success

For practitioners looking for best practices in distance education, some other areas to consider include:

• Accessibility for students with disabilities in course content and university websites.
• Peer connections for belonging and retention.
• Wraparound mental health care services that support online learner demographics.
• Financial aid tied to student learning behaviors.
• Universal design principles that center online education first.
• Motivational support for asynchronous learning.

So what? The preliminary study finds students exposed to learning skills and strategies were more likely to demonstrate skill-building behavior, aligning with existing literature and pointing to future evaluation of how students need assistance with preparing for the future as they navigate course tasks.

Additionally, students from historically marginalized backgrounds were more likely to respond well to the skill-building, suggesting that this could be one way to support equitable learning.

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In the future, researchers will expand their analysis to include additional data sources, institutions and iterations of the study.

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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Sapling learning to present on hot educational technology trends during sxswedu 2012 conference.

• How do students use STEM educational resources and how is this different from educator perception?
• How important is the textbook reference to STEM learning relative to other educational resources?
• Are today's much-hyped eBooks any better?
• What is effective and what does that mean for the future of STEM educational resources?
• Are we heading towards immersive digital learning environments and what will they look like?

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Eschool media announces sapling learning a 2012 reader's choice winner.

AUSTIN, TEXAS (January 12, 2012) Sapling Learning, the leading provider of interactive homework and assessment software for the Higher Education and High School sciences, was honored with the 2012 eSchool Media Readers’ Choice Award for one of the best ed-tech products in the market today.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Sapling learning partners with w.h. freeman.

Sapling Learning Teams Up with W. H. Freeman to Offer Online Homework for Select Chemistry and Physics Textbooks

AUSTIN, TEXAS (January 3, 2011) Sapling Learning, a leading provider of effective, interactive homework and instruction that improves learning outcomes in chemistry and physics, today announced a strategic alliance with W. H. Freeman and Company to offer online homework for key titles in chemistry and physics for higher education professors and students throughout the United States and Canada. This partnership allows W. H. Freeman to bundle Sapling Learning access codes with key titles in those disciplines.

The W. H. Freeman titles for which Sapling Learning will offer online homework are:

• Atkins/Jones, Chemical Principles, Fifth edition
• Atkins/Jones, Exploring Chemical Analysis, Fifth edition
• Blei/Odian, General, Organic, & Biochemistry, First edition
• Guinn/Brewer, Essentials of General, Organic, & Biochemistry, First edition
• Harris, Quantitative Chemical Analysis, Eighth edition
• Harris, Exploring Chemical Analysis, Fourth edition
• Kesten/Tauck, University Physics for the Physical & Life Sciences, First edition
• Tipler, Physics for Scientists & Engineers, Sixth edition
• Vollhardt/Schore, Organic Chemistry, Sixth edition

Driven by today’s digital lifestyle and the need to compete in sciences on a global level, both instructors and students are finding that augmenting textbook instruction with active, engaging digital instruction of benefit. Sapling Learning provides a robust, interactive learning experience with tutorial instruction complete with assistance, remediation, and practice to adequately prepare students for class. As they work problems, they receive targeted feedback, hints and solutions, which not only help them learn the subject matter they also learn strategies that make them stronger problem solvers in general. For instructors, Sapling Learning relieves them from of the burden of grading homework assignments. The automatic system provides sophisticated student interactions (such as molecule drawing, vector diagramming, etc.) which allows them the ability to assign meaningful, discipline-specific homework that would be too prohibitively time-consuming to grade if assigned as traditional "pencil and paper homework." “The National Science Foundation (NSF) National Survey of Recent College Graduates (NSRCG) reports that science is experiencing far too much attrition between freshman intentions and undergraduate outcomes. It’s a contributor to the United States’ declining competitive edge in the sciences,” said James Caras, PhD, CEO, Sapling Learning. “By combining best-in-class textbooks with Sapling’s online homework systems, students receive digital problem-solving practice and coaching that is proven to be more effective in terms of increasing student exam performance than the hand-graded paper-and-pencil homework of the past. This, in turn, improves the impact and quality of science education and retention which is essential in ensuring our competitiveness in the global community.” Independent instructor studies conclude that students who use Sapling Learning for 80% or more of their problem-solving practice see 18% greater scores than students who do not. This equates to an equivalent of a 1.3 letter grade difference, essentially taking students from a C+ to a middle A.

“W.H. Freeman is delighted to make Sapling Learning available with its titles in the physical sciences,” said Jessica Fiorillo, Executive Editor for Chemistry and Physics, W. H. Freeman.

About Sapling Learning Sapling Learning is a leading provider of interactive homework and assessment software for the Higher Education sciences. Since 2004, Sapling Learning has focused on providing students with rich, discipline specific interactions, such as molecule drawing and graphing, to promote engagement and comprehension in challenging problem-solving disciplines of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering. Sapling Learning provides instructors unprecedented flexibility to create and customize instructional content in an easy-to use, flexible, code-free environment. No other solution in the market provides the level of seamless integration of rich learning elements for both creating and learning scientific material.

For more information, visit www.saplinglearning.com .

About W. H. Freeman W. H. Freeman collaborates closely with top researchers and educators to develop superior teaching and learning materials for the sciences. Our motto is: We know that a dedicated instructor and the right textbook have the power to change the world—one student at a time. We are committed to superior quality, discerning editorial vision and long standing commitment to education. For more information, visit: www.whfreeman.com

Media contact: Patti Hill| 512.218.0401 | [email protected]