The first step of Phase II was to develop a project team and Terms of Reference.
Here are the main goals for Phase II:
1. What approaches are school districts, provinces, states, etc. using to help students and teachers discover and access learning resources
2. How have they funded their initiatives?
3. Best practices for how they have rolled-out these type of initiatives
4. Detailed summary of what jurisdictions are doing in the US and Canada, and in Europe and Asia
To meet these goals, we first did background research then prepared a comprehensive inventory of what other jurisdictions are doing to help students and teachers discover and access learning resources. This was set up to enable education leaders from the different jurisdictions to submit to an online form what they are doing in this area.
Inventory
“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed” – William Gibson
After looking through more than a hundred jurisdictions and digital commons sites, it was clear there was a very wide range in sophistication of initiatives and technologies. William Gibson’s quote about the future being here, just not evenly distributed was a good way of summarizing the environment.
For example, some jurisdictions like South Korea were planning on nationwide roll-outs to students of tablets whereas other jurisdictions were still debating whether it was beneficial for students to have digital devices in the classroom. Some jurisdictions were just beginning the conversation about personalized learning; whereas others were already on second or third generation systems that integrated curriculum and learning analytics.
Case Studies:
After doing a full inventory of different jurisdictions around the world (mainly US and Canada), we selected what we concluded were the most innovative examples and the examples where there were the most lessons learned. Several projects had been under way for more than a decade so there were some rich second or third generation approaches to learn from. The underlying technologies used by these different jurisdictions are diverse (Google Docs, SharePoint, WordPress/BuddyPress) as well as the budgets (from hundreds of thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions).
Maine: A new state of learning
Edmonton Public School District, Alberta, Canada
West Vancouver School District #45, British Columbia: Digital Dashboard
Glow Scotland & EduBuzz: A talke of two approaches
Presentation on January 10th
A summary of the findings of the environmental scan was presented to ERAC staff on January 10th, 2012.
Here was the agenda:
Participants:
1. Environmental Scan Project Context and Goal
2. Process
3. Challenges & Opportunities
4. Trends
5. Case Studies – Jay will talk about two case studies in US and one in Scotland, I will talk about two in Canada and brief overview of other regions
6. Resources
7. Recommendations
Here are the slides from the meeting:
Here is the presentation file in PDF format:
erac presentation jan 10th 2011
Here is a document showing the various components typically part of a successful digital learning commons environment. Most digital learning commons have some of these components, no jurisdiction appears to have them all in place. The mixture of components gives the character of the learning commons and often relates to the historic roots of the digital learning commons (i.e. did it originate from the distance education sector or more from face to face school environment).
Digital-learning-commons-components
This diagram shows a proposed “network of networks” architecture approach (rough format).
In the presentation, the topic of project based learning in Maine came up, along with mass-customized learning and the next generation of the Glow platform in Scotland . Here are the follow up resources:
Here is a summary of the main environmental scan findings:
coming shortly…
