Khan Academy in the New World of Common Core Standards

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

An intern at Khan Academy recently asked for suggestions on a Reddit education site. There was some interesting discussion in response around the efficacy of Khan Academy videos and how these video resources relate to Common Core standards.

One commenter notes that it is harder to grade and check answers with this approach. Another points out that math and science topics are more objective, so potentially more amenable to the use of short video lessons than say, history. “Dr. Momentum” responds that even math and science still involve opinions.

Students need to be able to understand a logical argument, construct a logical argument and refute an incorrect argument. Students need to develop their own reasoning ability. And coherence and depth in teaching a subject, not just subject knowledge, are required from their teachers.

One commenter points out that the Common Core standards for math include Mathematical Practices as well as Mathematical Content. Indeed, Khan Academy is good for the procedural side of things, and in conveying content. Practice transmission, on the other hand, just doesn’t happen on its own, and it’s not enough to explain procedures. It’s about developing expertise in students – “reasoning ability, conceptual understanding and procedural fluency,” among other attributes.

Here are the 8 practices for Math, which you can find at http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Practice -
MP1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
MP2: Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
MP3: Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
MP4: Model with mathematics.
MP5: Use appropriate tools strategically.
MP6: Attend to precision.
MP7: Look for and make use of structure.
MP8: Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Attention to how a student is thinking and attempting to reason is not something a video can do. Don’t get us wrong, we love the Khan videos, and there are many of them accessible from Curriki.

It’s about the connectedness. One can pick up a procedure or three, but until one has the ability to generalize then the subject matter is not really being understood sufficiently. While some students have an innate ability to do this, most will benefit from coaching and development and assistance in seeing the larger context.

The Curriki Algebra 1 course found here is designed to align with Common Core State Standards.

Benefits of Project Based Learning

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

How do you engage today’s Digital Age students in relevant, authentic learning tasks?

Project Based Learning (PBL) teaches both doing, as well as learning, and gives students real-world opportunities to think analytically, formulate ideas, and solve complex problems.

Project-based learning (PBL) has a long history in American education, dating to John Dewey and other early advocates.

Today, the project approach is center-stage as a strategy to engage diverse learners in rigorous learning.  Students are assessed based on what they produce or demonstrate rather than what they can recall for a test. This application of learning is a higher need as districts transition to the Common Core State Standards.

With PBL, not only do students acquire the knowledge outlined in the content standards, they also become proficient in essential skills for success in today’s world — such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. Teaching strategies that involve project-based learning offer students the potential of gaining deep insights into core concepts. For example, mathematics projects prompt students to develop and answer their own questions. This strategy assists students in developing higher order math skills that allow them to make the all-important connections between one math concept and other math concepts.

If you’re not familiar with our Project Based Learning Curriki Algebra 1 course, please consider using it as a classroom supplement, as the foundation for students’ Algebra 1 curriculum, in an after-school program, or in a homeschool environment.  (This course was sponsored by AT&T and developed by Curriki.)

Please share your experience with PBL, we’d love to hear from you!

Common Core and Open Educational Resources Working Together

By Kim Jones, Curriki CEO

Open Educational Resources are important enablers in support of Common Core standards. An article in Education Week entitled “Common Core Drives Interest in Open Education Resources” can be found here: http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2012/10/17/01open.h06.html

The article notes that Common Core standards are driving increased interest in open digital resources. For example, the state of Utah in the U.S. is creating textbooks made entirely from OER materials, and in the state of South Dakota educators have built a repository of OER content in support of the Common Core. The pilot projects for open textbooks in Utah were highly successful, so the open textbook project was expanded to be statewide during this current school year.

I was interviewed by Katie Ash, who wrote in the article:

“Such projects are exactly what the common core can now make possible”, says Kim Jones, the chairman and chief executive officer of Curriki, a nonprofit K-12 repository for open education resources based in Cupertino, Calif.
“We’re seeing a lot of teachers starting to contribute OER materials that are aligned to common-core standards,” says Jones. “We’re very excited about that and think it’s going to make a huge difference in allowing people across the U.S. to leverage what teachers are doing in other places.”

The article also noted Curriki’s work with the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, which is working to categorize and tag OERs to make them more accessible and easier to search. Also mentioned was Curriki’s launch during 2012 of a free Algebra 1 course aligned to Common Core standards.

“It’s an exciting time for education, between OER really crossing the chasm and common-core standards coming out, and just the work that’s going on around technology,” says Jones, from Curriki. “It’s all coming together at a great time, and it’s really going to have a positive impact on education going forward.”

For more information on how OER supports Common Core standards implementation, we encourage you to read the full article at: http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2012/10/17/01open.h06.html

Curriki Celebrates Six Year Anniversary!

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Curriki is celebrating our 6-year anniversary this week. For 6 years, Curriki has been the leading K-12 global community for teachers, students and parents to create, share, and find free and open learning resources that improve teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. We are pleased to be going strong and we thank you for your support and engagement, whether you just joined this year or have been involved with us for several years.

The name Curriki is derived from the words “curriculum” and “wiki”. Here’s how our mission is described at Wikipedia:

Curriki’s mission is to use technology to help break down economic and geographic barriers that prevent children worldwide from having access to quality education, and thereby to make learning possible for anyone, anywhere in the world. Curriki’s model is to develop curricula through community contributors, and to deliver curricula and open educational resources globally. Anyone with access to the Internet can contribute and use the material found on Curriki to teach themselves or others. Since the materials, which include digital textbooks, learning videos, and interactive resources, are provided in open source, they can be adapted as needed to particular requirements inside or outside of the classroom.

Curriki continues to grow rapidly. The number of resources available at Curriki has doubled just in the last 4 years, and is now at 45,000. The number of members has grown to over 300,000, more than tripling in that same period. There have been over 7.5 million unique visitors to the Curriki site! And there are 678 groups within the Curriki family that have established by our members.

Curriki’s pre-history was in 2004 and 2005 and saw the development of the original concepts for a global education community, spearheaded by Scott McNealy and myself when Scott was the CEO at Sun Microsystems and I lead the Sun Education group for the company. Working in the technology field and with the education community, we were able to see the potential to leverage the Internet and technology more broadly to address the mission as stated above.

We launched Curriki in 2006 as a non-profit organization, and the initial website was launched in 2007. The first contribution was from Kevin Driscoll. In the same year the Curriki review team was launched. In 2009 we added a full chemistry curriculum.

Highlights in the current year of 2012 included a significant redesign of the Curriki web site, the launching of the Curriki Algebra 1 course, and the 300,000^th member joining Curriki.

We look forward to increasing Curriki’s capabilities in the coming years and to continuing to help you achieve successful educational results!

MOOCs going Massive

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

A recent article in the NY Times suggested this is the “Year of the MOOC”. The article refers to the rapid growth of MOOCs as “a revolution that has higher education gasping”.

What is a MOOC? MOOC is an abbreviation for massive open online course, in other words a way of delivering a given course to many thousands of people via the Internet. According to Wikipedia:

“A massive open online course (MOOC) is a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web. MOOCs are a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources.”

So the principles are open access, promoting a course to many learners, and participation – active learning. The NY Times article noted that “three things matter most in online learning: quality of material covered, engagement of the teacher and interaction among students”

This Youtube video introduces the philosophy of MOOCs http://youtu.be/eW3gMGqcZQc ; it is less than 5 minutes in length and is worth a look.

Right now MOOCs are primarily a higher education phenomenon. The best-known MOOCs are Coursera and edX. Coursera begun at Stanford, and now 34 universities are contributing content at coursera.org. Presently there are 203 courses being offered at Coursera.

edX is led by MIT and Harvard, and now includes UC Berkeley and the University of Texas system (9 universities) as contributors at edx.org. Anant Agarwal, MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and President of edX has stated “This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press.”

Actually, at Curriki we think open courseware is the biggest change in education since the printing press. Open courseware, such as that available on Curriki, is the progenitor of MOOCs. We have not yet seen MOOCs take off in the K12 space, but it seems only a matter of time. One could imagine this happening initially on a district-wide basis, with a standard course based on open courseware (such as Curriki’s Algebra 1 course) being accessed by students across a district. The teachers in each classroom would have roles as facilitators and coaches, thereby promoting higher levels of individualized attention.

Smartphones in the Classroom

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Is there a role, or more properly stated, what is the role for smartphones and tablets such as the iPad in the classroom? A recent report on National Public Radio in the U.S. looked into the increasing usage of mobile devices in support of learning in classroom settings.

You can access the related blog, and the audio and transcript of the report, at n.pr/Py5ryu. The report notes that:

Allowing mobile technology in class has an ‘inevitable march of progress’ feel to it, like when calculators were first allowed. And in classrooms around the country, this change is already occurring.

As the photo suggests, change is is already occurring around the world, in this case Korea. The government in Thailand has purchased almost a million tablets for elementary school students.

Here’s a list of 10 North American K-12 schools allowing smartphones in the classroom. For example, one district in North Carolina allows students to use mobile devices in their algebra and other math courses, for calculation, for accessing math instruction videos on the web (think Khan academy and other instructional videos found on Curriki) and for other course-related purposes. Students there are reporting greater confidence in their math skills and more than half are considering careers in math-related fields. In another district in North Carolina, high school students with smartphone access scored 25% better in their end-of-year algebra exam than students not using smartphones in class.

And here’s a blog at Teachhub that discusses various ways in which smartphones and other mobile devices can be used effectively. These techniques include recording lectures, digitally delivering materials and useful apps such as Dropbox for sharing files.

Curriki supports the appropriate use of these devices in order to enhance learning, including by students in the classroom, and of course our substantial library of open educational resources is available for access by smartphones and tablet computers. This includes Curriki’s recently introduced open source Algebra 1 course.

We would be interested to hear your feedback and experiences regarding the successes and challenges you are seeing with student use of smartphones and tablets in your classrooms.