Dance of Digital Curriulum and Teacher Education

This week I received a message from a group of K-12 innovators developing New High Technology High Schools (Napa California model - http://www.newtechhigh.org/School/about/about_default.asp ) of 400 students for each of North Carolina’s 100 counties. Their response after reviewing the eSATS design, “The technology portion is amazing and we are all wish the same for NC students! The NC educators that I shared this with found it very interesting and requested more specific information about the curriculum.”

I met last week with director of curriculum for a major university’s college of education. He works closely with K-12 digital curriculum enterprises. He lamented that they focused on transforming legacy text based curriculum into digital format instead of using what meager eLearning based pedagogy that exists to create more effective digital curriculum.

Two years ago I interviewed most of the thirty presidents of Arizona’s eLearning enterprises. As a group their major concern was their current offerings were based on adaptation of “office technology to legacy education processes” which was severely limiting their prospect for future innovation. They wanted GAZEL (www.gazel.org) to work on creating eLearning research specific federal funding and advocate for building of eLearning research infrastructure.

I have been conversion for 15 years with Henry Kelly of now president of the Federation of American Scientists (then of the White House Office of Research) (http://www.fas.org/main/content.jsp?formAction=297&contentId=69). His series of analyses starting in 1988 in the defunct Congressional Office of Technology Assessment show that research in the application of technology to the learning process is (now) about $200 million a year while the research in the application of technology to the health care process is about $50 billion a year.

Within the eSATS design we have seven major components:

Teacher and staff education and professional development;

Digital curriculum for each student with integrated formative assessment;

Assessment, accountability, access to instruction, decision support data system;

One broadband Internet computer interface per student in the classroom;

Full onsite technical support – 99% up time;

eLearning Centered Schools funded for student mastering a curriculum year;

Innovation Central to manage the ten year transformational process.

Expect for the first two, all can be readily implemented with customer acceptance, innovative zeal and startup funding. And these two are caught in a three way virtuous circle inherent within any innovation life cycle:

eLearning digital curriculum is just now emerging from an agglomeration of “other” technologies to being developed with rudimentary K-12 student eLearning pedagogy. Pedagogy for education eLearning teachers will always lag the emergence of K-12 student eLearning pedagogy. But the development of student eLearning pedagogy requires field testing in an environment rich in the use of eLearning digital curriculum.

Fortunately the past twenty years has produced digital curriculum for K-12 education that provides a significant academic performance boost (effect factor over 0.45 [i.e. C student starts getting B+’s] -- A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Teaching and Learning With Technology on Student Outcomes, Learning Point Assoc. [NCREL] www.learningpt.org ) when integrated with legacy education.

Full statewide implementation of eSATS will take ten years. As eSATS rolls out 1:1 computing to all Arizona schools a rich eLearning environment for eLearning pedagogy research will be created. Teachers will become savvy on how to use the current digital curriculum. eLearning pedagogy based digital curriculum products will begin to emerge just about the time Arizona schools will be ready for them. With eSATS funded continuous education and professional development Arizona teachers will be to rapidly adopt the emerging eLearning pedagogy in the classroom.

By embracing the virtuous circle with eSATS, Arizona will serve its K-12 student needs. The global eLearning research community and eLearning enterprises will find Arizona K-12 system a very attractive place to conduct research and product field testing.

This virtuous cycle will accelerate Arizona K-12 eLearning success and provide a model for the rest of the country. We also become the driver for unleashing the global research community to address eLearning based digital curriculum.