eLearning Update: Online Learning in Tennessee

The Effective Engaging E-learning Environment for Tennessee, or e4TN, held its 4th annual conference last month, gathering educators from across the state to talk about how to improve and sustain online learning.

The grant-funded e4TN program was created in 2006 to develop courses for high school students in Tennessee. Currently, the curriculum consists of 25 courses, including a new physics course first made available in Fall 2010. Also, e4TN provides e-education professional development opportunities for teachers, such as their two-day annual conference.

In four years, the program has evolved from a base of two educators in one district to a state-wide organization serving 64 districts in Tennessee, mirroring the exponential increase of online learning throughout the country and speaking to the wide-spread demand for online learning in Tennessee.

"We've seen exploding growth in funded districts," said Wendy Oliver, the e4TN coordinator, in a press release. She attributed this growth in part to the work of Timothy Webb, Tennessee's Commissioner of Education, who appropriated federal stimulus funding for state-wide online learning.

eLearning Update: The Rise of Credit Recovery

For those of you keeping up with the latest developments in online learning, my colleague Mary Ann Zehr's story about online credit-recovery programs is a must-read. New York City, Chicago, and Boston have embraced online credit recovery classes, which allow students to re-take courses online they may have failed instead of in a face-to-face classroom. It is, indeed, one of the fastest growing segments of the online learning industry.

Still, one of the biggest hurdles to online credit recovery, and online learning in general, are state policies that require students to complete a certain number of hours, or "seat-time" in each course. Online learning advocates are urging state policy makers to move to a proficiency-based, rather than time-based way of earning credits, but not all states have embraced this shift, Zehr reports.

In her story, Zehr points out that there isn't much independent research out there about the efficacy of online credit recovery programs. In fact, the researchers in her story could not point to any studies of online credit recovery specifically. But that doesn't seem to be stopping the growth of such programs, which are growing in large school districts across the country.

Despite the support from school districts that online recovery programs are receiving, if you scroll down to the comments of the story, you'll find several skeptics who warn against using online credit recovery to help students graduate. Commenter cossondra writes, "Unless the student who was unmotivated to succeed in a traditional setting brings a newfound personal motivation to the program, independent online learning will be even less likely to produce success than a classroom experience where other students as well as a personal teacher are there to guide and motivate."

Check out the story, and weigh in with your own comments here.

Building K-12 Cyber Leaders

The Consortium for School Networking, or CoSN, released Wednesday an updated guide aimed at improving superintendents' technology leadership, echoing the sentiments of others in ed-tech that strong leadership is crucial to strong technology integration.

The revised version of the Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent Toolkit refreshes guidelines CoSN released in 2008 to "help superintendents build their knowledge and skills to become more effective, visionary technology leaders," says a release from the national ed-tech advocates.

CoSN's update provides superintendents with assessments to help evaluate how ready they and their administrators are to lead technology initiatives, and identifies five leadership priorities. I read them as suggesting an order of operations, but they could also stand independently.

The five themes are as follows:

1. Utilize technologies that allow yourself and other district administrators to strengthen leadership and communication.
2. Understand the technology demands of the modern workplace and basic citizenship.
3. Use technology not to change, but to expand the array of teaching methods made available to students.
4. Emphasize professional development to improve staff technology skills, even those of administrators and superintendents.
5. Monitor and adapt to emerging trends in technology, such as balanced assessments, and be willing to develop expertise in those areas.

While teachers and other faculty may lead piece-meal classroom integration regardless of district leadership, superintendents are crucial for fostering an environment that is receptive to technology integration, CoSN leaders said in the release.

"Technology leadership has to start at the top," said Chip Kimball, chairman of the advisory council for CoSN's Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent initiative and a superintendent in Washington state. "Technology leadership has to be an intentional undertaking with specific district-wide goals, and superintendents are in a position to lead the way in achieving this."

Based on what I have seen, many teachers and technology officers echo Kimball's claim and are quick to credit superintendents who have led their districts forward. Researchers are also noting superintendents' importance. In a meeting at the ISTE 2010 ed-tech conference last week, Blackboard K-12 President Jessie Woolley-Wilson said getting superintendents to think proactively, rather than reactively, about ed-tech was among the biggest challenges to expanding online learning.

Cloud Use Dissipating? Not Likely

At Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, teachers use the Google Docs cloud application to comply with federal programs, compile surveys, report data, and check out and return equipment.

And with all that information published to a shared online location accessible from anywhere, Nashville professional development specialist Richard Alcantar says it's natural to raise security concerns.

But those worries should drive districts to think about how they choose to use cloud software rather than whether to use it, Alcantar said Wednesday at a session at the ISTE 2010 conference in Denver. Because the potential benefits of saved time, money and resources are too great to ignore.

"Don't say I can't have confidential information out there in the cloud," Alcantar said. "If you know [the risks], you can set up protocols and processes and rules to minimize them."

Alcantar said schools should consider using cloud software for a robust variety of school functions, like filling out payroll and attendance forms, registering students for activities, and submitting public address announcements. That eliminates both the overuse of paper and the time it takes for a document or e-mail to flow from one desk to the next.

To be cost effective, Alcantar suggested using more nuanced software for sensitive data that may include teacher or student identification information, but basic free software for information that would, by law, be public record. That may ease safety concerns of information technology specialists who worry about data corruption or identity theft.

"Whether IT wants it to happen or not, it's going to happen," Alcantar said of the continuing move toward cloud applications in schools. "These changes are too big, they're not going to stop them. But we need to know their concerns are legitimate, and we need to listen."

With co-operation and persistence, even large districts like Nashville, with 76,000 students, can implement effective cloud practices, he said.

"I work in a huge district that's incredibly bureaucratic," Alcantar said to conference-goers. "The hierarchy is thick and we're still able to get some of this done. So you can do it too."

K-20 Digital Advances Seen as Slow

K-12 and postsecondary institutions are moving toward a vision of technology-rich, 21st-century education, albeit very slowly, says a new survey by the education division of the Washington-based Software and Information Industry Association, or SIIA.

The vision, outlined by SIIA, measures schools on 21st century tools, anytime/anywhere access, differentiated learning, assessment tools, and enterprise support. Roughly 650 educators representing all levels of K-20 education participated in this annual survey, which is in its third year.

The survey, released at the ISTE conference here in Denver on Tuesday, found that postsecondary institutions were ahead of K-12 schools in every category except the development of data systems to track student data and achievement, which researchers attributed to the push for tracking student data in K-12 that was spurred by the No Child Left Behind Act.

Overall, education institutions scored highest on implementing security tools to protect student data and privacy, as well as securing high-speed broadband access for communication and administrative needs. Areas where education institutions scored the lowest included creating electronic portfolios of student work and providing online courses to ensure that all students have access to high-quality instruction regardless of location.

The overall average on all 20 indicators, on a scale of 0-100 percent, was 62.2 percent, which is 0.39 percentage points higher than last year's results, and 1.34 percentage points higher than the results from 2008.

Karen Billings, the vice president of SIIA's education division, said the slow growth could be at least partially explained by the economic downturn. However, to reach the goals outlined by SIIA's vision anytime soon, education institutions are going to have to greatly increase their rate of progress, she pointed out.

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