Carpe Diem Seizes the Day

01/02/007

I had a lively chat with Rick Ogston yesterday. He is president of the Carpe Diem eLearning Community a 6-12 charter school in Yuma (rogston@cdayuma.com, www.cdayuma.com , 928-210-5777.

The Carpe Diem purpose build school is designed for hybrid eLearning. This concept is spot-on. As we start moving up this innovation-transition from legacy education to eLearning there will be a good ten to fifteen years where eLearning learning model will be hybrid. We do not yet have adequate knowledge on teacher practice and digital curriculum to jump in full (hedge) hog, as their mascot implies.

The school building outer periphery has elearning stations (cubicles) for each of their 300 students. In the center are larger workshop rooms for up to 30 students. They have a special arrangement where Florida Virtual School provides the comprehensive core subject digital curriculum to the eLearning workstations. The teachers move from student to student assisting them and providing guidance. The electronic testing by the digital curriculum provides individually paced assessments of each learning module,

For Arts and many electives the student are involved and projects and programs within the Yuma community. One partner is the Yuma Community Arts Foundation. The teachers gather students in the workshop rooms to present concepts and assess their process. A very rough average of student class time is 70% learning station and 30% workshop.

Rick has two current challenges. One is finding a really good means to bring reading levels of faltering students up to the AIMS criteria level. The MCREL study, November of 2005 Robert Blomeyer (Robert.bolmeyer@elearningpt.org), http://www.ncrel.org/tech/reading/index.html, that we flagged last month has been helpful his quest.

The other challenge finding the best teacher education and professional development curriculum and sources. Rick needs to increase the capabilities of his teachers specific to his unique hybrid eLearning system.

Any ideas out there for Rick Ogston of Carpe Diem at the gateway to Arizona and the new world of eLearning.