eLearning Census Infographic: How Districts Blend Their Learning

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Brian Bridges

During the 2012 California eLearning Census, we were not surprised to find that the predominant blended learning model was the Self Blend (now renamed A la Carte). After all, eLearning was just reaching the tipping point and a significant number of eLearners were disruptors, those students whose needs weren’t being met by traditional schools.

In 2013, though, we’re finding that districts and direct-funded charters are becoming more comfortable with online and blended learning. Numbers of involved students have grown within each district and 34% were utilizing more than one blended model. When we disaggregated the data, we found significant differences between how elementary (k-8) and unified (K-12 and 9-12) districts were blending. Some of this data is listed below. The complete California eLearning Census Report may be found here.

We encourage you to join us at the 2013 eLearning Strategies Symposium that will be held December 6th and 7th at the Hilton Costa Mesa. Governor Bob Wise and Dr. Eric Mazur will keynote on Friday, December 6th. Early-bird registration is just $159 and groups of two or more may register for $149.

eLearning Census Infographic: Districts Planning to eLearn

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Brian Bridges

Yesterday, CLRN published our second annual California eLearning Census report, a detailed look at how school districts and direct-funded charters are implementing online and blended learning in California. The report includes five, themed infographics and each day this week, we’re highlighting one on this blog. The entire report may be downloaded here.

While 46% of all districts and charters are implementing online and blended learning, we asked those that aren’t if they were currently discussing or planning to eLearn. While overall 26% said they were, the disaggregated data shows that 44% of unified (K-12) and high school (9-12) districts were actively engaged.

eLearning Census Infographic: Districts Learning Online

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Brian Bridges

Today, CLRN published the 2013 California eLearning Census report, and you’ll see out executive summary below this post. Download the full report here. Below is the first of five, themed infographics that detail census data that was collected from 516 school districts and direct-funded charters.

Don’t Create a Lousy Online or Blended Course

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Brian Bridges

Online and blended learning, growing 20% to 30% yearly, have reached a tipping point. CLRN’s California eLearning Census, conducted between March and May this year, received responses from 30% of California’s school districts and direct-funded charters. While we found that 45% of all districts and charters are utilizing some form of online or blended learning, we were surprised that of those districts not currently eLearning, one-third were in the planning stages to create online or blended programs. Yes, online and blended learning are trending and many teachers and districts are jumping on the eLearning bandwagon.

Flipped classrooms and the Khan Academy have received national attention as teachers place classroom lectures online and change classroom pedagogy to include project-based work. You may even be thinking of creating an online or blended course yourself. After all, you’ve taught for many years and you’re a master of your curriculum and teaching craft, so those skills should benefit you in creating an online course.

Think again.

Remember how, during your first year of teaching, you spent countless nights creating lesson plans and units only to throw most of them away the following summer? Remember how difficult that first year was? Multiply that times 10 and you’ll have your first year of online or blended learning. I’m not saying, “Don’t do it.” I’m saying that you should go in with both eyes wide open, following the advice I’ve shared below.

We speak from experience. We know a lousy course when we see one. The California Learning Resource Network (CLRN), a state-funded technology service, reviews online and blended courses for their alignments to the Common Core standards, California’s original standards and to iNACOL’s Standards for Quality Online Courses, which we helped write. Under a new partnership with the University of California, online courses must be CLRN-Certified before U.C. will consider them for A-G approval. However, to date, only 25% of the courses we’ve reviewed have received our certification. So, if commercial publishers have so much difficulty creating a high-quality, engaging, and interactive course, what makes you so special?

By all means, dream large. Online and blended learning provide opportunities often unavailable in small and medium sized districts. Opportunities to take an AP course or any world language should be available to all students, not just those in large or affluent districts. Begin with the end in mind, though.

Planning

Most successful projects begin with a thorough planning process that engages stakeholders, reviews research, and carves out a plan that solves a specific problem. Planning for online or blended learning is no different.

This year’s Keeping Pace , an annual census report and analysis of the online and blended landscape, includes a proposed 18^th month planning process with specific tasks for each phase. In the Systemic Planning stage, you bring together stakeholders and perform a needs analysis that asks: 1) What’s the problem you hope to solve? 2) What is your educational goal? 3) Who are the intended student groups? and 4) What are your district’s capabilities and desires?

That’s just the beginning, though, because before creating a solution, you also need to assess your technology infrastructure, your students’ and teachers’ technology skills, the availability of quality, standards-aligned resources, and teacher professional development.

But, assuming you’ve completed a planning process and targeted specific student groups or courses to affect, what’s next?

Normally, I’d suggest at this point a discussion about whether to build or to buy. Should you build courses from scratch (and do you have the capabilities to do so) or should you shop for quality courseware that you can pilot for a year or more?

But, you’ve already made the decision to create a lousy course, so let’s proceed.

Get Thee a Learning Management System

Whether you rent an existing course management system like BlackBoard or install an open source solution like Moodle or Course Builder, an LMS is a framework that contains your content, activities, and assessments, allowing you to track student progress and conduct online asynchronous and synchronous meetings. Whichever direction you choose, spend time mastering all the LMS’ components: installing curriculum, creating class rosters, embedding outside activities, and setting up discussion groups. Don’t start without an LMS, though.

Quality Content

Standards-aligned, engaging content can be purchased from a publisher, found in open source repositories, or created in-house. With iNACOL standard A2 stating, “The course content and assignments are aligned with the state’s content standards..”, you want to make sure that the content you provide students not only teaches (demonstrates) a skill, but also provides students opportunities to practice and assess each skill or standard. CLRN’s reviews include these three components of each standard identified for a course.

Your textbook is not a course though. While textbooks are aligned with the standards and may include practice activities and assessments, placing your book online, be it commercial or open source, is amateurish, at best.

Quality courses will include text though, but not entire chapters printed screen after screen. The better courses CLRN have reviewed include portions of text mixed with video lecture clips, streaming video, simulations, games, and short formative assessments. Creating quality online lessons is a much more time-consuming task than creating face-to-face lessons. Provide ample lead-time to create online lessons.

Engaging Lessons

Online course standard B3 states that course instruction and activities must engage students in active learning, including authentic projects and activities that challenge students beyond knowledge and comprehension. Rather than focus primarily on multiple-choice tests for assessments, it’s best to provide students knowledge work where they create, evaluate, and analyze. Students should regularly participate in online discussion groups, be they synchronous or asynchronous.

Just What Part of the “Accessible” Memo Didn’t You Get?

All teaching and learning materials must be accessible to all students. Period. If you’re creating video lectures, streaming video clips, or providing narrated presentations, each must either have closed-captions or a transcript. Online standard D10, and the Department of Justice, expects it and your students deserve it. Sites like Universal Subtitles are easy to use and allow your captioned videos to play from their site, or you may download the time codes to upload to YouTube.

Professional Development

While you may feel like you’ve mastered your craft when teaching face-to-face, teaching an online or blended course requires a different skill set and mastery of different tools. In an online poll we conducted, online teachers recommended that newly converted online teachers master the following tools before beginning to create an online or blended course: 1) SlideShare or a similar online presentation tool; 2) Collaborative meeting tools and related skills to set-up and conduct online discussions; 3) Portfolio creation tools for students to assemble examples of their authentic work; 4) Synchronous presentation skills because teaching “live” to online students offers completely different challenges and requires new solutions; and 5) Universal Subtitles for creating closed-captions.

One avenue of professional development is the Leading Edge Certification (LEC) for online teachers. The 45-hour LEC course includes units in online pedagogy, building an online community, accessibility, assessment, and preparation. Based on iNACOL’s Quality Standards for Online Teachers, LEC provides an opportunity to become a highly-qualified online educator.

Online and blended learning are growing quickly for a reason. These courses can help personalize learning, allowing schools to vastly expand their course catalogs, and providing students the opportunity to learn any time, any place, any path, or at any pace. We understand your eagerness to provide an online or blended option to your students. Before jumping into the water, though, we just ask that you learn to swim. Anyone can create a lousy course. It takes time, talent, and perseverance to create a great one.

CLRN Online Course Re-Review Policy

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Brian Bridges

As we shared yesterday, CLRN’s review process strives to be fair, unbiased, and non punitive. The CLRN Certification process is one way to shine a light on those courses that meet most of the course and online standards. With CLRN being a state-funded service, we do not charge for our review services. Still, course reviews are time and resource intensive, particularly when you’re striving to be thorough and consistent. While we hope all publishers will continue to improve their courses to be more interactive, engaging, and responsive, we’re unable to conduct full reviews of the same course when publishers slightly improve a course to better meet the standards. Because we want to continue to offer our services at no cost, we’ve modified our policies to provide publishers a narrow window when they’ve made specific improvements to meet the CLRN Certified criteria. Our new policy is listed below.

Secondary Review: New evidence for content or online course standards.

When CLRN’s review teams examine a course for its alignment to content standards and to iNACOL’s Standards for Quality Online Courses, they utilize publisher-provided correlation documents, also known as standards maps. These detail where reviewers should find evidence to confirm a standard’s presence. When a standard is not fully met, CLRN review teams provide a comment about components that are missing.

Once CLRN’s review is complete, we inform publishers that the course review will be published in seven calendar days. At this point, publishers may notify CLRN to publish the review immediately or they may allow the seven days to proceed with CLRN publishing the review afterwards.

However, if a publisher believes that there is new evidence, not previously submitted, that would clarify our review, they should notify CLRN during the seven-day window. CLRN will place a “hold” on the review and will schedule a secondary review for the specific standards for which the publisher provides new evidence. Once this secondary review is completed, CLRN will again inform publishers that the review will be published in seven days. Each course is allowed one secondary review.

Supplemental Update: New content and/or course standards.

Once a course review is published online, CLRN generally does not allow the resource to be re-reviewed for three years unless there is a major update to the course. However, in the case of courses that have not met the qualifications to be CLRN-Certified, CLRN may re-review courses provided the following:

Publishers have augmented the course to strengthen its alignment to the content standards and/or the course standards. Sufficient changes have been made to bring the course into compliance with the CLRN-Certified specifications.
Publishers provide specific evidence and locations about the standards that have been added or strengthened.

CLRN’s first priority during review sessions is to examine new course reviews. CLRN will conduct supplemental updates on a space available basis. Courses will remain in their published state during this time and publishers will be notified of the review results. No secondary review is available for supplemental updates. One supplemental update is permitted per course per year.

Major Course Update.

Courses that have experienced a major update contain substantially new content to meet the Common Core State Standards or California’s original content standards. The course’s structure, media integration, degree of interactivity and engagement, and learning management system have been significantly improved to better meet iNACOL’s course standards, particularly the 11 Instructional Design standards.

Major Course Updates are considered new courses and are reviewed in the order they are received.

CLRN-Certified: Analysis of 55 course reviews

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Brian Bridges

With yesterday’s announcement of CLRN’s partnership with the University of California, online courses must now be CLRN-Certified before U.C. will review them for their A-G requirements. That we’ve set the bar at 80% of both the content standards and the online course standards may be seen as too generous. However, we believe it’s a fair starting point, given that not all standards are equal. The addition of our online course Power Standards requirement ensures that critical standards are met in order to earn CLRN-Certified status. We believe our partnership will help drive course quality and provide stronger courses to our customers.

So, how have CLRN’s currently reviewed courses fared?

Over the past year, CLRN has reviewed 55 online courses from seven publishers. 15 courses from six publishers, 27% of the total, have earned the CLRN-Certified badge. You can easily find certified courses through our search page . Simply select the “CLRN Certified” check-box and narrow your search by subject or grade level. In addition, we’ve added a CLRN-Certified badge to all certified course reviews.

11 additional courses from four publishers met the 80%/80% requirements for content and course standards, but failed to earn certification because of a single Power Standard: online course standard D10, which requires that course materials are accessible to all students. In each of the 11 courses, instructional lectures and/or narrated presentations did not include closed captions or transcripts, which we believe is an easy fix. If each of these courses are modified to meet D10, and we hope they are, 47% of our reviewed courses will be CLRN-Certified. For more information about why D10 is important, read “What Part of the Accessible memo didn’t you get?” from my “Advice for Course Creators and Buyers” post.

The most common problem with the majority of courses that are not certified is with their alignment with the content or Common Core State Standards. While there are exactly 52 online course standards, the number of content standards per course varies between 19 for AP Probability and Statistics to 106 for ninth grade English-language arts courses aligned to CA’s original standards. Regardless of the number of content standards, the 80% requirement applies. 20 courses (36%) failed to teach 80% of the content standards for their course. These range from a low of 34% to a high of 78%. The median (half the courses had more, half had less) percentage of content standards met was 57%.

As we mentioned in the beginning, we hope our partnership with the University of California helps drive course quality and improvement. While the CLRN’s reviews are effective for three years (and certification ends three years after a review is published), CLRN typically will not re-review a course unless there is a major update. However, because we don’t want the certification process to be punitive, we’ve created new policies to encourage course improvement. We’ll share these in tomorrow’s post.

Online Learning, UC A-G, and CLRN-Certified Courses

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Brian Bridges

It’s been quite a year for the California Learning Resource Network. After investing a year to create the standards and review process for online courses, CLRN began reviewing English-language arts and mathematics courses last summer, spending much of last year training our reviewers and norming the process to ensure consistency. Last spring, we added history-social science, science, and visual and performing arts courses and plans are under way to add world language reviews this winter.

During 2011/12, CLRN reviewed 55 online courses from seven publishers: Accelerate, Aventa, Education2020, K12, Inc, Pearson Digital Learning, Plato Learning, and Thesys International. Our 2012/13 review queue currently holds 88 course submissions, including many from Advanced Academics, Apex Learning, Cambium Education, National University High School, and Odysseyware. Still, many of our customers have asked us about course approval for the University of California’s A-G requirements, since A-G approval is required for courses students take for admission to the University of California. We now have an answer.

CLRN is proud to announce our partnership with the University of California. By agreement with UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), online courses must now be CLRN reviewed and CLRN-Certified^®before UC will accept them for their final review and approval for A-G.

To achieve CLRN-Certified^® status, online courses must address at least 80% of the course’s content standards (Common Core or California State Standards) and 80% of iNACOL’s Standards for Quality Online Programs. Fifteen online “Power Standards” must be among those verified by CLRN. These Power Standards include: Content: A3, A9 & A13; Instructional Design: B3, B4, B5 & B10; Student Assessment: C2, C3 & C4; Technology: D4, D10 & D11; and Course Evaluation and Support: E3 & E10. Course publishers may utilize the CLRN-Certified^® term and logo in association with their certified products.

By request of the University of California, CLRN reviews will now include the “Not Met” content standards within posted reviews. Also displayed on CLRN’s browse page and within each course review, will be the percentage of content and online standards met. CLRN-Certified^® courses will include both a reference to its CLRN-Certified^® status and the new CLRN-Certified^® badge.

View UC’s Press Release.

Brian @ CLRN

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