lodeStar Learning Web Journal

By Robert N. Bilyk

The 2009-2010 flu season officially gets underway on October 4, 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No school principal will be surprised that the number of 'pre-seasonal' H1N1 flu cases already amounts to the tens of thousands. In our region alone (region 5, which includes Minnesota and five other states), CDC reports 8,632* cases and, tragically, 18 pediatric deaths as of September 12. A colleague of mine reported that on the third week of September, 30% of his child's school went absent.

The story unfolds in the news, in personal stories and not surprisingly in a very urgent discussion that touches on instructional technology. This week we've heard from several school leaders. The question resurfaces. "How do we continue schooling our students after our buildings are closed?" We heard the same question shortly after 9/11. In fact, after 9/11 our school (Cyber Village Academy) hosted the first meetings between the Minnesota Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health.

We founded Cyber Village Academy in 1997 to solve a similar problem with a different twist. "How do we continue schooling our students when they can't come into a building?" The issue we wrestled with was serious and chronic illness. That's how Cyber Village Academy, an elementary charter school, got its start. Our mission at first was to serve serious and chronically ill children. (Today, Cyber Village Academy is something quite different: an International Baccalaureate Organization school that serves all students with a blend of online and on-campus learning.)

In the early days of 1997, however, special electrical contacts were built into the pupils' seats, which foiled our efforts. To our interminable vexation, student funding came as a direct result of the number of hours a child's posterior was in the seat. A child's seated backside completed the electrical connection, kept the meter running and kept the money flowing. We didn't have the technology at the time to put the same electrical contacts into hospital beds or the homes of agoraphobic children or wherever they were needed.

But times have indeed changed. In Minnesota many folks worked endlessly to support legislation that placed online learning in the statutes and displaced this notion of 'seat time', which I'm told was never in statute in the first place.

So, politics and outmoded schooling aside, at Cyber Village Academy we learned many things about educating children outside of the building walls. These are simply my observations. To be brief, I'll list them but look forward to expanding these ideas with you in person - at conferences, in our technology workshops or at your request.

Here they are:

A need for online learning must be identified
The need can range from a high number of homeschoolers in a district, to students disadvantaged by unavailable classes and unavailable teachers, to chronically ill children. In our hometown, my eldest son who loved to program computers could not take a single programming class. None was available in the district -- an affluent district -- and none was available online at the time. In his senior year, he became the first student to make up a missing credit in an online class but didn't start taking computer classes until college.

In reference to identifying a need for online learning, I contend that we can use blended classrooms to live up to the potential that Clayton Christensen holds for technology in his book 'Disrupting Class'. Today's instructional technology enables us to differentiate or customize education for students like never before - but alas the old models prevail.

A few faculty, at least, must be onboard with the idea of online learning
These are the early adopters. Without them as trail blazers, mentors, change agents and advocates, very little progress is made. When you can build a small cohort of professionals, amazing things get accomplished. I would much rather work with a small but smart team in effecting change than press into service an entire teaching body.

The administration and faculty must think in shades and not in stark black and white
It doesn't have to be online or nothing, on-campus or nothing. Blended online and on-campus classes offer the opportunity to make a deeper connection between teacher and student. The student who is muted by the class of thirty suddenly finds expression in a discussion thread. The student who is bored to tears in class is given a challenging 'asynchronous' assignment for him to complete on his own terms, outside of class.

In my composition classes, I broke the students into groups. Some students worked at the computers around the perimeter of the classroom. They worked on sentence combining at a level that matched their experience. Other students worked at tables in middle of the room, editing, peer critiquing, brainstorming. They could then continue their studies and their work online and at home. This was a blended environment.

A learning management system/course management system is today's new infrastructure
A learning management system like Moodle, Blackboard, Desire2Learn or eCollege is critical to a school's ability to function outside of the school walls. A popular learning management system brings flexibility and freedom to the school. It offers the school the opportunity to purchase packaged content from publishers and it offers teachers the opportunity to create their own resources and combine them with publisher's content. It is the new text book, but with the flexibility to insert teacher inspired content.

Schools won't be able to make the shift overnight from text books to learning objects. Schools still buy textbooks and subscribe to integrated learning systems to the tune of millions of dollars each year. But at the same time, a few traditional book sellers have gone bankrupt and many are rethinking their business.

A learning object repository is today's modern library
Few schools of sufficient size can imagine being without that magical, mystical, and sometimes musty place we call the library. The technologies of the past - from the Gutenberg Press and the bindery to the Dewey Decimal System -- have conspired to enable this wonderful melding of mind and material.

But now we have learning objects and images and podcasts and digital documents of every kind. They are not suited for the library shelf. A new place is needed, and that is the learning object repository. Every school must have access to one.

In Minnesota, a significant effort is underway to enable one-stop shopping for online courses, careers, college information, digital library information and on and on. It also includes a statewide learning object repository that enables teachers to share their work. The effort, called the Minnesota Learning Commons is a collaboration of the University of Minnesota, Minnesota State College and University System (MNSCU) and the Minnesota Department of Education.

http://www.mnlearningcommons.org

I'm very proud of Minnesota's achievement and have been loosely connected to a number of the services under the Minnesota Learning Commons umbrella. Years and years ago when I was a college teacher I wrote the first prototype that got key decision makers interested in online course searches. Before I left Cyber Village Academy, I assisted Karen Johnson (Minnesota Department of Education) in the initial organization of the K12 Online Clearinghouse. Our school was one of the first members of the Minnesota Online Learning Association, along with Trio Wolf Creek, Northern Star Online, Spring Lake Park Online Learning, Minneapolis Public Schools Online, and a couple others.

We also have other connections to the Minnesota Learning Commons. Our LodeStar authoring tool is used in all 37 colleges of the Minnesota State College and University System. eFolio (another major initiative) supports direct upload of LodeStar objects and LodeStar can upload directly to the underlying learning object repository.

Students must publish or perish
Student publication comes in many forms -- art shows, journals, plays, history displays, science fairs, showcases of every kind. When students reconstruct meaning from teacher-led presentations and represent them in the form of animations, movies, newspaper articles, plays, history day and science fair exhibits or whatever, the ephemeral nature of knowledge is replaced with something much more rooted in our brains.

In our school, we began adopting the electronic portfolio system (specifically Minnesota's eFolio) as a means for students to publish the artifacts of their school experience. We were becoming an International Baccalaureate Organization school and the personal portfolios documented the students' progress through the program.

http://www.efoliominnesota.com/

A best-of-class Electronic Portfolio can be interwoven with the fabric of the school like no social networking site can.

An authoring tool turns teachers into participants.
Everything mentioned so far requires some form of content. Content gets published in a learning management system, a learning object repository, and an electronic portfolio. The learning management systems and the electronic portfolios have their own editors and methods for creating content. Authoring tools expand those possibilities. Authoring tools enable teachers to contribute and to participate in this digital revolution above and beyond the native capability of the learning management system, the learning object repository and the electronic portfolio.

Participation means not substituting a textbook's table of contents for a curriculum and not substituting a purchased online course for a curriculum. It means teachers building things of instructional value and exercising their choice of content, strategy, and assessment. Participating means sharing something of the teacher, rather than the teacher proctoring someone else's content.

Conclusion
We don't welcome H1N1 and all the misery that it brings to people. The only silver lining to this very dark cloud is that it gives our leadership pause -- to imagine schooling beyond the walls of the building. I look forward to an engagement much more profound than replacing school seat time with home seat time. I imagine schooling beyond the constraints of one size fits all, where the needs of every individual child can be attended. We now have some of the tools to accomplish that vision.

*http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/