Haiku Learning Blog

Common standards for American schoolchildren’s education appear to be on the horizon. As reported by The Washington Post on May 31, 46 states and three U.S. territories are collaborating to create a set of common reading and math standards for K-12 students.

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.
   

Last week The Center for American Progress released a new study that the Haiku team is excited to share with you. The study, Getting Students More Learning Time Online: Distance Education in Support of Expanded Learning Time in K-12 Schools (pdf), finds that virtual schools and courses are playing an increasingly important role in American K-12 education.

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.