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We keep in close communication with our users, so these trends were no surprise to the Haiku team. In fact, if you’re familiar with our approach to updating our learning management system then you know that we constantly collaborate with educators to learn how students learn and teachers teach. That knowledge enables us to evolve Haiku LMS to meet the actual needs of actual people rather than impose our ideas for what we deem useful features.

We’re pleased that our learning management system already offers much of what educators do and will need going forward:

• Online gradebook and class rosters
• Chat*
• Online interaction with teachers*
• Assignments and student calendars
• Announcements
• Learning and course management

* Chat and online interaction get an asterisk because they’re features that are already in the works for Haiku LMS. In the meantime, third-party services like VoiceThread meet the need for these functionalities and are integrated into Haiku LMS via our Embed the Web™ feature.

More information about how to obtain the original, full report is available in the SIIA press release (pdf).

What other trends do you see?

Something for Everyone

While some people talk the talk about the applications and implications of blended learning, schools around the United States are actually walking the walk. The article “Schools Factoring E-Courses Into the Daily Learning Mix” provides first-hand evidence that blended learning has boundless benefits. For a rural district in Idaho it enables students to take courses like foreign language that aren’t available in their own building; for students in Los Angeles it enables students to avoid scheduling conflicts that inevitably result when so many choices and activities are available. In each case, online courses are integrated into the school day, and schools increasingly see the valuable role online offerings can play alongside traditional classes (4). The article also notes strategies for successful implementation of a blended learning program, including on-site resources like mentors and computer labs.

A Shift in Mindset

Blended learning can also reduce dropout rates. An estimate in the article “Detroit-Area District Innovates to Address Dropout Problem” puts the dropout rate in metropolitan Detroit at 40 percent. With Detroit’s economy in crisis, jobs are scarce for adults let alone adolescents who have given up on education. Westwood Community School District offers at-risk students an alternative to the traditional classroom setting: blended learning. The approach is markedly different even in semantics: class participants are “researchers” rather than “students,” and they engage course content through online classes, project-based learning, and in-person support (6).

Worth a Read

Other articles in the issue touch on topics like synchronous and asynchronous classes, enrollment caps, and funding. This report is one you don’t want to miss. It’s available to download from the Education Week website.

This is a huge step forward for online and blended learning because it further underscores the increasing momentum and success of digital learning. Such a shift to digital content ensures that schools will be able to keep content current and ultimately to tie that content directly into their online classrooms to provide students with even more resources.

There are a number of content providers that are already publishing great content for students, and this latest announcement is just one more indication that digital information is here to stay.

It’s past time to consider what’s necessary to succeed …

He makes a strong case. We as a country got caught up in attaining The American Dream and failed to continuously align public education with our evolving goals and expectations. Now American workers are paying for that myopic mindset, having lost the competitive edge over foreign workers and even robots and computers. Those who are currently succeeding and will continue to thrive, Friedman says, are those with the gumption “to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies.” These people, says Friedman, are the untouchables.

… but we can make changes that will better position our future.

At a time when a college degree isn’t the ticket to success it once provided, we need to be smarter about school and teach skills that go beyond facts and figures. To Friedman, that means improving “entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.”

Haiku Learning’s take: we’re already on our way

Friedman may be right, and we’re glad he spoke up. While a retooling of the public school system gets debated and worked out at a national level, we’re seeing a grassroots movement in the Haiku community that indicates individual schools and teachers are already pushing in new directions. They’re setting up virtual classes that support their real-world classrooms, and in many cases the courses are exclusively online. They’re challenging students to think beyond what they read on the page and to apply knowledge and reasoning that really stretch their thinking.

You have until October 21 to submit feedback. You can view the standards and give input online:www.corestandards.org/Standards/index.htm.

Speak Up

The Haiku team encourages you to review the standards and add your voice to the conversation. We’re excited about the opportunity that common standards will provide in terms of shared content and shared teaching and learning strategies, yet we recognize that it will take an extraordinary effort to implement the metrics and to ensure that they truly are benefiting students.

The initiative is led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Forty-eight states and three U.S. territories have joined the effort. See the complete list.

This article in the New York Times summarizes the report well. The complete report is available as a PDF as well.

Web 2.0 tools invite innovation

eSchoolNews further touched on this topic of online learning with its article “Schools get help in using Web 2.0 tools” that summarizes a whitepaper by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) about using the Web in the classroom. In short, the CoSN found an increasing interest in identifying new needs for new systems rather than looking for new systems to solve old needs; in other words, it’s crucial to rethink existing structures and whether they require an overhaul.

Web 2.0 tools make it possible for convenient collaboration, which means more people are engaged and have a voice — and that includes everyone from administrators to community members.

We’re encouraged by these findings because they demonstrate just how much online education has evolved in the past few years in terms of its advantages, acceptance and wide-spread use, and quality and effectiveness of the available tools. Haiku LMS will constantly evolve as we continue to collaborate with teachers, schools, and districts to brainstorm new ideas and features that will make their online environment an even more effective teaching and learning framework.

Mott’s post does an excellent job of articulating the benefits of portfolios and the importance of students maintaining them, so I’ll refer you to his post to read more in-depth discussion.

Key Benefits of Online Portfolios

• Track and assess student learning and progress over the course of years, not months
• Enable students to take ownership of their work and see their development and learning through their portfolio rather than solely through grades
• Provide an intentional venue for students to connect ideas and knowledge across disciplines

Introducing the Haiku LMS ePortfolio

The Haiku team agrees whole-heartedly with Mott when he writes “Until learning tools and content become more malleable (i.e. open, modular, and interoperable) we will not realize the full potential of an interconnected, networked world in education.” That sentence encapsulates the Haiku philosophy, and his post provides an opportunity for Haiku to tout a new feature we’ll be releasing in July: ePortfolio. Without spilling all the juicy details just yet, one valuable function is the ability for a student to export their ePortfolio as HTML and take it with them if they change schools; if students are expected to produce quality, comprehensive work then they must be able to take it with them to truly experience ownership.

Watch www.haikuls.com for an announcement about the ePortfolio release.
 

Led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the initiative is intended to help students across the nation acquire a universal set of skills that will enable them to compete in the global market.

What This Means

The details of the initiative will be in the works in the coming months, though developing common education standards does increase opportunity on a number of fronts:

• Teachers and districts could develop and share curriculum and resources across state lines
• Students could transfer from one state to another and acclimate more easily into the new district’s educational program
• Community members could bring ideas from other regions and adopt or adapt them in their own district

For Haiku LMS users this is great news! A common set of standards has a number of benefits, including:

• Enabling the Haiku team to easily, effectively tag content, which would potentially make searches more relevant for Haiku teachers.
• Making one of Haiku’s upcoming features, Benchmarks, even more valuable because tagged benchmarks would be relevant to everyone across the U.S.
• Lowering the resources involved in tagging and organizing content, which means less work for the Haiku team, less work for content creators, and cost savings across the industry.
   

The study highlights a number of advantages of virtual courses and schools, including:

• Expanding the toolsets and opportunities for high-quality content and instructors available to students
• Increasing the flexibility of learning time in terms of full-time or supplemental online courses
• Enabling self-paced courses that allow students to focus on learning course content
• Potentially reducing cost-per-student per course (which depends in part on whether a district plans to implement its own online course catalog or contract with a K-12 online course provider)

By and large these advantages benefit all stakeholders — students, educators, districts, parents, and communities — because they increase opportunity through availability. No longer does geographic location limit topics a student can study, specialized classes that a teacher can teach, courses that a district can offer, interests that a parent can encourage, or educational options that a community can provide. In particular for communities seeking to attract new families, distance learning may provide the educational advantage that families seek when relocating.

Expanded Opportunities

Noting that in real-world education “smaller schools have the greatest disadvantage in their ability to offer a broad range of [real-world] courses to meet student needs” largely due to the availability of staffing and financial resources, the study recommends that districts assess their needs and capabilities when evaluating distance education programs. That is, what do students need, and is the district itself or a course provider better suited to meet that need? For smaller schools this could mean offering students a greater variety of courses to take or teachers more opportunities to share their expertise beyond the district.

Teaching in the Classroom and Online

At a time when teachers are increasingly expected to utilize current technology, it seems that the skills required of educators shift as well; not only are they responsible for their content areas and course preparation, but also to potentially master the art of online instruction. The study notes on page six that “states such as Georgia and Washington have added online teaching requirements to their teacher certification systems,” which will certainly go a long way toward learning in-class and online instruction, but what are learning management systems doing to minimize the learning curve for teachers and students new to the virtual world?

The Haiku team works hard to keep Haiku LMS easy-to-use, fun, and intuitive so that teachers keep their creativity and control of their courses. We’re thrilled to see a study that highlights the benefits of distance learning and the advantages of online courses – both supplemental and full-time – and we’ll keep collaborating with teachers to make sure that Haiku LMS does what they need and stays out of their way.