Scaling Quality Topic 5
Authorship: What is the teacher role in scaling high-quality courseware? Is s/he developing curriculum and designing the course, or using off-the-shelf courseware and using the efficiency to work one-on-one with students?
We recognize that teachers do not have the time or ability to create every piece of high-quality courseware that they need to teach a course. With this in mind, a teacher’s role in scaling high-quality online resources and instructional approaches is primarily in championing and encouraging adoption. Therefore it is important that Creators of courseware help make this possible by recognizing and applying key design principles while creating online courseware.
The first consideration that we have identified involves allowing teachers to modify and share resources. In order for teachers to play an effective role in scaling high-quality courseware, it is essential that teachers have the ability to interact with and modify the content that developers, other teachers, or they themselves have created. In this growing digital ecosystem, sharing resources, commenting on their effectiveness, and adapting it to fit the needs of a wide range of students is key to creating a resource that will scale. Creating a locked down resource, that is part of a “walled garden” ecosystem, often protects copyrights and locks in users, but may actually inhibit scaling.
Beyond creating open resources that can be shared and modified, we recognize that teachers often are not comfortable sharing these resources with coworkers, both in and out of the building. The stress of their jobs, the lack of free time, and the concern that they will be judged or evaluated based on what they share often prevents teachers from doing their part to scale resources. To ensure quality resources are scaled, it is important that teachers are able to collaborate as a community of professionals. Creating this community of collaboration is a daunting task, but one that would undoubtedly benefit all developers of high-quality courseware. Our vision is one that not only allows, but encourages and facilitates this collaboration in schools, district, and across all educational institutions.
The third consideration that we have identified involves being able to clearly identify how these resources play a role in the overall curriculum. Experienced teachers may be able to identify resources and where they fit into the flow of a course, but many teachers are not able to do this. Courseware creators can help mitigate this shortcoming by clearly identifying how their resources fit into the overall curriculum. This could be done by identifying how it fits into an aligned system of resources and by clearly identifying the standards and outcomes that are taught or assessed through the courseware.
The teacher’s role in scaling high-quality courseware lies not so much in a particular kind of authorship but in the use of the courseware – powerful instructional implementation that produces student results. By providing courseware that supports high-quality, contextualized use, developers are creating the conditions for viral scaling. Beyond creating conditions for scaling, a definition of quality that incorporates the experience of both student and teacher users (student results and instructional implementation) ensures that the definition of quality is not independent of implementation.
High quality courseware is dependent not only on the content, but also the teaching process. Therefore, courseware must include instructional delivery supports. It must also be flexible enough to be used by teachers with a variety of instructional styles.
Any course exists in a culture of continuous improvement. The task of building courseware must be less about building the “perfect course” and more about enabling an environment or eco-system whereby educators and learners continuously seek to improve the practice of teaching and learning, adapting and sharing quality resources. This principal of continuous improvement recognizes that we have much to learn about leveraging technology to improve learning.
For teachers to become viral scalers, school systems must create a culture of collaboration. This means and providing systems for moderating, curating, disseminating the best practices and iterations of the courseware. Developers need to be mindful of this in both the product design and their communication with schools and districts about implementation.
The main challenge is overcoming the number one pressure that teachers face: lack of time and inertia. Most classrooms today are over crowded and teachers have more pressure on them than ever before. If teacher scaling comes through sharing advocacy, this will only take place on a local school level if time for collaboration is built in the schedule and if teachers have a sense of community to support each other. Teachers have little or no motivation to share online to a group of people they don’t know. They are also afraid to put up their curriculum or comments and modifications of other products for fear of being ridiculed. If we want teachers to share online, then they have to have time to do so built into the schedule. The online site needs to be moderated to facilitate communication. Also, there needs to be a way to rank resources or implementation based on real usage and outcome data that does not discourage participation.
One of the major problems with online resources is interoperability. This is a major problem for all resources, one that Creative Commons is trying to solve by bringing together the major players and having them talk about ways to improve interoperability.
If we have a way to scale teacher resources, we need to make sure that this way is good. Thus we need to test it first with teachers to make sure it is going to work. Why? You only have one chance to make a good first impression otherwise the courseware may get a negative reputation, hindering scaling efforts.