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 fundamental to the future directions we advocate in Section 4.

Cognitive theory and faculty expertise guide the initial development of each course. OLI researchers conduct a variety of studies to examine the effectiveness of various educational innovations. The results not only improve the courses, but also enhance the knowledge about effective practices in online learning.

Students and faculty who use the courses benefit from the evaluation that is built into all courses. Frequent formative evaluation gives students the type of constructive and timely feedback on progress that is available from individual tutoring sessions but often absent from other digital learning environments. Continuous evaluation of class performance gives faculty the information they need to effectively modify or supplement instruction to meet learning objectives.

A primary objective of the project is to build a community that will play an important role in course development and improvement. The courses are developed in a modular fashion to allow faculty at a variety of institutions to either deliver the courses as designed or to modify the content and sequence to fit the needs of their students and/or their curricular and course goals. These courses will be broadly disseminated at no cost to individual students and at low cost to institutions.

The first courses developed through OLI are introductory courses intended to replace large lecture format courses in economics, statistics, causal reasoning, and logic. The courses are highly effective, intellectually challenging sequences of instruction that reflect not just cutting-edge technology but some compelling ideas about pedagogy and content of introductory college-level instruction.

OLI, according to its website, is intended to have a profound impact on higher education by increasing access to education, enhancing the quality of instruction, and providing a model for online courses and course materials that teach more effectively and appeal to students more powerfully than anything in existence today.

Creative Commons, with a tagline of share, reuse, and remix, legally, is a critical infrastructure service for the OER movement providing free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. They can change the default copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”