User:Computercolin/Education Project Brainstorm 22 March

TODO / Questions

 * Do we need to mention background?
 * Multiple intelligences

22 Mar 2010

Red Hat Scope Project Proposal Brainstorm 2 Project Proposal

A process to use for creating new educational software
Start with a vision/manifesto that makes very clear what kinds of people will passionately want to work to create and improve this software and what the ideal endpoint looks like. Decide to act primarily as an integrator of diverse tools and make them more accessible OR primarily build a new piece of software that meets a specific, unmet need. Seek out a user group that is diverse and ALREADY DOES PERSONALIZED LEARNING fairly well. Build tools to make THEM efficient, not traditional schools.

The Future of Personalized Education
Personalized Education will require a number of tools and processes that currently are not practiced in the "factory model" of education. A handful are:


 * Assessment
 * New strategies (multiple success-critera pathways)
 * E-Portfolio
 * Visualization
 * Cirriculum
 * Individualized curriculum design
 * Understanding by design (UbD by Wiggins and McTighe)
 * Collaboration
 * Collaboration

Making Teachers Designers

 * Teachers bridge high level state goals with individual student needs
 * Teachers integrate a variety of concepts/goals around student passions

OSS Curriculum/Assesment Development
Personalized learning requires entirely new forms of curriculum and assessment from what exists today under the factory model. Currently governments set learning goals for its schools and enforce these goals with cumulative exams. Both the instruction and the evaluation follow a factory model. Personalized instruction will require personalize evaluation. The ways in which goverment design standards, educators create learning plans, and students are evaluated will all have to be individualized.

For the sake of example, the Understanding by Design model produces an individual learning plan by the following process:

Districts set goals (high level and broad) =>       Educators define Objectives from goals (measurable) =>               Educators create assessments pathways that prove/disprove attainment of an objective

How do districts and educators complete this process? We think software tools for completing these steps would be beneficial for two reasons: 1) software tools guide teachers and make the process simpler 2) software tools allow teachers to share components of their curriculum and conserve efforts.

Another example. In the Understanding by Design system, students are expected to have different intelligences. Fulfillining a goal like "deep understanding of human physiology" would boil down to many different assessments. One instructor thinks to assess students based on their abilty to draw and label an organ system (a task suited for visual students). Another thinks to assess students based on their ability to demonstrate with props the contractions of chambers of the heart. Personalized learning requires that students have an assessment pathway that fits their intelligences. No educator can brainstorm as many vaild, assessment pathways as a community of educators looking (through a software tool) at the assessment pathways of many other educators.

Why a Collaborative Cirriculum Design Lends to the Software Realm

 * State standards create an index to which each assessment can be mapped
 * Topic vocabulatory is limited and lends itself to search and pattern matching
 * Understanding by Design is a fairly concrete, reproducable process
 * Great brainstorming advantages develop from collaboration--educators are not in a position to collaborate in person

New Forms of Individualized Curriculum

 * Diving board goals (students fill in specific areas from a template/set of guiding prompts)
 * Learning contract between students and instructor

Research and Piloting
Past experience has shown plenty of opportuntities to work with local Graduate Education programs. This kind of partnership would be highly beneficial.