News from Peabody

IRIS Center’s annual report indicates strong growth and demand

Published March 22, 2017

Demonstrating its widespread appreciation by educators for its largely free content, the Peabody College IRIS Center continues to grow and finds its online content in high demand.

Providing a variety of tools – modules, course materials, and high-end research results packaged for quick consumption and in-class application by overworked and under-resourced educators – visits to the IRIS Center Website in 2016 grew by 20 percent, to a total of 1.7 million visits.

Based at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development, the IRIS Center is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs.  Its continued popularity is seen, in addition to the 1.7 million visits to its site, by:

• Time on the site: visits to the website last an average of 15 minutes, indicating that its content is attractive to educators.
• Global usage: the majority of visits (1.4 million) were from the United States, but visits to the site also came from 230 other countries and territories. The countries with the highest use were the Philippines, Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Spain, Kenya, and Columbia.
• Use among peers; 100 percent of colleges and universities with special education doctoral programs utilize IRIS content, as do 85 percent of colleges and universities with teacher preparation programs.

“I use IRIS Modules all the time! My students love them and so do I. I appreciate all that your Center does for education,” says a user from Carson-Newman University.

“Our heavy traffic and consistently positive feedback encourages us and confirms our mission,” says Naomi Tyler, co-director of the IRIS Center.

More details about the usage of the IRIS Center content can be found in its annual data report: https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/2016_iris_summary.pdf