ANN ARBOR—In four years since the University of Michigan announced a centralized effort to promote digital learning and two years after U-M’s president announced Academic Innovation as a major initiative, the university has experienced more than 7 million enrollments in online learning opportunities that involved people in 190 countries.

In addition, there has been impressive participation from faculty, staff, students and alumni in the various courses and programs, and use of tools that have been developed or scaled for additional employment through resources provided by the Academic Innovation program, leaders say.

“We’ve made significant progress over the last four years in fostering a culture of innovation in teaching and learning at U-M,” said James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation. “In partnership with faculty, staff and students across campus, we have created a new ecology of credentials and a set of tools to advance learning and personalization at scale.

“With continued collaboration across our community, we will continue to grow our model and evolve our portfolio as we move with our community of innovators toward the creation of problem-solving communities that are interdisciplinary, intergenerational and interprofessional.”

Academic Innovation has released statistics that show how much those beyond the university and within the campus community have embraced online learning with development of massive open online courses (MOOCs), course series, online degrees and current topical learning opportunities known as teach-outs.

The numbers also show the impact of several digital tools that have been developed or grown to scale on student learning at U-M and other institutions, such as ECoach (personalized education), GradeCraft (gameful learning), M-Write (writing to learn), Problem Roulette (practice exam problems), Viewpoint (learning simulations) and ART 2.0 (academic decision-making).

Some of the stats:

• Online learning experiences, which includes individual courses: 159
• Faculty collaboration: 160+ U-M faculty leading 112 initiatives
• Faculty adopting digital tools developed at U-M: 155+
• Educational institutions adopting digital tools developed at U-M: 90+
• Participants in the teach-out series, which launched in 2017: 72,000+
• Percentage of undergraduates that have used at least one tool: 85 percent
• Academic Innovation launched a new portal for all of its content, Michigan Online, in late spring and also offered free course certifications to faculty, staff and current students. The offer was expanded to alumni in fall. In that short period, members of the U-M community have created more than 8,400 user accounts on Michigan Online and have generated 2,900 course enrollments and completed 600 courses.