E-Learning and Public Education

Cross-Posted on August 21, 2012 

CLASSROOM 21 | by Greg Limperis

 

Let’s face it:great blended, online, virtual digital public schools and courses will always be few and far between. The problem with public education is that it is habitually underfunded. For years, I remember being in a classroom and struggling to get things such as paper to use in my class before going paperless. Today, we want schools to build great online virtual lessons and courses for our students. Before last year, my wife used to be one of the best classroom teachers out there. She has the skills to come up with great lessons, but lacks the technical prowess—and the time—to bring those lessons to fruition.

Creating great online courses are a lot of work, and I know this from personal experience. Last year, when I took on my new position as the Supervisor of Instructional Technology and Media for my school district, my wife left teaching in the classroom for multiple reasons. She became an Instructional Designer consultant working with Elearning Innovation as a representative of Technology Integration in Education. Their products are excellent. The company develops custom online learning solutions for universities and other educational entities. While the output they create is very professional and top quality, it takes lots of hard work and planning. It’s literally a full-time, blossoming company and there are simply not enough hours in the day. They create great courses such as the one offered this month on TIE. If you haven’t checked out the series of Balanced Literacy workshops offered for free this month on TIE, check them out.  They’re very professional, but they weren't created by a single person. It took a team of people to create what you see.

According to Edudemic.com and one of their latest infographics, creating effective e-learning takes at least five people and hundreds of man hours. It requires a project manager, instructional designer, multimedia designer, e-learning developer, and a quality assurance manager. As the infographic states, “effective online learning requires approximately 200 total man hours per instructional hour of enhanced e-learning.” Two hundred man-hours per instructional hour for any professional can get expensive real quick. Creating the courses offered this month for free on TIE was not easy, nor was it cheap. It took lots of planning, hard work and money in order to create these workshops.

Can today’s public education support this? Do they have the expertise or the money to ensure the creation of excellent and effective online digital learning?  Can they go it alone? The answer is, it will take companies such as Elearning Innovation to create mass amounts of content that can be chosen from and accessed by schools and districts for a fee. In the future, schools will provide the necessary teachers to moderate these courses that were created by someone else, for them. Various teachers throughout a district will use the courses. Cost of creating these courses will be offset by the advertisement space that will be sold within them. They’ll be created in such a way that the course facilitator can customize them in order to meet both their individual instructional needs and the needs of his or her students.

Who creates your e-learning courses for your district? How dynamic are they? Could they be better if you had a staff of professionals to dedicate to them? It’s time we start to work together to bring great content together. Dynamic lessons can be created and shared across districts and states. Thanks to the new Common Core Standards, this is now possible. We can and must share the burden and cost of creating these courses, but we can also share in the final product. We can create a repository of courses to choose from with online digital professional development created in the same way. We can pay for it through advertising and company sponsorship.

Regardless of how we approach online e-learning in public education, we have to think of doing it in a way that is not just cost effective, engaging, and well planned; we have to do it in a way that doesn’t overburden our already-strained public school educators. It’s time for real, effective e-learning in public education.

The Connected Educator

Cross Posted on EdTech Digest| by Greg Limperis

August marks the U.S. Department of Education’s month-long celebration of the connected educator. What exactly does that mean to you, to me, and to millions of students we educate daily in this world? Well, years ago, I began teaching students before I even knew I wanted to be an educator. Growing up I was a Boy Scout and later on earned my Eagle Scout status. One lesson I took away from the experience: no one ever does anything successfully alone. Earning badges, acquiring skills and gaining knowledge all took help, guidance and collaboration. Through this I increased my skills. In my acceptance speech for Eagle Scout, I thanked everyone who helped make it all possible as do many humble people who also know this secret of success.

For sure, I was growing my connections, but my connections were limited. In a mid-sized city, my reach extended only so far. I could only connect, learn and grow from so many. My inability to cover more territory left me wanting more, and this was one reason I went off to college. To learn more, see more and experience more were great incentives. To meet others with different experiences meant the world to me.

Little did I know that, at the time, I was increasing my connections but still limited to the here and now. I had to connect with people next to me who were living and experiencing the same things as me in the present time.

Nonetheless, it was amazing that this urge forward, this desire to learn from others and share, connect and collaborate brought me to my first real job. Out of college with no goal or plan in place, I became a National Park Ranger. I met people from around the globe. They visited my place of work for a short time and in that time, we connected. I learned from them in ways I hadn’t been able to do before. I developed real and meaningful connections and learned about others from across the world, through their eyes and the experiences they shared.

During this time, one of those connections suggested to me that I might return to school to become an educator. And so it was that I found myself heading back to the place I first began to open my eyes to the world, where I learned to share and help others. I was again growing my connections.

Upon completing my master’s degree in education, I began working as a teacher in a classroom situation that felt foreign. Trapped within four walls with very little connection to the outside world, I was able to learn and share through text and pictures, but it wasn’t the same. Everyone I worked with, taught to, and experienced things with were entirely too similar to me. We all grew up in the same region. We all lived there, worked there, experienced many of the same things. Yes, I had technology 15 years ago in my classroom. And yes, I used it all the time. But I was still stuck within my four walls every day. We could imagine, but we couldn’t truly experience.

As the years went by and technology improved, I never lost my passion to be connected. I constantly sought out ways to grow and learn from others. Four years ago, Steve Hargadon turned me on to the power of Web 2.0 and the ability for all of us to be connected. Once again, I gained back that connected feeling. Then along came Facebook, Twitter, build-your-own social networks, LinkedIn and more. Now, I was connecting in ways I never thought possible.

These connections allowed me to bring knowledge, experience and global awareness to my students I taught each day. More importantly, through these connections I gained knowledge and experiences I never had before. I was learning from others in ways I never thought possible, sharing valuable knowledge and experience.

It’s fitting that we celebrate the Connected Educator in August, but I think it is something  that shouldn’t be confined to the U.S.  That’s nearly silly when our classroom is so much larger than that. Why not connect and share with the world, on a global scale? Why not celebrate it worldwide? I have nearly 2,000 personal connections thanks to LinkedIn. I have nearly 25,000 people I connect with in one way or another globally, each day. That’s right—globally. I am now a truly connected educator, and I call on you to be one, too. I blog monthly, sharing my insights, thoughts and experiences with others worldwide. I participate in the exchange of resources on a daily basis. I talk live thanks to technology with people halfway around the globe. I learn more about them and they about me in experiences that forever change my life. I don’t see a way that I can continue to teach and to not be connected.

So, I challenge you: connect with others. Celebrate connectivity! Not from the U.S.? Call on your country to join ours and let us all be connected educators, learning from each other daily, learning from others who see things from other people’s point of view. Let’s live, grow and learn together. Let us all become true connected educators.

The Best Professional Development I Never Had

Posted on July 5, 2012 

CLASSROOM 21 | by Greg Limperis

As summer quickly approaches so does the time for teacher professional development. While teachers frequently attend professional development throughout the school year and after school hours, we’re also asked (or required) to take additional professional development over the summer months to keep our certification up to date or to prepare us for the next school year as new initiatives roll out. Recently, I began to reflect on some of the best professional development experiences I’ve ever had — and it gave me pause. The best professional development experiences I’ve ever had were the kind that I didn’t have to go to.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against professional development in any way. I’m also a big believer in continuous learning. Thanks to technology, the teaching profession is changing at exponential speed and we certainly need to stay ahead of the curve. Nonetheless, looking back I realize that any professional development I had to go to — wasn’t the kind that I personally would have chosen for myself.

Often, professional development provided for teachers is not in the subject they teach. Focused on raising test scores, it’s test content centric and not otherwise instructionally or generally helpful. There is no love of learning, no love of teaching woven into it. Only a love of learning and teaching will result in creating students solidly prepared for life in the real world as productive, contributing citizens and responsible leaders. Only those students who follow their passions will achieve true success in what they do.

Donald Trump once said that his success came from finding his passion. Trump said when you find your passion, doing the work to succeed in that passion no longer seems like work. Putting in extra time to be successful isn’t a problem, therefore, because you’re enjoyingwhat you do. That’s a mantra to live by.

So, ask me to sit in on professional development that I didn’t choose and I come in with a preconception that it doesn’t pertain to me nor will it necessarily interest me. Precisely because you haven’t consulted my power to choose, you’ve got a bit of an uphill battle on your hands. Now you’ve got to win me over. Allow a teacher choice and they select what interests them — and they move forward with an open mind. Then I’m excited about what you’re going to show me, and I want to learn more.

Of course, this means there should be many choices. And it follows that I would need to be provided with at least some opportunities that would likely align with my passions. This type of professional development would more likely result in my sharing what I learned with students or other staff. But I really need this PD to happen whenever it’s best for me. Because — let’s face it. Life gets busy for us all. Sometimes PD is inconvenient. I have things I have to get done, PD is only one of them. Offer it to me when I’m in the midst of grading papers late at night after a long day or working on progress reports or report cards and my mind will be elsewhere.

On the other hand, it would be easier to participate in something I’m both passionate about and that interests me. I can always watch an inspiring video, take part in a stimulating simulation, be part of a conversation, webinar, chat or professional learning network.

Even so, I need to be given skills that I don’t already have. How do you know what you’re showing me isn’t something I’ve already mastered — but perhaps someone else in the room has yet to grasp it? I need my PD to be individualized, just as my students need the same sort of instruction from me. Are we not, as educators, expected to be lifelong learners? Dare we ask our staff to participate in PD that doesn’t mirror the instruction we ourselves need to provide? We ask our students to sit in groups to really engage, but we sit through slide presentations? We don’t engage teachers, we do little to help them pursue their passion — and yet, we expect them to go back to the classroom and engage their students, to get them to get their students to pursue their passions and have their students assume the role of a lifelong learner?

I’m a lifelong learner. I am passionate. But please, don’t work that out of me by providing PD that doesn’t engage, that isn’t convenient, and that is geared for the masses and ignores my individual needs. Why not give me PD that I seldom get: the kind I go out and seek on my own. I go to conferences whenever I can. I sign up for workshops that interest me. I go home and try out these things I learned on my own to help myself to become a better educator. I belong to a Professional Learning Network (PLN) that allows me to converse with like-minded professionals in ways that allow me to develop and grow — on my own time and frequently online. Give me an avenue to find the answers I need from my peers, as well as experts in the field in which I need the help. Do so at a time and place that’s convenient to me. Let me be the professional that I am, and I will want to become better at what I do.

However, if I am not and if I don’t, then perhaps I’m not in the right profession. Maybe I need to consider finding somewhere else to go to find my passion. But if you help me do this, we both will be forever grateful. Otherwise, keep forcing PD on me I did not choose at an inconvenient time and that isn’t individualized and you’ll continue to get results from your PD that you never intended to get.