The Big Number
$90 Million
Winter 2025
By Avery Franklin
OpenStax at Rice, the world’s largest publisher of free, open education resources, was awarded $90 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to build and lead SafeInsights — a groundbreaking research and development infrastructure for inclusive learning and education research.
SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the predictors of effective learning, all while protecting student privacy. This five-year project represents the NSF’s largest single investment in research and development infrastructure for education at a national scale.
It will serve as a central hub for a multidisciplinary team of 80 partners and collaborating institutions, including major digital learning platforms that currently serve tens of millions of U.S. learners. The inclusion of researchers,
educators, developers and students from diverse, representative backgrounds will be
a top priority.
Funded through NSF’s Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-2 program, which places it alongside other critical infrastructure for scientific discovery such as telescopes and supercomputers, SafeInsights is the largest federal award in the history of Rice.
“Learning is complex. Research can tackle this complexity and help get the right tools into the hands of educators and students, but to do so, we need reliable information on how students learn,” says OpenStax founder and director Professor Richard G. Baraniuk, who will lead the SafeInsights project. “Just as progress in health care research sparked stunning advances in personalized medicine, we need similar precision in education to support all students, particularly those from underrepresented and low-income backgrounds.”
For example, a research study could reveal what strategies are most effective for middle school students struggling with reading comprehension in algebra to prepare them for success in high school and college. These studies can be replicated and expanded across different platforms, enabling a deeper understanding of the multitude of factors that influence learning outcomes, leading to the development of more effective, evidence-based teaching methods and tools.
Richard Baraniuk is Rice’s C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of statistics and professor of computer science in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing.