The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is devoted to developing high quality openly available online courses through use-driven design that is grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence.

OLI started in the fall of 2002, funded by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Foundation's goal of using information technology to help equalize the distribution of knowledge and educational opportunities for individuals, faculty, and institutions within the United States and throughout the world, is in concert with the research and teaching interests of the OLI faculty at Carnegie Mellon. While OLI makes its courses openly and freely available on the web as part of The Foundation's Open Content initiative, OLI distinguishes itself from many other OpenCourseWare (OCW) projects in the amount of instruction OLI embeds in its online courses. Many OCW course materials would require a significant amount of additional instructional material and instruction to support a novice self-learner. OLI's goal is to embed in the course offering all of the instruction and instructional material that an individual novice learner needs to learn a topic at the introductory college level. If used in mixed-mode with traditional instruction, OLI courses become particularly effective. OLI provides feedback tools that give instructors insight into where their students are mastering the concepts and skills and where their students are struggling so that instructors can use their teaching time with students most effectively.

The Open Learning Initiative has a dual focus of product development, in the form of producing online courses, and research, in the form of investigating how to make such courses increasingly effective in facilitating learning. Each of the OLI courses are designed to address learning challenges specific to the domain area of the course. One example is the unit on stoichiometry in the OLI chemistry course. College level chemistry is often taught out of context as a set of abstract mathematical skills.

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