Craft Category: Artifacts

This report helps policymakers promote collaboration and deeper learning with Open Educational Resources (OER). The authors demonstrate how policymakers are helping teachers to build resources, share educational materials, and personalize instruction by permitting publicly funded learning materials to be shared openly.

Open educational resources (OER) are learning materials licensed in such a way as to permit educators to share, access, and collaborate in order to customize and personalize instruction.

Among the report’s collected policy recommendations, three key principles are required for effective sharing of learning materials:

• Emphasize that all materials create by state, regional, or local entities with public funds will hold an open license.
• Allow states with instructional materials lists to include vetted OER.
• Allow flexible use of funding to support development, maintenance, and infrastructure for OER.

View this report today and learn how policymakers can promote collaboration and sharing of resources in your state, district, and school.

This toolkit from Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) and the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) is for K-12 district, charter, and school leaders to use in the very early stages of conceptualizing and designing a next generation learning program, initiative, or whole school.

Rather than offering a prescriptive model to follow, the toolkit helps educators figure out their own goals in blended, personalized, competency-based learning and the pathway to change that best fits their community and students. It organizes the most helpful publications, websites, and tools available today around four key issues: understanding next generation learning models; planning for and managing change; designing next generation learning opportunities; and engaging the planning team and stakeholders in the process.

Because few practitioner-created tools exist in this emerging field, the toolkit highlights the essential questions to ask throughout the planning and design process as well as the communities of experts, practitioners, and learners to connect with and learn from.

RETHINK: Planning and Designing for K-12 Next Generation Learning Type: pdf

This report, fourth in its series, analyzes blended learning through the lens of disruptive innovation theory. The goal of this paper is to help education leaders anticipate and plan for the likely effects of blended learning in classrooms.

The authors introduce their readers to sustainable disruptive innovation, hybrid models of blended learning, implications for education leaders, and what’s next for the field. Delve into this report now to gain insight into disruptive, sustainable innovation happening in today’s classrooms.

This guidebook by Laura Vanderkam provides crucial guidance to savvy philanthropists looking to transform schools through blended learning. While still very much in its infancy, blended learning is demonstrating promising results, driving a flurry of entrepreneurial activity, and increasing enthusiasm among educators for new ways of teaching and learning.

This poses a challenge for philanthropists. Opportunities for donors to transform schools through blended learning are numerous, but so too are pitfalls. Blended learning done well provides adaptive, rigorous, mastery-based learning for any student, anywhere. Done poorly, it becomes one more example of how the promises of technology can fail to materialize in our schools.

Use this resource to direct your philanthropic giving toward transforming education toward mastery-based models of blended learning.

The Learning Edge: Supporting Student Success in a Competency-Based Learning Environment delves into the fourth element of the definition of competency education: students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.

Understanding how to structure supports is important because learning in a competency-based environment means that students and adults are often on the edge of their comfort zone and competence — the learning edge. Download this paper and learn how innovators are designing school culture, embedding supports and organizing resources to ensure students are progressing and on pace.

This report analyzes the components of effective competency-based information systems. Based on interviews and research, the ideas portrayed reflect lessons learned, best practices, and emerging opportunities. Read this paper to find role-specific strategies to make informed decisions, support new competency-based learning models, and to catalyze change in education.

Necessary for Success provides insights from state leaders on how to re-engineer policies and practices of our K-12 system. The authors introduce the main concepts behind competency-based learning, and they study important initial steps taken by states in developing this emerging model. Read this report and discover how state leaders create a culture of competency within state agencies.

Keeping Pace with K–12 Digital Learning is the title of this year’s report. Digital learning is replacing the previous reference to online and blended learning. This seemingly small word change signifies a significant evolution in the landscape, and a major change in the way we are analyzing and reporting on it. A bit of history should be helpful in understanding our original focus, and our reason for change.

Keeping Pace with Online Learning was first published in 2004. We chose to focus on the young and disruptive K–12 teacher-led online learning segment, and not the broader education technology segment. At that time, K–12 teacher-led online courses were almost exclusively provided by state-supported virtual schools delivering supplemental online courses, and charter schools where students took all of their courses online. A small but growing number of school districts were also beginning to establish full-time online programs accessible to students regionally and across individual states.

This report provides outcomes-based assurance frameworks, with associated course-level and school-level learning performance metrics, as well as implementation recommendations.

Viewed from the perspectives of online schools, courses, and students, this report suggests principles for reform that will help provide outcomes-based quality assurance to better identify successful schools, address needs of the student populations they serve, and may apply broadly to the ongoing debates about how best to evaluate physical schools as well. This report suggests multiple outcomes-based performance indicators and supporting metrics for quality assurance and effectiveness of online programs and courses.

This paper identifies the following key performance metrics for student learning outcomes:

• Proficiency
• Individual student growth
• Graduation rate
• College and career readiness
• Closing the achievement gap