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
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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.

Big Data Analytics for K-12 Personalized Learning

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

There is a rush, perhaps a gold rush, underway in efforts to leverage Big Data analytics to improve K-12 educational results.

A story from Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/03/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130303

reports that a new $100 million data warehouse has been built in the U.S. to monitor academic achievements of public school students, from kindergarten through grade 12. The article states that “The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states.”

Already 9 states in the U.S. are participating to some degree, and two of these, New York and Louisiana, are planning to provide all or most of their student records into the data warehouse. The database includes students names and addresses, and other personal information.

A non-profit named inBloom, Inc. (previously called the Shared Learning Collective) has been established to operate the database, which already contains millions of student files. It is a cloud-based data warehouse for student data such as grades, test results, assessments, standards met, behavior and attendance. It is not a repository for digital content, but will contain links to content, leveraging the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative methodology. The stated goal for the data warehouse is to support more personalized learning.

Here you can watch a video that introduces inBloom’s vision for customized teaching and learning:

A very large amount of data is gathered by school districts and states, but resides in many separate databases and is not cross-correlated or well-analyzed. This project aims to change that. See this Mindshift article:

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/07/how-will-student-data-be-used/

Pulling data together in this way is intended not only to make learning more customized, but also to make it easier to track results as students move from district to district or even state to state. In addition, it will allow data analysis on student achievement to be linked to various learning resources, potentially including the 46,000+ resources on Curriki.

Educational software suppliers are excited by the opportunity to mine the database and better determine what educational products to develop, including educational games and other digital learning products, lesson plans, and reports.

The goals of the project are laudable, but not surprisingly, given the sensitive nature of the data, privacy and security concerns are being raised. inBloom states on their web site: “We recognize the sensitivity of storing student data and place the utmost importance on the privacy and security of that data.” Parents in some states are already raising concerns about potential data leakage. While the data warehouse contains essentially the same data already held in school district databases, it now becomes available to a wider audience, including educators in other states than the original source for the data. And educational content vendors are requesting access to test data, for example. Presumably this will be made anonymous when supplied. Ownership of the data is retained by the states and districts that supply it. But some organizations, including the PTA and ACLU, are already asking “What are the remedies if and when data leaks?”.

We’d be interested to hear what you think about this project. What benefits and risks to you see in amassing a well-integrated and analyzable database of K-12 student achievement? How would you want to see this data being used to improve learning outcomes? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Please provide comments.

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

How do you feel about standards?

Death and taxes – commonly cited as the two things that are unavoidable. Except . . . there’s at least one more thing, and that thing is standards.

We are not in a love ‘em or leave ‘em era when it comes to standards. No Child Left Behind left many teachers feeling that they are forced to “teach to the test” in order to be successful in their profession, rather than drawing on the skills they were reliant upon before to engage their students in successful learning.

The current administration supports a new set of standards – the “Common Core.” The first iterations are being polishing up and the list will be rolled out over the next months. This will elevate the conversation about how students should be prepared to a national level. We are interested to see what changes the Common Core will bring!

At Curriki, the editorial and leadership teams have long struggled with how to be a platform that welcomes all contributions of educational resources, while providing some guidance on what, in the repository, has been “vetted.” Ratings by master teacher using the Curriki Review System have kept the repository free and open while providing some guidelines. The newly minted Member Rating System has taken accountability one step further.

The response to these features has been strong, but we know that to be fully useful and to help users be accountable, Curriki needs alignments to standards. This month in the Curriki Survey, we solicit member feedback to help us better understand your relationship to standards.

And soon, you’ll see a new “tab” when viewing resources. This tab will allow members to perform alignments to all grades and subject area standards, as provided by a partnership with Academic Benchmarks. Members can also, of course, gain access to alignments that have already been done.

Tell us what you think, and then, stay tuned!

Meredith Phillips
Executive Editor
www.curriki.org