Don’t just flip the classroom, flip the school day

Don’t just flip the classroom, flip the school day
By: Michael B. Horn

Oct 10, 2019
Flipping the classroom—in which students independently consume online lessons or lectures and then spend their time in the classroom focused on what we used to call homework—crashed on the scene eight years ago. But if Bob Harris, president of Edudexterity and currently working as the head of human resources for Pittsburgh’s school district, is to be believed, it isn’t enough.

It’s time to flip the high school day, he says, and he has plans for how to do it.

The basic idea is that almost all students would benefit from gaining a variety of real work experiences while in high school because they would gain a deeper appreciation for their potential directions in life; an understanding of their strengths, passions and purpose—a glaring gap in high schools that emerged in research for our new book Choosing College—and social capital in the form of mentors and potential professional connections outside of school and the circles of their family and friends, about which my colleague Julia Freeland Fisher has written extensively.

In Harris’s conception of the flipped school day, students would start their day at 9 a.m.—more in line with the research around when teenagers should wake up and start their days—by reporting to a workplace that could rotate every semester or year.

After working half a day, the students would then break for lunch and head to school to do their extracurricular activities and work on projects with their fellow students.

Finally, in the evenings, students would take their classes online from home when their parents are more likely to be at home—also more in line with research that suggests students tend to perform better in courses that meet later in the day. They wouldn’t have homework per se, as work would simply be woven into their online learning experiences.

One of Harris’s insights is that a big reason school exists as it does is that it plays an important custodial function in the lives of many families. For years, the only way to learn from a teacher was in a classroom.

But with the advent of online learning, students can theoretically learn anywhere, which means that you can change what you do during the times when it’s important to provide custodial care for students. All too often, students are already doing most of their learning late in the evening anyway. Rather than fight it, why not embrace it?

All too often, students are already doing most of their learning late in the evening anyway. Rather than fight it, why not embrace it?
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Plus, far fewer teenagers—roughly 20%—hold a job today compared to a generation ago when 40% did. Flipping the school day would rectify that challenge and fill the morning time in a productive fashion.

Doing so would also equip students with an understanding of how their learning connected to their potential careers after school, which, in the ideal, would help them build motivation for when and what they learn online—which itself could be far more tailored for their learning needs, both in terms of the choice of courses and in terms of the learning pace and path within the courses.

It would also seem to present an interesting solution to the return of people’s nostalgia for career and technical education. And by flipping the school day for all students, it could potentially avoid the historical perils of tracking students into academic versus career pathways in high school.

Flipping the school day for all students could potentially avoid the historical perils of tracking students into academic versus career pathways in high school.

Finally, flipping the school day could also greatly bolster the counseling function in high schools. Today counselors operate at a 491-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio in high schools, which means there is little time for meaningful advice for students. But by placing students into jobs in the community, schools could potentially leverage a far wider swath of their community’s resources to help counsel and guide students into the choices they make in their lives.

If no high school wants to go all-in on the experiment, then they could try it as a pilot for a segment of their students. In so doing, they could also use it to create more capacity in their school by changing when and how the building is utilized and providing more shifts for students so that the schools would be open for far longer, act more as community centers, and students could experience smaller class sizes with teachers.

Given all we know, flipping the school day seems like a worthwhile experiment to me.


Michael B. Horn

Michael is a co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He currently works as a principal consultant for Entangled Solutions.

How to Use Edtech to Get Your Learners Active and Moving

By Kerry Gallagher (Columnist)Jan 24, 2017

Shutterstock / Hurst Photo

Winter weather sometimes means nasty rain and snowstorms, indoor recess, and less physical activity for our students. But instead of dusting off the DVDs buried in your desk drawer, consider using these edtech-powered ideas to get your learners’ bodies moving and brains working.

Open Class With “Activators”

Teachers do not have to wait until the bell rings or until they have formally addressed the class to get their students’ learning started. They can have an enticing challenge waiting for students as they enter the room. I like to call these challenges “activators” because they activate curiosity, thinking, and problem-solving in students’ brains. Certain edtech tools allow the teacher to use a dashboard to track student progress in real time, including:

Teachers do not have to wait until the bell rings or until they have formally addressed the class to get their students’ learning started.

• Socrative from MasteryConnect: This has been a go-to for teachers for years because of its simple interface that allows teachers to create assessments in advance or on-the-fly. Socrative’s free version does not require students to create accounts.
• Formative: This tool and its varied question types fit more content areas (even advanced math and science) than most other platforms. It also boasts Google Classroom integration.
• Pear Deck: This platform has a new dashboard in beta that users can activate in the add-ons section, meaning it is easier for students to engage in self-paced activities.

These three platforms offer great options for providing students with engaging and challenging activities to look forward to immediately upon entering your classroom. Just project the necessary codes onto a screen at the front of the room, and watch students dive in.

A Little Healthy Competition and Movement

Review games often inject energy into a classroom before a test, and right when students need a jolt of energy to get that over that summative assessment hump at the end of a unit. Activities that push students to work in teams and use their combined knowledge and skills to achieve the best results will add noise and movement to your classroom, as well. Here are a few tools to consider using in the process.

• Kahoot! is a go-to because the music alone gets students moving. From upper elementary to 12th grade, students are unable to resist standing up, moving around the room, and even cheering at the results.
• A common tool seen in the world language and social studies classrooms at my school is Quizlet Live. Students are up and moving, talking, and cooperating to compete with their classmates to answer the quiz-like questions.

It is worth noting that both of these tools offer modes for self-paced studying and learning. Engaging students in modes that include bright colors, music, and even competition is only appropriate when they are already relatively confident with the material. Try those other modes when students are first learning content and need to practice at a pace that’s right for them.

Explore the Hallways

After notifying administrators–just to ensure there isn’t some other school event that would interfere–use edtech tools and students’ mobile devices to move the lesson beyond your classroom walls and spill into the hallways. Depending on your students’ skill level and the time you can dedicate to the adventure, here are three approaches.

• Teachers can create scavenger hunts with Klikaklu. Even before Pokemon Go, teachers were creating indoor and outdoor scavenger hunts for their students with this tool. Just scan in images of objects and places you want your students to visit; they will find that object based on learning clues you set up to be revealed in the app as they go.
• Students can work together as a class to create their own scavenger hunt with QR codes. I recommend i-nigma as a free QR code scanner due to it’s speed and ease of use. Students can do their own research, and then make it accessible to their classmates via a jaunt through the hallways using the steps detailed here. (Not a fan of i-nigma? Just Google “QR code creator” to find a wide array of free generator tools.)
• Augmented reality is another option. Students or teachers can trigger videos, articles, or other content to appear when scanning preselected images. Try this kind of scavenger hunt at your school’s next art show. Aurasma is a great go-to tool for creating your own augmented reality experiences. You can find even more ideas in Monica Burns’s recent book Deeper Learning with QR Codes and Augmented Reality.

Teaching mindfulness and self-control is such an important part of encouraging young learners to self-advocate and push themselves through frustrating moments.

Brain Breaks

Brain breaks help learners to re-energize when they are in an energy slump or refocus when they have become distracted. Whether it is with silly songs and dancing or classroom yoga, edtech products can help.

• Students can refocus their brains and bodies with breathing and stretching thanks to amaZEN U. There are sample videos to try out with you class right on the homepage, as well as a monthlong free trial available to all teachers.
• A favorite in my own home with my second grader and preschooler is GoNoodle. When young learners have the post-lunch slump or deserve a reward for nailing that tough Common Core math activity, a song and dance–mixed with a little dose of empowerment–is just what they need.

Teaching mindfulness and self-control is such an important part of encouraging young learners to self-advocate and push themselves through frustrating moments. These services can provide the content and motivation to help your students when they need a mental and/or physical boost.

Do not let winter’s cold temperatures and wet storms keep your students from learning with activity and movement. Rather, facilitate a more physical and focused learning experience—particularly when the winter blues have settled in.

Kerry Gallagher (@KerryHawk02) is a Digital Learning Specialist at a 1:1 iPad school serving 1500 students grades 6-12. She is also the Director of K-12 Education for ConnectSafely.org, and an EdSurge columnist.

Docs say don't start school before 8:30AM

To ensure sleepy teens get enough rest, the American Medical Association is suggesting that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m.
The AMA adopted the policy recommendation Tuesday during its annual meeting. The policy also encourages physicians to educate parents, school administrators, teachers and other community members about the importance of sleep for adolescent mental and physical health.
"Sleep deprivation is a growing public health issue affecting our nation's adolescents, putting them at risk for mental, physical and emotional distress and disorders," said Dr. William E. Kobler, a board member with AMA. "Scientific evidence strongly suggests that allowing adolescents more time for sleep at the appropriate hours results in improvements in health, academic performance, behavior, and general well-being."
The sleep issue has been a hot topic in recent years among school districts, but it's one they must juggle with priorities such as bus schedules and giving athletes enough time for afternoon sports practice.

The AMA said recent studies show that only 32 percent of American teenagers reported getting at least eight hours of sleep on an average school night. But the American Academy of Pediatrics says that teenagers between 14 and 17 years of age should sleep 8.5 to 9.5 hours every night.

Nudges Help Poorer Children

There are enormous inequalities in education in the United States. A child born into a poor family has only a 9 percent chance of getting a college degree, but the odds are 54 percent for a child in a high-income family. These gaps open early, with poor children kindergarten less prepared than their classmates.

How can we close the gaps thes? Contentious, ambitious Reforms of the education system crowd the headlines: the Common Core, the elimination of teacher tenure, charter schools. The debate is heated and sometimes impolite (a recent book about education is called "The Teacher Wars").

Yet as thes Debates rage, Researchers have been quietly finding small, effective ways to improve education. They have identified behavioral "nudges" that prod Students and their families to take small steps that can make big differences in learning. These measures are cheap, so that schools could use them Nonprofits Immediately.

Let's start with college. At every step of the way, low-income Students are more likely to stumble on the path to higher education. Even the summer after high school is a perilous time, with 20 percent of those who plan to attend college not actually enrolling - a phenomenon known as "summer melt." Bureaucratic barriers, like the labyrinthine process of applying for financial aid, explains some of the drop-off.

While they were graduate students at Harvard, two young Professors Students designed and tested a program to help them stick to the college plans. Benjamin L. Castleman, now at the University of Virginia, and Lindsay C. Page, at the University of Pittsburgh, set up a system of automatic, personalized text messages that Reminded high student, about the their college deadlines. The texts included links to required forms and live Counselors.

The result? Students who received the texts were more likely to enroll in college: 70 percent, compared with 63 percent of those who did not get access them. Seven percentage points is a big increas in this field, similar to the that cost Gains Produced by Scholarships Thousands of dollars. Yet this program cost only $ 7 per student.

The same Researchers also tested a texting program to keep students from dropping out of college. The problem is importante because the graduation rate of low-income college students is dismally low; two-thirds leave without a degree. Community college students received their texts reminding them to complete the re-enrollment forms, Particularly aid applications. Among freshmen who received the texts, is 68 percent went on to complete their sophomore year, compared with 54 percent of those who got no nudges. This, too, is a big impact - especially for a program that cost only $ 5 per student.

We know because they were Evaluated These programs worked, like all the innovations cited in this column, using a randomized, controlled trial. Randomized trials, once rare in education research, are Increasingly common. The What Works Clearinghouse, which reviews and rates the quality of education research, lists 242 randomized trials.

Continue reading the main storycontinu reading the main storycontinu reading the main story
Students were randomly assigned to receive or not receive texts I thee. Because the two groups were randomly defined, they were basically indistinguishable at the start of the study. They diverged as the texts altered the behavior of those who got them compared with those who did not.

Text messaging will not help everyone get through college, and cheap Interventions will not solve every problem. But they solve some problems for some students The, freeing up time and financial Resources for those who need other kinds of help.

Some Students need personal counseling to help them balance the Demands of school, family and work. Unfortunately, Counselors are stretched thin, often carrying caseloads of Thousands of students.

Continue reading the main story
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Two Researchers at Stanford University, Eric P. Bettinger and Rachel Baker Analyzed an innovative program in which a professional academic counseling at-risk students The coach calls to talk about time management and study skills. The coach might help a student plan how much time to spend on each class in the days approaching finals, for example. The results are impressive, with coached Students more likely to stay in college and graduate. This program is more expensive than texting - $ 500 per student, per semester - but the effects persist for years after the coaching has ended.

Can nudges help younger children? Susanna Loeb and Benjamin N. York, both also at Stanford, developed a literacy program for preschool children in San Francisco. They sent texts describing simple Activities that parents develop literacy skills, such as pointing out the words that rhyme or start with the same sound. The parents spent more time with them receiving the texts are on thes Aciviies and their children's children were more likely to know the alphabet and the sounds of letters. It cost just a few dollars per family.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and University of Toronto are also working on Methods to develop literacy. Ariel Kalil, Susan E. Mayer families and Philip Oreopoulos you with tips about how to read texts with their preschoolers. The result was that the substantially parents spent more time reading with their children.

Researchers are also testing the effect of giving parents more information about their children's Efforts are in school. A school in Los Angeles, in collaboration with Peter Bergman of Columbia University, personalized text messages sent to parents of middle and high school students. The texts told their parents when the children did not hand in homework assignments, listing page numbers and specific problems for students to complete. The parents and students The Responded: Completed homework grades and test scores went up 25 percent and rose. Other forms of communication between the school and parents who improved, too, with parents are twice as likely to reach out to their children's teachers.

These light nudges can not solve every problem by a long shot. But at a low cost, they can help many students.

Why are not schools, districts and states rushing to set up the measures thes? Maybe because the programs have no natural constituency. They are not Labor- or capital-intensive, so they do not create lots of jobs that are lucrative contracts. They do not create a big, expensive initiative that a politician can point to in a stump speech. They just do their job, effectively and Cheaply.

Susan is a professor of economics Dynars that, education and public policy at the University of Michigan. She has advised the Obama administration on the findings of each student-aid policy research. Follow on Twitter atdynars of each.

The upshot Provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Horn on Blended Learning

Education Week

Published Online: December 9, 2014

Blended Learning Is About More Than Technology

By Michael B. Horn & Heather Staker

Battles between different philosophical camps in education are nothing new.

Whether it's knowledge vs. skills, memorization vs. project-based learning, small schools vs. comprehensive ones, the debates in education are often framed as a choice between "either-ors."

From John Dewey to Chester E. Finn Jr., countless education researchers have documented the fallacies in these dichotomies and the dangers of being too beholden to an "-ism," as Dewey wrote.

Many educators sense the folly as well. They know that at different times and in different circumstances, different approaches are best for students.

Despite this understanding, teachers are often handcuffed in their ability to steer their way toward a pragmatic middle ground. With limited blocks of time in a public school day and a set curriculum to work their way through, as well as the need to serve many students, each with unique learning needs, teachers must make trade-offs. More of one thing means less of another.

Blended learning—the mix of online and in-school learning—represents a way to break away from the trade-offs mentality, as Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen explains in the foreword to our new book, Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools. (Christensen is also the co-founder, with Michael B. Horn, of the Christensen Institute, where both of us work.)

Done right, blended learning breaks through the barriers of the use of time, place, path to understanding, and pace to allow each student to work according to his or her particular needs—whether that be in a group or alone, on practice problems or projects, online or offline. It preserves the benefits of the old and provides new benefits—personalization, access and equity, and cost control.

The question is how educators can capture these benefits. Blended learning is not inherently good or bad. It is a pathway to student-centered learning at scale to allow each child to achieve his or her fullest potential, but it is not a guaranteed success.

More generally, too many schools have crammed computers into their classrooms over the years—spending many billions of dollars, with little to show for it. It is not unusual to see a district adopt educational technology only to see costs rise and student achievement decline.

So, how to proceed? The first rule is simple, even if it is counterintuitive. Do not start with the technology.

Instead, schools should follow a tried-and-true design process to innovate successfully. The first step is to pick a rallying cry by identifying the problem to solve or the goal to achieve. Some problems relate to serving mainstream students in core subjects, while others arise because of gaps at the margins—where schools cannot offer a particular course, for example. Both areas are worthy of innovation. In either case, though, the problem or goal must not be about technology—such as trying to solve a "lack of devices"—and lead to a deployment of technology for technology's sake.

"Blended learning is not inherently good or bad. It is a pathway to student-centered learning at scale."

With the problem or goal identified, it is important to state it in a "SMART" way—specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-related—such that an organization will unambiguously know what success is and if it has been realized.

One common mistake is failing to bring the right people to the table to lead the effort. The result is that teachers are either stuck with tasks beyond their reach or too much bureaucratic oversight. Schools must match the right type of team and the right people to the scope of the problem.

The Milpitas, Calif., school district, for example, has created coordinating teams to support teachers innovating within their classrooms, and brought together heavyweight schoolwide design teams to rethink the very structure of some of their schools.

With the rallying cry in place and the right team organized, it is time to design. The starting point is to look at school from the viewpoint of students to understand what they are trying to accomplish in their lives and thus what motivates them. When leaders get the design right from their pupils' perspective, such that young people feel that school aligns perfectly with the things that matter to them, students arrive in class eager to learn.

This is not to say that educators should not instill certain core knowledge, skills, and dispositions in students, but that to accomplish these objectives seamlessly, schools should be intrinsically motivating. This means not only understanding what students are trying to accomplish, but also understanding the experiences they need to get those jobs done, and then assembling the right resources and integrating them in the right way to deliver those experiences.

We know that teachers are a crucial part of the student experience. But to gain teachers' buy-in, schools must work for teachers as well, which is why designing the teacher experience is the next step. Teachers have personal jobs to do in their lives, and the magic happens when schools offer experiences that are fulfilling for both students and teachers. Ensuring that teachers have opportunities to achieve, receive recognition, exercise responsibility, and advance and grow in their careers is critical. To provide teachers these motivators, institutions using blended learning are experimenting with extending the reach of great teachers, assigning teachers specialized responsibilities, employing team-teaching, awarding micro-credentials for achievement, and granting teachers increased authority.

The next step is the one where technology and devices finally enter the equation. The objective is to design the virtual and physical setup to align with the desired student and teacher experiences.

Some of the important questions that schools should ask when selecting content and software are: Should we build our own? Should we use one or multiple outside providers? Or should we adopt a facilitated-network solution—a platform that integrates modular content from a variety of sources? Considering devices—what type and how many—to match the software and student and teacher experiences is equally important.

Finally, teams should think through the physical environment in which students learn. Will the traditional egg-crate factory-model school design enable students and teachers to be successful? Or is a more modular environment that enables increased customization desirable? Increasing numbers of blended-learning programs are embracing the latter.

From here, it's time to put the vision into action. That means taking the choices from these different steps and piecing together a coherent instructional model.

After a team finishes designing, its work is still not done. Execution matters.

Schools must create the right culture. Blended learning accelerates a good culture and makes it great, but it will also accelerate a bad culture and make it terrible. Schools should also implement their designs with humility and acknowledge that it is unlikely that they will get the design right on the first try. Taking a discovery-driven approach to help school leaders identify and mitigate risks as they kick off a blended-learning program—and iterate accordingly—will help avoid costly mistakes both for students and a school's limited budget.

Blended learning is no panacea. It's a scalable strategy that can break the trade-offs inherent in the traditional school design to allow teachers to reach students in ways never before possible. But for it to work, school leaders must not start with blended learning or technology for its own sake, but instead undertake a careful design process to unlock its potential.

Michael B. Horn is the co-founder and executive director, education, of the Christensen Institute, a nonprofit think tank in San Mateo, Calif. Heather Staker is a senior research fellow at the Christensen Institute. They are the co-authors of Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools (Jossey-Bass, November 2014).

Vol. 34, Issue 14, Pages 22,28

Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs

We will have 1,000,000 unfilled STEM jobs in the US in 2020 (50% of the growth in computing).

In Europe the numbers are similar http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/grand-coalition-digital-jobs

And yet we also have this - large numbers of unemployed youth

http://www.npr.org/2014/07/02/327058018/a-lost-generation-of-workers-the-cost-of-youth-unemployment?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=morningedition&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20140702

Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs

The Commission is leading a multi-stakeholder partnership to tackle the lack of digital skills in Europe and the several hundred of thousands of unfilled ICT-related vacancies.

At a time when Europe faces massive unemployment, technology companies face a critical shortfall of talented ICT experts. This contradictory picture reveals a mismatch between the skills on offer and those in demand in today's fast developing technology market. As a result Europe might face a shortage of up to 900,000 ICT professionals by 2020, risking its potential for growth and digital competitiveness.

This is why in March 2013 the Commission launched the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs: a multi-stakeholder partnership that endeavours to facilitate collaboration among business and education providers, public and private actors to take action attracting young people into ICT education, and to retrain unemployed people. Our goal is to start to increase the supply of ICT practitioners by 2015, so as to ensure a sufficient number of them in Europe in the near future.

Recently the European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Vice President Neelie Kroes brought CEOs from across the global economy together at the World Economic Forum in Davos to expand the Coalition that is delivering digital training opportunities and jobs. Corporate leaders were then invited to endorse the Davos Declaration on the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs.

We encourage stakeholders to join the Grand Coalition either by making pledges for concrete short-term actions and forming or joining National Coalitions for Digital Jobs. We also strive to engage many more stakeholders through our events, workshops and meetings to share success stories and best practices.
So far, more than 50 pledging organisations have joined. The online Pledge Tracker shows the progress made in implementing the individual pledges. Moreover, national coalitions have already been launched in Greece, Malta, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Poland; and initiatives are underway in more than 10 countries.

Over the next months the efforts will be enhanced so that additional trainings, internships and jobs can be counted in hundreds of thousands instead of thousands and to make the Coalition sustainable. As such, the Commission seeks commitments from CEOs and political leaders to pledge substantial support for the Coalition, widening the membership to additional ICT and ICT-using companies. The Coalition aims also to reach out more companies’ HR managers and public, as well as private employment services.

Top 10 US Libraries

The Institute of Museum and Library Services announced winners of its top honor for libraries and museums today, the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Winners include public libraries, an aquarium, and a botanic garden.This year’s winners are:

1. • Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, N.Y.
2. • Chicago Public Library, Chicago, Ill.
3. • Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, Las Vegas, Nev.
4. • Mid-Continent Public Library, Independence, Mo.
5. • Mystic Aquarium, Mystic, Conn.
6. • North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh, N.C.
7. • Octavia Fellin Public Library, Gallup, N.M.
8. • Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Norman, Okla.
9. • The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Ind.
10. • Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, Mass.

Banning chocolate milk backfires

Banning chocolate milk from elementary schools can have negative consequences on children's nutrition as well as on sales in school cafeterias, a Cornell University study has found.

“When schools ban chocolate milk, we found it usually backfires. On average, milk sales drop by 10 percent, 29 percent of white milk gets thrown out, and participation in the school lunch program may also decrease,” reported Andrew Hanks, lead author and research associate Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. “This is probably not what parents wanted to see.”

The study examined 11 Oregon elementary schools and found that although kids were taking in less sugar and fewer calories, they also began giving up milk entirely, and as a result, consumed less calcium and protein.

Brian Wansink, co-author of the study, proposed changing the way regular milk is presented rather than banning chocolate milk.


“Instead of banning chocolate milk, make white milk appear more convenient and more ‘normal,’” Wansink said in a statement. “Put the white milk in the front of the cooler, and make sure that at least one-third to half of all the milk is white. We’ve found that this approach can increase sales by 20 percent or more."

Khan Aligns to Common Core

 Mary Jo Madda · Mar 25, 2014

'Math of Khan': Sal Explains Academy's Common-Core Aligned 'Missions'

Interactive exercises stretch from early elementary math to calculus

Khan Academy

“Math missions” are the latest in Khan Academy’s student-driven features. Khan Academy founder Sal Khan on Saturday during the CUE conference announced the launch of the organization's Common Core-aligned, adaptive math exercises, which he described as “a culmination of what we’ve been working on since the beginning.”

“Standards are great, but they don’t meet the students where they are,” Khan explains as the reasoning behind launching the features, which were developed through a collaboration involving Khan Academy, Smarter Balanced and 40 handpicked teachers who wrote math questions.

Khan also expresses that these new features are meant to support teachers in Common Core integration, rather than replace teachers as the facilitator of instruction and practice. "There will never be anything that replaces or marginalizes teachers. If it came down to choosing between technology and an amazing teacher, I would choose the amazing teacher and nothing else," says Khan, who chatted with EdSurge at the CUE conference. "This [set of new features] elevates the role that a teacher can play."
So how exactly do these "missions" enhance the teacher experience?

Math missions (see photo below) consist of interactive math problems aligned to every Common Core standard. Each problem is accompanied by a step-by-step solution created for that problem.



Upon logging onto Khan Academy, students are given a pre-test to find their level before they are directed to a page of “math missions.” The missions, which cover Kindergarten math through calculus, take students through a series exercises tailored to them (based on the pre-test) to build what Khan calls "skills." Elizabeth Slavitt, Khan Academy’s math content lead, reports that “every student receives… a queue that recommends exercises for them based on their level.”

With each skill, students must answer three to five exercises in a row to gain “energy points” and move closer to finishing all skills in a given mission. Here are some examples which Khan links to Common Core standards:

• Creating line plots 1 (2.MD.D.10)
• Understanding multiplying fractions by fractions (5.NF.B.4b)
• Exploring rigid transformations and congruence (8.G.A.2)
• Intersecting functions (HSA-REI.C.11)
• Solving problems with similar and congruent triangles (HSG-SRT.B.5)

Successful completion of missions gets charted on a progress report on the student’s dashboard while “coaches”--whether teachers, tutors, or parents--can see a student’s progress when he or she gains access with a class code or coach ID.

Additional new features include a Common Core Map, which teachers can use to “assign material that is most appropriate for each student's needs without spending countless hours developing and grading different classroom and homework assignments,” according to Khan Academy’s Manager of External Relations (and former math teacher) Charlotte Koeniger. Teachers can use the map to search by standard, grade level, and/or math concept to view the standard with exemplar questions.





Surprised by the move away from videos? Khan Academy gained popularity as a video-based instruction platform, but Khan says that he's always had interactive practice questions on the site.

“To be honest, to some degree, this is a return to what Khan originally was. The original platform was a focus on interactive exercises and the videos were a complement to that,” says Khan.

The Khan Academy missions team also stresses that instead of solely focusing on introducing new topics, the adaptive platform was designed to help students address skill gaps. Slavitt explains:

“For us, our goal isn’t necessarily that Khan introduces new concepts to students. We want to give practice. Students can fill gaps if they have gaps. If it’s good for introducing new concepts, that's great. But if it's for practice, that's also great.”

For more information, visit Khan’s Common Core landing page, or view this video tour of the new “missions” learning platform.

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About the Author

Mary Jo Madda

What can Feds do to accelerate Ed Tech market?

To stimulate a national conversation on whether and how pull mechanisms might be used to accelerate the development of high-impact learning technologies, OSTP seeks public comment on the questions listed below:

(1) What learning outcomes would be good candidates for the focus of a pull mechanism to catalyze the creation and use of new learning technology? These outcomes could be relevant to early childhood education, K-20, life-long learning, workforce readiness and skills, etc.

(2) How are these learning outcomes currently measured and assessed?

(3) What information exists about current U.S. performance relative to this learning outcome? What information exists about the presence (currently available or potential given current trends or breakthroughs) or absence of effective interventions (technology-based, offline, or hybrid) to improve this learning outcome?

(4) Why would a pull mechanism in this area accelerate innovation in learning technology?

(5) What role might different stakeholders (e.g. Federal agencies, state and local educational agencies, foundations, researchers, practitioners, companies, investors, or non-profit organizations) play in designing, funding, and implementing a pull mechanism for learning technology? What role would your organization be willing to play?

(6) What changes in public policy would facilitate experimentation with pull mechanisms at different levels of government?

Notice of Request for Information(RFI)

A Notice by the Science and Technology Policy Office on 01/13/2014

Summary

The Office of Science and Technology Policy requests public comments to inform its policy development related to high-impact learning technologies. This Request for Information offers the opportunity for interested individuals and organizations to identify public and private actions that have the potential to accelerate the development, rigorous evaluation, and widespread adoption of high-impact learning technologies. The focus of this RFI is on the design and implementation of “pull mechanisms” for technologies that significantly improve a given learning outcome. Comments must be received by 11:59 p.m. on March 7, 2014, to be considered. In your comments, please reference the question to which you are responding.

Respondents are encouraged to submit their comments through one of the following methods. Email is the preferred method of submission. Please do not include in your comments information of a confidential nature, such as sensitive personal information or proprietary information. Responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the Federal Government to form a binding contract or issue a grant. Information obtained as a result of this notice may be used by the Federal Government for program planning on a non-attribution basis. Please be aware that your comments may be posted online.

 Email: learning@ostp.gov. Email submissions will receive an electronic confirmation acknowledging receipt of your response, but will not receive individualized feedback on any suggestions.

 Postal Mail: Office of Science and Technology Policy, Attn: Cristin Dorgelo, 1650 Pennsylvania Avenue NW., Washington, DC 20504. Submissions by postal mail must be received by the deadline, and should allow sufficient time for security processing.

This Request for Information (RFI) offers the oppm1unity for interested individuals and organizations to identify public and private actions that have the potential to accelerate the development, rigorous evaluation, and widespread adoption of high-impact learning technologies. The focus of this RFI is on the design and implementation of “pull mechanisms” for technologies that significantly improve a given learning outcome. Pull mechanisms increase the incentives to develop specific products or services by committing to reward success. Examples of pull mechanisms include incentive prizes, Advance Market Commitments, milestone payments, “pay for success” bonds, and purchasing consm1ia. The public input provided through this notice will inform the deliberations of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

OSTP is interested in identifying policies and serving as a catalyst for public-private pat1nerships that have the potential to accelerate the development, rigorous evaluation, and widespread adoption of high-impact learning technologies. For example, imagine if learners in the United States had access to technologies that:

 Dramatically reduced the large and persistent gap in vocabulary size between children from wealthy and poor households.

 Allowed middle and high school students to outperform their international peers in math and science.

 Enabled English-language learners that are reading at several grade levels below average to catch up after only a year.

 Gave non-college bound students an industry skills ce1tification or set of cognitive skills (e.g. literacy, numeracy, ability to understand and apply chmis, graphs and diagrams) that are a ticket to a middle-class job, increasing their employability and their incomes by $10,000-$20,000 or more in less than a year.

 Doubled the percentage of community college students that pass remedial math, which is currently only 30 percent.

Successfully delivered a “growth mindset” intervention to teachers and students.

Were as effective as a personal tutor, were as engaging as the best video game, and improved the more students used them.

 Currently, there is a large gap between the relatively modest impact that technology has had on education, particularly in K-12, and the transformative impact that it has had in many aspects of our economic and social life. For example, businesses are using information and communications technologies to dramatically increase productivity, tap the expe1iise of their employees, slash the time needed to develop new products, tailor products and services to meet the needs of individual consumers, orchestrate global networks of suppliers, derive insights from huge volumes of transactional data, and improve their products and services by conducting rapid, low-cost experiments.

Education, particularly K-12 education, remains relatively untouched by advances in our understanding of how people learn, how to design instruction that incorporates those insights, and the explosion in information technologies such as low-cost smartphones and tablets, cloud computing, broadband networks, speech recognition and speech synthesis, predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning, intelligent tutors, simulations, games, computer-suppmied collaborative work, and many other technologies. That is why President Obama has proposed ConnectED, a new initiative to connect 99 percent of America's students to the Internet through high-speed broadband and high-speed wireless within 5 years.

Learning technologies will be much more effective if they informed by “learning science”—advances in disciplines in fields such as neuroscience, cognitive science, educational psychology, and discipline-based education research that shed light on how people learn. This research can provide actionable insights on issues such as student motivation, the circumstances under which prior knowledge helps or hmis learning, how students can organize knowledge in rich and meaningful ways, and the ways in which students can progress from novice to expeti in a given domain.

There are a number of reasons for the gap between the potential of learning science and technology and the cunent state-of-the-practice:

 The United States is investing 0.1 percent of K-12 expenditures on R&D, compared to 2 percent in mature industries and 18.7 percent in the pharmaceutical industry. This extremely low level of investment in educational R&D has clearly limited the pace of innovation.

 Entrepreneurs seeking to develop and market new products to the K-12 market face a number of challenges, including low per-pupil expenditures on software, lengthy adoption cycles, and a highly fragmented market. This in turn limits the amount that companies can spend on research and product development.

 It is difficult for companies to make authoritative claims about the impact of their products on learning outcomes assessed through rigorous third-party validation, which limits the premium that school districts and other consumers of learning technology are willing to pay for high-quality, effective products.

This suggests that an effective national strategy for increasing the impact of learning science and technology should address both the “supply” and “demand” for advanced learning technologies.

To increase the “supply” of learning technology, the Federal government and philanthropists could increase funding for research and development and support training grants and scholarships in relevant disciplines such as educational psychology, cognitive science, instructional design, artificial intelligence, etc. The National Science Foundation is funding a program called “Cyberlearning Transforming Education” and the Depmiment of Defense is supporting research in advanced training technologies. The President FY14 Budget request includes funding for a “DARPA for Education” (ARPA-ED).

However, there has been little discussion of the potential of what economists call “pull mechanisms” to accelerate the development, evaluation, and adoption of high-impact learning technologies.

As economists have recently noted, governments and other funders can suppmt innovation using “push” programs (e.g. funding grants and contracts to universities and companies, providing tax incentives for R&D, or supporting government laboratories) and “pull” mechanisms that “increase the rewards for developing specific products by committing to reward success.” Push programs pay for research inputs; pull mechanisms pay for research outcomes.

“Pull mechanisms” have been used successfully in the field of global health. In December 2010, children in developing countries began receiving a vaccine that will prevent deaths from “pneumococcal” diseases including pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis. Nearly one million young children die every year from pneumococcal infections, with 90 percent of these deaths occurring in developing countries.

The development of this vaccine was accelerated by a $1.5 billion “Advance Market Commitment” backed by five governments and a private foundation. Pharmaceutical companies that have agreed to provide the vaccine at $3.50 per dose to low-income countries for the next 10 years will receive additional payments from the $1.5 billion in donor commitments. The AMC increased the size and predictability of the market for pneumococcal vaccines, which increased the willingness of companies to invest in high-volume production of these vaccines for developing country markets. Expe1ts predict that this AMC will save 7 million lives over the next twenty years.

Non-binding commitments to purchase products can also provide market pull, if there is both a clearly defined performance specification and a strong expression of interest from potential buyers. For example, in June 2013, the U.S. Department of Energy put together a coalition of the Federal government and over 200 major commercial building pmtners that issued a challenge to U.S. manufacturers: “If you can build wireless sub-meters that cost less than $100 apiece and enable us to identify opportunities to save money by saving energy, we will buy them.” At least 18 manufacturers agreed to take up the challenge. In 2011, the Department of Energy put together a similar and successful challenge for energy-efficient and cost-effective commercial air conditioners, with the first manufacturer meeting the challenge in May 2012.

In addition, Federal agencies have offered almost 300 incentive prizes on Challenge.gov, providing opportunities for citizen solvers to offer novel solutions to tough problems, while minimizing risk to Federal agencies by only paying for success. More information about pull mechanisms can be found in this supplemental information document.

OSTP is interested in stimulating a conversation about how pull mechanisms could be used to accelerate the development, evaluation, and adoption of learning technologies. Some of the advantages of pull mechanisms are that a funder can (a) pay only for success; (b) set a goal without having to choose in advance which team or approach is most likely to be successful; and (c) increase the number and intellectual diversity of the teams that are working to solve a particular problem. Although there a variety of different types of pull mechanisms, they generally require establishing a clear goal and an agreed-upon set of metrics for evaluating progress towards that goal. If education is going to benefit from increased use of pull mechanisms, policy-makers and stakeholders have to identify some specific challenges that are important and measurable, and where it is plausible that learning technology can help improve student outcomes.

Using Pull Mechanisms for Learning Technologies

Pull mechanisms can be used for social interventions that do not use technology. For example, the first “social impact bond” is being used by the United Kingdom to reduce recidivism among 3,000 prisoners. The United Kingdom's Depa11ment for International Development (DfiD) is supporting a “Results-Based Aid” approach to improving education in Ethiopia. Under this pilot, DfiD will make grant payments to the education ministry for the increase in the number of students above a baseline that sits for or passes the national grade 10 exam. There will be additional payments for students in the poorest regions, and for girls compared to boys.

It may also make sense to experiment with pull mechanisms to accelerate the development and rigorous evaluation of learning technologies. Some of the potential advantages of learning technologies include:

 Low marginal cost: The marginal cost of making software or digital content and services available to more students is very low, although the fixed cost of R&D and rigorous evaluation may be high. This is why IT stmtups are able to grow rapidly—the cost of serving tens or hundreds of millions of customers does not increase arithmetically with the number of customers.

 Ability to maintain high levels of “time on task”: For example, good game developers can keep users riveted for hours at a time. They can create experiences that are intrinsically motivating, and that offer an increasingly difficult set of challenges that keep users in the “sweet spot” between being bored and frustrated.

 Continuous improvement: The productivity of most public sector services is flat or negative. Researchers and entrepreneurs have ideas for developing online services that get better the more people use them by (a) conducting many low-cost experiments to discover what works; and (b) collect, analyze and act on the data that can be generated online.

 Learning anytime, anywhere: Mobile devices allow individuals to access digital content at a time, place, and pace that is convenient for them. This might be particularly impmiant for an adult who is trying to upgrade their skills while balancing the competing demands of work and family.

 Digital tutors: Research suggests that the average student tutored one-on-one using “mastery learning” techniques (students are helped to master each concept before proceeding to a more advanced learning task) performed better than 98 percent of the students that learn the same material using conventional instructional methods. Projects funded by DARPA and the Office of Naval Research suggest that it may be possible to develop “digital tutors” that model the one-on-one interaction between a world-class subject matter expeti and a student. A pilot suppmied by the Veteran's Administration is allowing unemployed veterans that use the digital tutor for 6 months to get IT jobs that pay $40,000 to $80,000.

 Personalization: Researchers and firms are developing software and online services that are personalized to the needs, background, interests and skill levels of individuals.

 Interactive simulations that enable “learning by doing”: Researchers have developed simulations in areas such as physics, chemistry, biology, emih science, and math. For example, an “Energy Skate Park” simulation allows students to explore energy conservation with multiple different variables (shape of the track, starting height and speed of the skater, mass of the skater, and friction). Students can quicldy repeat experiments and rapidly explore the effect of many different parameters.

 Embedded assessment: Technology can help provide continuous assessment of a given set of knowledge, skills and abilities if the designers know (a) what behaviors would constitute evidence that a student has mastered a given competency; and (b) which tasks can elicit those behaviors.

Questions

To stimulate a national conversation on whether and how pull mechanisms might be used to accelerate the development of high-impact learning technologies, OSTP seeks public comment on the questions listed below:

(1) What learning outcomes would be good candidates for the focus of a pull mechanism to catalyze the creation and use of new learning technology? These outcomes could be relevant to early childhood education, K-20, life-long learning, workforce readiness and skills, etc.

(2) How are these learning outcomes currently measured and assessed?

(3) What information exists about current U.S. performance relative to this learning outcome? What information exists about the presence (currently available or potential given current trends or breakthroughs) or absence of effective interventions (technology-based, offline, or hybrid) to improve this learning outcome?

(4) Why would a pull mechanism in this area accelerate innovation in learning technology?

(5) What role might different stakeholders (e.g. Federal agencies, state and local educational agencies, foundations, researchers, practitioners, companies, investors, or non-profit organizations) play in designing, funding, and implementing a pull mechanism for learning technology? What role would your organization be willing to play?

(6) What changes in public policy would facilitate experimentation with pull mechanisms at different levels of government?

Response to this RFI is voluntary. Responders are free to address any or all the above items, as well as provide additional information that they think is relevant to accelerating the development, rigorous evaluation and widespread adoption of high-impact learning technologies. Please note that the U.S. Government will not pay for response preparation or for the use of any information contained in the response.

Ted Waelder,

Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant Director.

Supplementary Information: Overview of Pull Mechanisms

Incentive prizes are one type of “pull mechanism”—results-based market incentives designed to overcome market failures and catalyze itmovation. Experts often make a distinction between “recognition” prizes that honor past achievements and “inducement” or “incentive” prizes that encourage participants in the competition to achieve a particular goal. In a 2009 repot1, McKinsey identified six prize archetypes that provide a useful framework for identifying types of prizes that can best achieve different types of goals:

Exemplar Prizes that define excellence within an area.

 Point Solution Prizes that aim to spur development of solutions for a pmiicular well-defined problem. Solutions can include software applications, algorithms, predictive models, ideas, business plans, policy proposals, designs, or prototypes.

 Market Stimulation Prizes that try to establish the viability of a market to address a potential market failure, mobilize additional human talent and financial capital to jumpstati the development of a new industry, or change public perceptions about what is possible.

 Exposition Prizes that are designed to highlight a broad range of promising ideas and practices, attract attention, and mobilize capital to further develop the winning innovations.

 Participation Prizes that create value during and after the competition- not through conferral of the prize award itself but through their role in encouraging contestants to change their behavior or develop new skills that may have beneficial effects during and beyond the competition.

 Network Prizes that build networks and strengthen communities by organizing winners into new problem-solving communities that can deliver more impact than individual effmis.

Other types of pull mechanisms include:

 Advance Market Commitments: Binding commitments to purchase, or to subsidize purchase, of a ce1iain volume of a product at a fixed prize, if the product meets pre defined performance characteristics (pneumococcal vaccine and Department of Energy examples discussed above).

 Buyer's Consortia: Cooperative agreements between purchasers of products that leverage the combined buying power of those purchasers to drive down the price of products, such as a buyer's consmiium set up for Maine school districts to purchase specialized software and specific assistive technology devices.

 Pay-for-Success Bonds: Under a Pay for Success bond, also known as a social impact bond, the financing organization and the Federal, state, or local government enter into a contract that specifies the population to be served, the outcomes to be achieved, the measurement methodology to be used, and the schedule of payments to be made. The financing organization works with philanthropic and other investors to invest in innovative, data-driven service providers that can achieve results. One example of a pay for-success bond program is an initiative in New York targeted at reducing recidivism in adult males.

 Milestone-based Payments: Payment terms in a standard grant or contract in which the payment for each performance milestone established in the statement of work is not made until the milestone is proven to have been achieved. One example of this approach has been successfully demonstrated in NASA 's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.

 Priority Review Vouchers: An accelerated regulatory review offered to products that meet certain performance or cost criteria, such as the FDA Innovation Pathway and USPTO 's Patents for Humanity.

 Patent Buyout: An offer to buy out the patent rights to a product that meets specified performance conditions at a set price (price for patent usually marked up over market value; followed by placing of the patent into the public domain to encourage competition for commercialization of the product). One example is the purchase of the patent for the Daguerreotype process by the French government in 1839.