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.

'Time for a Revolution'

"We're way past reform," said Jeff Piontek, the head of school at the Hawaii Technology Academy, in his closing keynote speech at the ISTE conference in Denver. "It's time for a revolution in education."

The former science educator and head of the state-sponsored charter school spoke to a packed auditorium on the final day of the conference about the importance of following your passion and infusing creativity and innovation into the STEM subjects. In fact, he recommended changing the well-known acronym, which refers to the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math, to STEAM, the extra "A" referring to the arts, an idea that elicited applause from the audience.

"It's creativity and innovation that's going to drive our economy," said Piontek, criticizing the standardized tests that he said stifled learning and creativity in public schools across the country. Standardized tests "are not a true gauge of student learning," he said. "We need to think about how we actually assess students on a larger scale."

Educators must give students the technological tools and resources they need to become competent global citizens, said Piontek. Teachers must learn to guide students with content and curriculum and trust that the students will know how to use the tools, he said. "When you're in a classroom, you have to know that the culture you're teaching is not your own," he said, referring to the gap between those who have grown up using digital tools and those who have not.

Piontek's comments echoed most of the panelists, speakers, researchers, and educators I heard from here at the ISTE conference this year. Rethinking the way students are taught and assessed, using technology to support learning, and supplying students with the tools and resources they need to learn through real-world projects is a sentiment that prevailed throughout the conference, and one that Piontek encouraged educators to take with them when they return to their schools throughout the country and the world.

Citing the Real Author, Not Mr. Google

Putting its stamp on another hot topic at the ISTE 2010 ed-tech conference in Denver, the International Society for Technology in Education on Wednesday explained an evolving web-literacy curriculum developed with Microsoft and gathered feedback from conference-goers.

Critical Thinking In the Classroom focuses on teaching students to be responsible cyber researchers. The lessons, which can be downloaded for free, are available at three ability levels and are broken into five units: the mechanics of searching, validity and reliability, plagiarism, citing Web sources, and civil discourse.

Chris O'Neal, the ISTE faculty member who collaborated on the curriculum, said the program is aimed at changing the habits of students who have a quick Internet trigger, but not a natural skepticism of what they find on the other end of the search field barrel or an awareness of where it comes from. Some younger students, he said, even think everything they find on a search engine is the search engine's own content.

"We asked [students], 'Would you make life decisions based on the first [Web] page that comes up?'" O'Neal said. "And some kids really said, 'Well, it depends what the question is.' "

The ISTE-Microsoft venture comes at a time when digital responsibility is becoming a topic of national—and federal—discussion. The National Broadband Plan, released in March by the Federal Communications Commission, is calling for increased focus on digital literacy. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education and Karen Cator, its director of education technology, want students to gain a grasp of digital citizenship, the concept of understanding and evaluating your actions as a member of a digital community. The ISTE-Microsoft curriculum scratches the surface of those issues in its civil discourse unit.

"When we posed these questions to a whole bunch of media specialists in the country, that's something that came back," O'Neal said. "Kids have a real hard time being in blogs and being civil. ... They're reading a statement someone says as truth, and getting really, really ticked off about it."

Other organizations are developing curricula that more thoroughly tackle the citizenship issue. Look for a blog post about one of them when the conference disperses and yours truly is back at EdWeek's Bethesda, Md., headquarters.

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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