About the OLC

ICPSR's Online Learning Center (OLC) is the result of discussions with teaching faculty about using data in their classrooms and the challenges such an undertaking can entail, in which several key themes emerged. Instructors wanted the ability to 1) quickly locate relevant data that are easy to work with and work to demonstrate the concept(s) and 2) customize any materials to their own teaching approach and syllabus. To that end, Data-Driven Learning Guides are being created for the express purpose of making ICPSR data more user-friendly for classroom exercises.

Designed for faculty to use for in-class demonstrations or to assign as supplemental activities for giving students greater exposure to concepts, the Data-driven Learning Guides share the following characteristics:

All Guides follow a template that includes a clearly stated learning objective, brief background of the focal concept and chosen dataset, analysis that demonstrates the concept, interpretation guides and further reference material
Topics and concepts chosen represent those that are typically taught in an introductory (100- or 200-level) course in the relevant discipline
Multiple Guides representing various sub-areas of a single topic are useful in lower-division substantive courses in addition to survey courses
Datasets used represent the wide range of data available through ICPSR and are therefore different than other exercise series that focus on a single omnibus survey
Analysis is simplified through the recoding of variables to collapse categories or deal with missing data as appropriate
Bibliographies of related materials are included

For more information or with questions about the Online Learning Center, please contact: OLC@icpsr.umich.edu.

Overall Project Status

The OLC is under continual development. More topics and guides will be added over time. Future phases will include a mechanism for faculty to submit their own Data-Driven Learning Guides, and tools to aid faculty with assessing student learning related to OLC use.

Project Staff

Lynette Hoelter
734.615.5653
lhoelter@umich.edu

Frederique Laubepin
flaubepi@umich.edu

Meet the DDLG Developers

Linking to the OLC?

Want to link to the OLC from your Web site? Feel free to use our link buttons. Just copy and paste the code below the image into your Web site.

Submit Feedback

The OLC is in its infancy and the site was created to address issues raised by faculty members in preliminary research about what would be most useful. Your feedback would be much appreciated to let us know what works and what doesn't, to suggest topics for new Data-Driven Learning Guides (DDLGs) or resources to be added to the bibliography of existing DDLGs, or to propose new functionalities within the site itself. Your feedback is important in improving the educational uses of ICPSR's resources.