Jeff Piontek is an author, keynote speaker and teacher (most importantly). He has worked with many at-risk school districts nationally and is a thought leader in on-line and blended learning.
Education and learning could look radically different in the next few years. The education foundation KnowledgeWorks has released a forecast on the future of learning, focusing on ways that technology and new teaching strategies are shaking up traditional models. Check out this snapshot of an infographic the organization created to depict a learning ecosystem that includes whole communities in education. Make sure to check out the full infographic.
“TeachThought’s intrepid staff have featured a list of 75 different MOOCs for you to explore in the following article by Mike Acedo—courses made for students and teachers alike!”
by Mike Acedo
In today’s world, society has placed its highest value ever on upper education and its requirement in the work force.
Unfortunately, the price tag for such an education has simultaneously risen exponentially, limiting millions of potential students from attaining the fundamental human right of a quality education. Furthermore, it prevents students from broadening their own knowledge and stems their capability of developing new skills that may improve their own lives, their families, and their communities. Fortunately, with the rise of technology in today’s society, it has become possible for the low income and underserved members of society to have access to a free, quality education from some of the top universities in the world.
With the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), students from anywhere with an Internet connection, can access free courses facilitated by some of the top educators and experts in every subject area. From mathematics, to computer science, to philosophy, to business design, MOOCs give learners unprecedented access to some of the most valuable knowledge, from some of the most prestigious universities, for free. Though most of the courses do not offer actual credit towards a degree, some MOOCs are beginning to offer certificates, additional credit options, and other enhanced learning services for nominal fees. Students have also been able to submit course work done through MOOCs to their own universities and be granted credit or research units. Additionally, students may use completed courses as a way to build their qualifications by highlighting their work on resumes, cover letters, and social media.
Though some have criticized the real value of MOOCs, it is undeniable that these courses give students the capacity to learn at a level never before made available to them. It may not be perfect, nor at times pretty or easy, but it is a step forward towards the ultimate goal of providing a quality education to not only the lucky and privileged, but to all who seek to better themselves through learning.
Below is a list of courses from various MOOC providers, separated by subject areas that are increasingly valuable in today’s society. Also included are courses that educators can use to improve their own teaching methods, skills, and facilitate a more effective learning environment in their classrooms.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for Students
Social Science
Unlocking the Immunity to Change: A New Approach to Personal Improvement
Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s The Walking Dead
Personal and Professional Development
Information, Technology, and Design
Mathematics
Image and Video processing: From Mars to Hollywood with a stop at the hospital
Making Better Group Decisions: Voting, Judgment Aggregation and Fair Division
Business & Management
Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part I
The Power of Macroeconomics: Economic Principles in the Real World
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for Teachers
Effective Classroom Interactions: Supporting Young Children’s Development
Surviving Your Rookie Year of Teaching: 3 Key Ideas & High Leverage Technique
Emerging Trends & Technologies In the Virtual K-12 Classroom
Foundations of Teaching for Learning 3: Learners and Learning
Foundations of Teaching for Learning 7: Being a Professional
Foundations of Teaching for Learning 8: Developing Relationships
Tinkering Fundamentals: Integrating Making Activities into Your STEM Classroom
First Year Teaching (Elementary Grades) – Success from the Start
First Year Teaching (Secondary Grades) – Success From the Start
Flexible blended learning models allow teachers in Milpitas School District in California to spend time with small groups of students while others learn on computers. / Photo courtesy of Milpitas School DistrictThese barriers fit into three categories: Redesigning teacher roles that meet state policy and union contract provisions, purchasing and managing technology, and recognizing online classes as valid for admission to California university systems. A report from the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation lays out both the barriers and workarounds in an effort to help superintendents share their ideas.
Three of the most important workarounds center around teacher licensure requirements, BYOD and online course approval.
“There is some real creativity and leadership among the superintendents in California, and several of them are not content to take the California education code as-is when they think that there’s something they can do to benefit students,” said Michael B. Horn, co-founder and executive director of education at the institute.
With blended learning, teachers often need more flexibility in terms of which subjects they teach and how they work with students. Some models work best with a teacher who is certified in a single subject in elementary school, while others work better with a teacher who is certified in multiple subjects in high school, the opposite of what typically happens.
But the California Education Code requires teachers to be credentialed in whatever subject they’re teaching at the time, which means that school districts need to get creative with how they manage staff in these different models. And they also have class size requirements to deal with.
In the Milpitas School District, an initial State Board of Education waiver for elementary class sizes and credentialing helped them overcome these barriers. But then the district changed its model. Now grade level teams of two to three teachers shuffle elementary school students back and forth next door. They’ll also have students rotate within a classroom.
“I see the teacher doing small group instruction with five to six kids, and the rest of the class is completely engaged in their own learning,” Superintendent Cary Matsuoka said.
As the Santa Clara and San Mateo County superintendents threw out barriers, it turns out that one of them wasn’t an actual barrier at all, just a perceived one. The California Education Code requires schools to offer a free education, and some superintendents didn’t think they could have students bring their own devices to school for blended learning because of that requirement.
But they could shift to student devices as long as they don’t require students to bring them. The trick is in the wording, Horn said. They can allow students to bring them and provide devices for students who don’t.
Along with local culture and policy barriers, school districts have to deal with college admission requirements, which they didn’t always think were barriers in the past. With the rise of online classes, the University of California and the California State University systems have many online high school classes to review for college admission requirements. The process is time consuming and doesn’t necessarily result in course approval, so it leaves student schedules and school course offerings in limbo for a time.
As a result of this approval process, school districts must be careful about how they handle online learning in the context of college admission requirements. One district didn’t say a course was online or in person. It’s staff just provided transcripts with the title of the course, and that helped them get around this issue.
As blended learning and technology change the way students learn, states need to be tighter on student outcomes and looser on how they get there, Horn said. Smarter regulations can give schools more creativity and flexibility so they can generate better student outcomes.
And while these superintendents came up with a number of barriers and workarounds, superintendents in other regions and states may face different barriers. Horn encouraged superintendents in other counties to come together for a day to hammer out some of these issues with their collective knowledge and experience.
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http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Blended-Learning-Barriers-Spark-Creative-Workarounds-.html
You may have seen headlines touting the growth and transformative potential of competency-based education. People working to make higher ed more accessible are very excited about the possibilities of this format to help more students earn degrees and to close the skills gap.
Nevertheless, competency-based education, remains an obscure concept to people outside of the few dozen universities that are pioneering it. So I want to use this article to lay out some of the basics for people hearing the conversation grow louder and who want to know what it’s all about.
No, scratch that. By the end of this article, I want you to be able to participate in the conversation. And that shift in focus, from what I deliver to what you are able to do with it, is the start of our lesson.
Think of CBE as a shift in focus from what a student is taught to what they are able to do. Designing a program begins by asking what students should be competent at when they finish the program. For example, a computer science department, instead of starting with what languages and concepts to teach, might determine that a graduate should be able to write a secure web application (among many other things.)
Think of CBE as built around assessment. Exams or projects are designed for students to prove they have mastered the competencies. In the case of writing a secure web application, the classes will teach the concepts and languages leading to that ability, and ultimately a student will have to demonstrate they can do it. There won’t be a test at the end of this article, but if there was, it would test what you are able to do with this information.
Think of the competencies as units or modules. Lesson are designed around each competency, and a student progresses from one to the next. The ability to write a secure web application might be a competency needed toward the end of a program with many other milestone competencies leading up to it. Or, in a graduate-level program, it might be the competency needed to progress past the first few lessons.
Think of CBE as a form of time shifting like what has happened with television viewing. Instead of millions of people watching a broadcast at the same time every week, we now watch episodes on our own schedules. Sometimes we are one day behind the broadcast, sometimes a show waits on the DVR for months, and sometimes we binge watch an entire season. You move on to the next episode when you are ready. Similarly, in competency-based education, each student progresses not according to when lessons are delivered but according to when a competency is mastered.
Think of a competency as something a student may have even before they enter a program. CBE awards credits based on what students can demonstrate they are able to do, so they sometimes don’t have to sit through the related lessons, and they start out that much further toward degree completion.
Think of CBE as a change in how progress is measured. Now students make progress toward a degree by earning “credit hours” primarily by applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair for a certain amount of time (usually at times not convenient for working adults). CBE refocuses attention on learning rather than on seat time.
Think of CBE in terms of the working adult population and others without access to higher ed. Too many conversations about college presume a student body of middle-class Americans between the ages of 18 and 22 who are enrolled full time. But that “traditional student” is a shrinking share of who actually attends college. And it’s a miniscule share of who wants or needs to earn a degree. CBE is most relevant to the “non-traditional” student body who can’t access college on traditional terms.
At this point, the potential advantages of CBE are probably starting to become apparent.
Because it is self-paced, it may be more effective and more practical for many students.
Working adults with real experience can start with a significant portion of the degree progress already complete.
It’s cheaper. College for America’s online competency-based degree, for example, is $2,500/year
There is a clearer connection between lessons and real skills, which is attractive both to students and to employers. A CBE degree may more clearly signal career readiness than traditional degrees do.
Competencies are potentially more recognizable across institutions. In the current system, credit hours are idiosyncratic, so students have trouble transferring credits, which is particularly hard for working adults. More portability of credits could help with the more than 30 million people in the U.S. who have earned some college credits without graduating. 7 million of those have more than two years worth of credits. Competency-based assessments could put those 7 million people at the threshold of an associate degree and halfway down a clearly defined path toward a bachelor’s degree.
CBE has actually been around for quite awhile, and everything said above is technically true of “traditional” campus-based CBE, but now two new factors are emerging that have the potential to scale the concept quickly.
First, online education is becoming more viable. When that is paired with competency-based education, many commentators think you have a game changer. The Christensen Institute, for example, says online CBE is a disruptive innovationthat will challenge traditional degree programs “because it marks the critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers and the right business model.”
And that’s with the business model not even competing on equal ground. So far, students in most competency-based programs haven’t been eligible for financial aid, because that aid is based on credit hours. Therefore, students in CBE programs have had to pay the rack rate, which is still competitive enough with traditional programs subsidized by financial aid that CBE programs are thriving.
What will dramatically turbocharge CBE is if it becomes eligible for federal financial aid. The Department of Education has indicated they are open to this, and they are experimenting along those lines. Last month, they authorized the University of Wisconsin to award federal financial aid for its UW-Flex program, and more are on the way.
Western Governors University, StraigherLine and Excelsior College pioneered online CBE programs about ten years ago. Meanwhile, the programs have been growing steadily in traditional university systems, often in their continuing ed or online ed branches.
Perhaps most exciting is that several projects are underway, supported by major foundation funding, to bring together dozens of existing and aspiring programs. For example:
The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning has a multi-year project to provide training and technical assistance to a cohort of institutions just getting started in CBE.
Next Generation Learning Challenges from Educause is making grants to “breakthrough” CBE programs.
Lumina Foundation has brought together a consortium of institutions experienced in CBE to share challenges and solutions.
The Association of American Colleges & Universities is working on General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs), a project to promote competency-based pathways to liberal arts degrees.
I certainly don’t mean to make competency-based education sound easy to design or without objections. In a future article, I’ll look at some of the potential obstacles and the arguments against CBE.
In the meantime, lots of valuable information is emerging for people interested in what the emergence of CBE means for their schools, their students or their business community. Here are two great documents I recommend where you can dig deeper.
For the business case, take a look at the Christensen Institute ebook Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution.
For a white paper with lots of examples of what schools are currently doing, a great summary is from The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning.
Competency-based education presents an alternative philosophy of when and on what terms students take tests and move on to new material. In competency-based models, students advance upon mastery. A different spirit of assessment sits at the fulcrum of competency-based approaches: students only move on to new or more challenging material once they can show that they’ve mastered more basic skills and concepts. This means that students will often advance at different paces, and sometimes along different pathways. This also means that a competency-based system requires paradigm shifts in both how and when we assess students’ mastery.
Competency-based high schools in the U.S. use a variety of modalities to assess students. A number of these approaches are being used in the state of New Hampshire, in the United States, which has mandated that all high schools measure credit in terms of competency rather than time. Some schools like Sanborn Regional High School still use many traditional pen–and–paper exams, but with one key difference: they offer “reassessment without penalty” for students scoring below 80 percent. Therefore students do not fail, but rather revisit material until they are able to retake tests to demonstrate mastery.
Other competency-based schools, particularly those using blended learning curricula such as North Country Charter Academy, rely heavily on online assessment. In such schools, students engage primarily in self-paced online curriculum and receive face-to-face support from teachers on an as-needed basis. As such, the school relies heavily on online assessments to gauge gaps in students’ understanding and determine when individual students are ready to move on to the next online lesson or module.
Still other competency-based models, like Next Charter School, assess mastery through student projects rather than on pen-and-paper or online tests at the end of a lesson or unit. For example, the students in a social studies course might be asked to write a letter to President Obama proposing foreign policy strategies. The letter might have to include both a historical account of previous foreign policy strategies, a proposed action, and a rationale and justification for why that proposed action was the best option. To assess these projects in a competency-based rather than a time-based manner, the school adds in additional supports and opportunities to revisit material. Leading up to final projects like this one, teachers use various formative assessments, like short quizzes or less formal inquiry, to gauge students’ progress toward mastering various competencies and readiness for their final project. This helps to ensure that students are not assessed until they appear ready, rather than on a fixed schedule regardless of their mastery or lack thereof. Additionally, if a student fails to demonstrate mastery in his final project, he has the option to revise his final project, or he can move on and design a new project to address the competency or competencies that he failed to master.
As schools design systems and processes to assess mastery and growth on an ongoing basis, they are also increasingly incorporating performance assessments in their curricula. Performance assessments are tests that aim to assess students’ abilities to demonstrate competencies across various disciplines and focus on the “application” of competencies, rather than on the rote memorization of facts. For example, a student may be able to answer multiple-choice math questions, but a performance assessment would test his ability to calculate change in dollars and cents in a sales transaction.
Some schools like Sanborn are designing performance tasks that can be administered through traditional pen-and-paper exams, but test concepts in the context of real-world examples. Other schools have incorporated performance-based assessment into projects, such as the letter to the President described above, through which students are expected to apply their understanding of U.S. history and foreign policy to a real-world persuasive writing task. At still other schools, such as MC2, students are expected to ultimately defend their learning in front of a panel of teachers, much like doctoral students are expected to defend their dissertations in front of a committee of scholars.
Shifting assessments to create a competency-based model not only requires new modes of testing student mastery, but also more flexible, on-demand opportunities for students to take tests. Without fundamentally shifting its assessment schedule to allow students to take assessments when they are ready, and providing opportunities for students to revisit material that they have not mastered, schools cannot pursue a truly competency-based model.
On-demand assessment is challenging because it contradicts schools’ traditional approaches to verifying student learning on a fixed academic calendar. Schools must reconceive their calendar and schedule in a far more individualized light if they are to imagine assessing students when students are ready to be assessed, rather than on a fixed day, at a fixed time. Some smaller schools may manage to assess students on this as-needed basis. But to scale such a system likely requires the adoption of new technology platforms. These platforms will need to track student progress, help to calculate when students are ready to be assessed, and in some cases provide appropriate assessment items on-demand. Without such capabilities, tracking each student’s progress and appropriate assessment schedule would prove overwhelming to any one educator.
Government accountability systems, such as annual exams, likewise pose obstacles to creating on-demand assessment systems. To ultimately square top–down accountability regimes with ambitions for more personalized learning systems, these national or state tests will likely need to be administered on a more
How online competency based learning is changing the higher education landscape
We recently had the pleasure to interview Michael B. Horn, Co-founder and Executive Director of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. If you are new to innovation in higher education, Michael is a thought leader you want to be following. From his policy work dedicated to transforming ‘monolithic, factory-modeled education systems’, to his research and award winning authorship—Michael has dedicated his career to pushing for education initiatives that will enable each of us to reach our fullest potential and in turn, change the world.
While there is a solid array of disruptive innovations popping up as technology advances, we have decided to focus in on an area that is being realized not only in education, but in healthcare and corporate learningenvironments as well—competency based learning!
So I think that there is a broad movement right now in higher education with online learning being a macro disruptive innovation that’s sweeping through higher education. My sense is that the three biggest changes we’re seeing emerge right now are manifestations of online learning. These changes include:
1. The online competency based programs that are emerging. Institutions like UniversityNow and theSouthern New Hampshire College for America I think are going to be very significant in changing the higher education landscape.
2. The second one is related to online competency based learning and it is those institutions that are working much more closely with employers. Here I really think of the online players like Udacity who have partnered with AT&T, Google and Facebook to provide online courses which teach students marketable skills that meet industry demands.
3. The third one is the place-based coding boot camps that are starting to pop-up like General Assemblyand Dev Boot Camp. I think immersive social learning programs like these are going to be a critical piece to this puzzle. As online learning continues to find better ways to deliver content, it’s going to be about meeting the face-to-face needs of learning by creating networks and having places to create projects so we can learn and socialize with others.
I think online competency based learning really flips the traditional world of higher education on its head—it is fundamentally about learning and showing what you can do and know. It’s not about the amount of time you spent on campus or the amount of time you’ve spent in class—it’s about building skills—often at a lower cost because you can move as you master things. It really says that research is not at the center of this model, it’s actually teaching and learning. It presents the possibility for students to move in very different pathways through the material which is really unique from the traditional higher education learning experience. It says, hey, if you learn something outside of the institution that’s okay, because we can still show through assessment that you have mastered this or you know how to do it.
This brings me to the last thing—assessment has become a big part of online competency based programs. Right now, in traditional programs, courses are designed to weed people out of subjects not to encourage the learning and actually make people stronger.
There are two main criticisms that occur to me that I keep thinking about…
1. Many of us see that competency based learning is a powerful tool but there are still many that say, “Is it really rigorous?…Does it actually work?…Wait a minute, you get to take these same assessments five times until you master it—that doesn’t seem rigorous?!”
When you step back from these criticisms and think about how absurd the comparison is, in many ways, it is easy to gain perspective. Look at traditional institutions for example, does it really benefit students when they are forced to move on after not mastering something? How do we possibly think that this is more rigorous than a program that requires you to really master something? I think the important thing for competency based learning programs to keep in mind when facing these criticisms is that you can do competency based learning really badly. You can still move people on and say they have mastered something even when they haven’t. I think it’s really important for online-competency based programs to remember when they are handling these criticisms is to not just sell “competency based learning”, but really focus on making them high quality programs.
2. The second thing people are criticizing is that competency based learning is “too career focused” and “too focused on narrow jobs and not developing citizens”. I guess the way I think about it is that online competency based programs don’t just have to be centered on careers. We’re already seeing this with Northern Arizona University and their liberal arts competency based program. I think we are beginning to have a much broader sense of how competency based programs are applied. Additionally, as they get better and better, we will begin to see them extend into more and more fields.
The last part to this is that I think a lot of employers are seeking skills that are actually not that narrow at all. If competency based learning programs are focused on skills that employers want employees to know and do—I really don’t think that’s a terrible thing because these skills are not incongruous from being a really great citizen in the 21st century.
We couldn’t agree more Michael! Being a great citizen is not at all disparate from being a great employee—especially with the increasing focus that many organizations have on the triple bottom line.
All kinds of companies and services – social networks, data brokers, loyalty card programs to name just a few – amass and analyze details about millions of consumers’ activities and preferences. But the inner workings of this surveillance economy remain largely opaque to the public despite the recent revelations of widespread government data-mining of people’s phone and e-mail records.
Now a group of Web developers in Austria has introduced an online game called Data Dealer that aims to make the business of consumer profiling more transparent. The animated game encourages players to amass and sell fictional profiles containing details like the names, birth dates, weight, height, shopping and dietary habits of imaginary consumers.
The idea behind this cartoon data collection ecosystem is to give players a visceral sense of the widespread trade in personal data, says Wolfie Christl, a co-creator of the game.
“If you tell people they should be a bit careful, nobody listens. It’s boring,” said Mr. Christl, 36, who lives in Vienna. The game, he said, is intended to help people “understand a few things – what kind of personal data exists, which attributes are collected, who is collecting this data, why and what they are using it for.”
A screen shot from Data Dealer, an online game that
explores the personal data ecosystem on the Internet.
In Data Dealer, each player starts out with an avatar of a database, a gray anthropomorphic vault containing more than a million profiles and a budget of $5,000.
Players can buy additional profiles from a variety of sources like a dating Web site, a sweepstakes company – or even a disgruntled nurse named Mildred who is selling access to her hospital’s patient database.
Players can also earn money by selling their profiles to a fictional large employer called “Star Mart,” a health insurance company or an imaginary government entity referred to as “Central Security Agency.”
Each vendor lists the consumer details it has to sell.
The fictional dating site, for example, is selling the relationship status, sexual orientation and political attitudes of its members, along with their birth dates, genders, phone numbers and e-mail address. The cost to the player: $150 for 8,000 profiles.
Although hypothetical members of the dating site may think they are anonymous, the game suggests that data dealers could use such disparate details to connect people’s dating profiles to their real names.
“For the chance to find their soul mate, lonely souls will pour out their hearts to you and let you in on their deepest secrets,” the game says. “Once you line up e-mail addresses and pseudonyms with the real names, things start to get interesting.”
Data dealer also explains to players the value of different types of information.
Of e-mail addresses, for instance, the game says: “once you know someone’s e-mail address, you can pinpoint them anywhere, no matter which nickname or pseudonym they use. In addition, e-mail addresses can be sold quite profitably for marketing purposes.”
Although the first version of Data Dealer is meant only for individual players, the game’s developers are raising money on Kickstarter this week to finance an upgraded version that will let people play against one another – and hack each others’ databases.
Mr. Christl says he hoped the game inspired people to demand more control over the information collected and disseminated about them.
“I think at the moment all this data is being controlled by big companies and by government institutions and not by people themselves,” Mr. Christl says. “We need a self-determined usage of personal data in the future. Some changes are needed to achieve that.”
Although Data Dealer is only a game, the timing of its Kickstarter campaign seems fortuitous. Offline, federal regulators have been urging real data dealers to make their practices more transparent.
A few weeks ago, for instance, Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, proposed that data brokers — companies that gather and analyze information from multiple sources about millions of consumers — give the public more access to and control over details collected about them.
“Data brokers should develop online tools so consumers could see the information multiple companies have about them,” says, Ms. Brill. The name of her initiative: “Reclaim Your Name.”
Ever wondered how Google Earth creates its images? It uses a process called texture mapping, pioneered in animation and video game technology, to overlay a flat satellite image over a 3-D terrain map. If you think of how a flat label is wrapped around a soda bottle, you’ve got the right idea.
Most of the time, this works well, but there’s a glitch every now and then. The result is a crazy distortion of the landscape as 2-D and 3-D worlds collide. Brooklyn artist Clement Valla documents these surreal screw-ups on his website. Fortunately, Google Earth corrects them promptly, but these fleeting landscapes sure are fun.
Education advocates for years have marveled at the potential of Big Data. Schools collect so much information on students and their educations. The challenge has always been how to pool that data in a meaningful way to improve learning.
Now a new nonprofit organization with ties to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and News Corp.–backed education services provider Amplify says it has created a massive online database of student information that educational content developers can access when building new products for use in K–12 schools.
The database, which went live a few months ago, gives for-profit educational content providers access to the kind of personalized student data — names, addresses, grades, learning habits, test scores, etc. — that should, in theory, enable them to better customize their products to the needs of students. However, critics, including some parents, say the prospect of such a large, essentially shareable, online cache of sensitive personal information has serious privacy implications for schools. More on the dust up follows.
The Gates Foundation provided much of the funding for the $100 million project, which was developed by Amplify and later spun off into a separate nonprofit organization called inBloom Inc., which we first read about in a story by Stephanie Simon for Reuters news service.
Simon reports that the database already contains information on millions of students. She also points out that federal law enables participating schools, which maintain ownership of the data, to share that information with educational content providers through which they have contracted, without first obtaining parental consent.
Several states have already reportedly agreed to enter data from select school districts, with New York and Louisiana leading the way, writes Simon.
Creators of educational content for schools say they are excited about the possibilities.
“This is going to be a huge win for us,” Jeffrey Olen, product manager at education software provider CompassLearning, told Simon during the education portion of the massive SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.
Not everybody shares Olen’s enthusiasm. While designers of educational products could profit from access to more specific student data, some say obvious security risks and the potential for misuse among companies far outweigh the potential benefits for students and schools.
In a blog post about the debate, educator Mark Garrison calls the database “irrational” and encourages parents to write letters in protest.
He’s not alone. Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit that advocates for class-size reductions in New York City schools, told CBS News New York that “thousands of parents have emailed the State Education Department and DOE in recent weeks, protesting this plan, and hundreds have sent letters to the state and city demanding that their children’s private data not be shared with inBloom Inc., or any other corporation or third-party vendor.”
Jason France, a father of two in Louisiana, is among the doubters. “Once this information gets out there, it’s going to be abused,” he told Simon. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
What’s your take? Will students benefit from a database that allows educational service providers to access private student information to potentially develop more customized content for use in schools, or do the risks of sharing that information far outweigh the potential benefits? Tell us in the Comments.
Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet in November, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he says, “but that doesn’t really make you fluent.” 
Mitch Resnick: Let’s teach kids to code Fluency, Resnick proposes in today’s talk, comes not through interacting with new technologies, but through creating them. The former is like reading, while the latter is like writing. He means this figuratively — that creating new technologies, like writing a book, requires creative expression — but also literally: to make new computer programs, you actually must write the code.The point isn’t to create a generation of programmers, Resnick argues. Rather, it’s that coding is a gateway to broader learning. “When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it’s the same thing with coding: If you learn to code, you can code to learn,” he says. Learning to code means learning how to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively. And these skills are applicable to any profession — as well as to expressing yourself in your personal life, too.In his talk, Resnick describes Scratch, the programming software that he and a research group at MIT Media Lab developed to allow people to easily create and share their own interactive games and animations. Below, find 10 more places you can learn to code, incorporating Resnick’s suggestions and our own.
While we’re at it: bonus! General Assembly offers a variety of coding courses at their campuses across the globe. Additionally, their free online platform, Dash, teaches HTML, CSS and Javascript through fun projects on a simple interface that is accessible from your web browser.
