NSF invests $90M in innovative national scientific cyberinfrastructure for transforming STEM education

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced today a strategic investment of $90 million over five years in SafeInsights, a unique national scientific cyberinfrastructure aimed at transforming learning research and STEM education. Funded through the Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure Level-2 program (Mid-scale RI-2), SafeInsights is led by Prof. Richard Baraniuk at OpenStax at Rice University, who will oversee the implementation and launch of this new research infrastructure project of unprecedented scale and scope.

SafeInsights aims to serve as a central hub, facilitating research coordination and leveraging data across a range of major digital learning platforms that currently serve tens of millions of U.S. learners across education levels and science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

With its controlled and intuitive framework, unique privacy-protecting approach and emphasis on the inclusion of students, educators and researchers from diverse backgrounds, SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the predictors of effective learning, which are key to academic success and persistence.

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