Gates Foundation launches $20M effort to improve online college instruction

What if you could watch videos of the world's leading college professors lecture about a difficult subject you were trying to master — online, any time you needed to watch?

That's one of the ideas that could receive funding from a $20 million initiative unveiled Monday by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The initiative aims to find new ways to deliver college instruction, using technology to make college learning more effective, and possibly also less expensive.

The Next Generation Learning Challenge will provide grants to educators and entrepreneurs to develop more fully promising technology tools. Initially, the grants will focus on classes taken by students in higher education, but in later years it will focus on K-12 learning, said Bill Gates, co-chair of the foundation, in a conference call Monday.

Many colleges and universities already are using online learning tools, but they're costly to develop and "many are not that ambitious," Gates said. For example, the courses often don't provide a real-time way to measure whether the student is learning, he said.

Some of the technologies that might be funded under the grant process include increasing the use of "blended" learning, which combines face-to-face instruction with online learning; using digital games, interactive media, simulations and social media to spark interest in learning; supporting "open courseware" for introductory classes such as math, science and English; and using learning analytics, or tests, to monitor student progress in real time.

The initiative is being offered in collaboration with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and is being led by a nonprofit, EDUCAUSE, which works to advance higher education through the use of information technology. The grants will range in size from $250,000 to $750,000.

The Gates Foundation said that by age 30, fewer than half of all Americans have earned a college degree. For low-income and minority students, the situation is bleaker. Yet by 2018, some studies estimate that careers requiring postsecondary education or training will make up 63 percent of all job openings.

Last week, the Gates Foundation announced a $34.8 million program to help boost community-college graduation rates. The Completion by Design program will award competitive grants to groups of community colleges that come up with new approaches to help community-college students complete their studies.

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@seattletimes.com