Help Build a National Facility to Accelerate Learning Research
We’re building toward a national facility for education research—something that does for learning science what particle accelerators do for physics and telescopes do for astronomy. By combining shared infrastructure with collaborative processes, this facility will make it easier and faster to test ideas, improve instruction, and understand how students learn.
We’re not starting from scratch. This effort builds on the success of REAL CHEM, a fully developed general chemistry course used by a growing community of instructors. It also draws on technical infrastructure—including Torus, DataShop, and the broader LearnSphere ecosystem—that supports content authoring, data collection, and large-scale analysis. Together, this sociotechnical foundation provides a powerful starting point for building a national facility.
We are currently preparing a proposal for the NSF IUSE program, which will be submitted on July 16, 2025. This will be our first attempt to secure support for building the facility—but not our last. Your ideas and feedback now will directly inform this and future proposals, and help ensure the design reflects the needs of the broader community.
How You Can Help
We’re inviting the community to help shape this effort in three key ways:
🔹 Contribute an Idea
Have a concept for a learning innovation or study you’d like to pilot using shared infrastructure? We’d love to hear it. 🔗 Submit your Idea→
🔹 Join the Team
Interested in serving on an advisory group, contributing to peer feedback, or helping shape the facility as it grows? 🔗 [Tell us how you’d like to be involved →]
🔹 Provide Feedback
We’re designing this facility in conversation with the community. Share your thoughts on priorities, governance, data sharing, or anything else that could make this project more useful. You can add to discussion at the bottom of this page, or provide private feedback here.
The following is a list of core process we’re designing, and where we especially welcome your input. Each has a link to a page with more details and separate discussion forum.
🔹 Create instructional materials
Instructors and researchers use tools like Torus and generative AI to design new content.
🔗 Explore the tools—would this work for your ideas? →
🔹 Peer feedback and light vetting
Contributors can submit drafts to get feedback from others in the community. A simple vetting step helps determine when materials are ready to be released as alternatives.
🔗 Learn about the review process—and share your thoughts →
🔹 Deploy, observe, and improve
Materials are shared as alternatives instructors can adopt. As students interact, the system collects anonymized data to inform iterative improvements.
🔗 Learn about the analysis tools—would they work for your needs? →
The long-term goal is a self-improving collection of instructional materials—one that evolves based on real classroom data and shared community insights. With each iteration, the system becomes more effective at supporting student learning.
This website prepared by David Yaron (yaron@cmu.edu) on behalf of the REAL CHEM team.
I’d especially be interested in people’s gut reactions to the idea and general pitch. Pretend you are on the panel reviewing this proposal. What questions would come to mind?
Incredible idea. One question that comes to mind from the vantage point of a reviewer:
What kind of support (beyond what is already available through Torus) will the project provide for contributing teachers/researchers in terms of content development and/or integration into the system? A workshop that brings in potential instructors and trains them in both gold-standard teaching methods and with the Torus system could be interesting. Maybe it could look something like the Chemistry Laboratory Curriculum Innovators Program from the Popova lab (https://sites.google.com/smcm.edu/nsf-iuse-2337027-clc-innovator/home?authuser=0) or maybe even leverage existing programs like this and include support in this IUSE grant to send someone to provide a Torus session at these programs.
Thanks. We do have a summer workshop program about Torus and other tools. The workshop includes strands, where you spend most of your time in sessions focussed on the strand. We have long-standing strands on educational data mining and content creation. This year, we are adding chemical education research (CER). Part of the plan is to expand this to accomodate a larger number of people.
But I think having workshops at BCEE may also be helpful. Could also do ChemEd (which alternates years with BCCE), but not sure how many higher-ed folk go to chemed.
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