Scaling Quality Topic 3
Choice: Who chooses courseware: districts, teachers, students and parents? How does the selection process affect quality? What would a healthy selection process look like and what impact would it have on courseware development and use?
Quality courseware is highly engaging to the learner, embedded in a domain, connected to a learning community. It promotes mastery, can be modded, offers learner a choice of experiences and ways into learning (roles, artifacts, doing), is nonlinear, is aligned with the CC, and has proven outcomes for students. If it meets these criteria, your courseware will receive the Conversations on Quality seal of approval.
What is the vetting process for choosing quality courseware? We are giving parents, in conversation with their children, a large role in choosing courseware. Parents and child will meet with their assigned learning specialist (teacher). The learning specialist will discuss the options available and make recommendations based on learning analytics of what fits the learner’s needs and what they need to experience and perform in order to meet the common core standards.
Parents and child can also look at product ratings on an Amazon like web site for course offerings. Heck, it could even be Amazon. The parents then make the choice with their child of their playlist.
You may have more questions about quality. Quality courseware is highly engaging to the learner, embedded in a domain, connected to a learning community. It promotes mastery, can be modded, offers learner a choice of experiences and ways into learning (as per Nicole Pinkard, it offers students the opportunity to play a role such as engineer, create an artifact such as a robot, and or learn a skill such as programming), is nonlinear, is aligned with the CC, and has proven outcomes for students. If it meets these criteria, your courseware will receive the Conversations on Quality seal of approval.
Finally, at the end of the day, we care what learning occurs because of your coursework. We care about the thinking and work that students produce. We are not interested in a school where ‘young people go to watch old people work.”
This is critically important in order to allow learners to own learning and voice of learner to drive marketplace.