Ithaka

Ithaka organizes and preserves academic knowledge and, with its partners, has built a powerful infrastructure for preserving research reports, data sets, plant specimens, art objects, and more. In 2009, Ithaka acquired JSTOR, the single most important platform for preserving scholarly records. It has also incubated the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, which helps small liberal arts colleges integrate the latest in information technology into their teaching, learning, and scholarship. This general operating support grant would represent Special Projects’ last grant to Ithaka.

Ithaka is a leading player at the intersection of education and technology. It runs online repositories such as JSTOR and works with universities to help them use technology to improve teaching and learning. This grant would support a rigorous test of an online statistics course developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at several campuses of the State University of New York and the University of Maryland. Broadly, this project will explore whether, when compared to traditional classes at state universities, the OLI statistics course can be delivered at lower cost without negatively affecting learning outcomes.