למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

For bringing the startup model to schools.

Despite charging about $30,000 for tuition, AltSchool’s losses are piling up as it spends at a pace of about $40 million per year.

"Closing any school is painful," AltSchool founder and CEO Max Ventilla said in an interview. "But ultimately the path for the company to be sustainable and impactful is to provide the platform we're developing to schools we don't directly operate."

Ventilla expressed frustration that AltSchool, which previously received criticism for focusing its attention on private schools serving mostly wealthy families, is now taking flak for choosing to prioritize efforts to serve a broader universe of more diverse students in the public-school sector.

For outside schools, the company charges about $150 to $500 annually per student for its technology, depending on the size of the institution. AltSchool said it currently has hundreds of students at partner schools and will soon have more than a thousand. Its tools help teachers dole out assignments, keep tabs on a students’ work and make adjustments based on performance.

student-centered learning practices tend to share a common (if sometimes unspoken) goal: to develop learners’ capability for self-directed, lifelong learning by granting more control and responsibility for the learning process

There is no active role for the learner in this “personalized” experience. These systems reduce all the richness and complexity of deciding what a learner should be doing to – sometimes literally – a “Next” button. As these systems painstakingly work to learn how each student learns, the individual students lose out on the opportunity to learn this for themselves. Continued use of a system like this seems likely to create dependency in learners, as they stop stretching their metacognitive muscles and defer all decisions about what, when, and how long to study to The Machine.

to develop an approach that – if you’ll pardon the play on words – puts the person back in personalization

We believe very strongly in this “machine provides recommendations, people make decisions” paradigm.

First, Lumen is acknowledging that though developing learners’ understanding of the material is critical, there is a higher, more profound goal of learner autonomy.

Second, Lumen is using the power of learning analytics to improve learning habits through self-reflectiveness as a means to travel on the path toward autonomy.

There are lots of ways that a thoughtful user interface designer can think about progressively revealing some of this information and providing “nudges” that encourage students on certain paths while still giving them the knowledge and freedom they need to make choices for themselves.

This is so rare. More often than not, our curricula rushes past lower, imprecise, informal, concrete rungs on the ladder of abstraction straight for the highest, most precise, most formal, most abstract ones. That’s a disservice to our learners and the process of learning.

You can always ask a student to move higher but it’s difficult to ask a student to move lower, forgetting what they’ve already seen. You can always ask for precisely plotted points of a model on a coordinate plane. But once you ask for them you can’t unask for them. You can’t then ask the question, “What might the model look like?” Because they’re looking at what the model looks like. So the Times asks you to sketch the relationship before showing you the precise graph.

We asked you to take the trouble to draw a line because we think doing so makes you think carefully about the relationship

The lesson builds your thinking into its instruction.

It is a common view that "if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand." Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students. They feel like they are learning and become more confident in their answers, but tests reveal they haven't learned anything.

K-12 has been using the computer to automate direct instruction, the pedagogy that has dominated K-12 for the past 120+ years. In automating direct instruction, the computer has been and is being used to present information and drill learners. As Schuler, et al. pointed out, more than 80 percent of the apps in Apple’s iPad store are some form of digital flash card. While drilling learners via an iPad may be more fun for the children, drilling is still drilling, and the gains from using iPads have been modest – incremental at best.

The 11 Barriers to Technology Adoption

We have said it before — and been beaten up for saying it, by the way — but we will say it again: to a first approximation, the impact of 50 years of computing technologies on K-12 education has been zero.

When an early adopting science teacher visited a third-grade classroom to demonstrate the inquiry-oriented pedagogical practice of “fostering conversation through question asking," one student piped up: “Why are you asking us questions? Your job is [to] provide us with answers, not questions.”

If the tests are about “this or that fact,” then it is not surprising that personalized learning, with its focus on competency-based learning of “this or that fact,” is seeing significant adoption in U.S. schools.

Personalized learning does increase test scores!

The technologies and systems to deliver goods and services that meet individual customers’ needs with near mass production efficiency

Individualization refers to instruction that is paced to the learning needs of different learners. Learning goals are the same for all students, but students can progress through the material at different speeds according to their learning needs. For example, students might take longer to progress through a given topic, skip topics that cover information they already know, or repeat topics they need more help on. Differentiation refers to instruction that is tailored to the learning preferences of different learners. Learning goals are the same for all students, but the method or approach of instruction varies according to the preferences of each student or what research has found works best for students like them.

The Obama administration wants to provide at least $200 million to support educators in their transition to digital learning. A top administration priority is helping educators integrate technology into the curriculum and use digital resources to personalize learning, he said.

Setting aside the fact that the ultimate goal in most discussions of this topic, and certainly for the corporate “solutions”, is to improve standardized test scores, I find something very wrong with those two terms, “individualize” and “personalize”.

And when I look at the context surrounding the pronouncements about personalized learning by Duncan and other education “experts”, not to mention in the marketing materials from any number of vendors, there is very little about including students in the decision making process.