Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

I’m attending an online chat today called School Choice a la Carte hosted by EducationSector.org. I’ll keep notes here…. Choice quotes:

Science fiction author William Gibson (read Pattern Recognition, loved it. Hated Necromancy): “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.”
Clayton Christensen’s book Disrupting Class (reading it) predicts that the growth of technology, especially computer-based delivery of instruction, will revolutionize how we educate students,

A couple forward leaning examples of what’s to come: (Weird list – given all the huge investments in adaptive learning by subject, this is a funny sample….)

• Provost’s second generation is at least partially adaptive for level and modality
• School of One pilot in NYC this summer tested personalized math play lists mixing online and onsite instruction
• Guarenteach.com, incubated by Christensen inspired Innosight, has 20,000 short math videos that match learning levels and interests
• Sylvan’s new platform is partially adaptive
• Informal learning (social learning platforms, peer-to-peer learning, and learning games are all exploding

There are over 100 universities participating in the “Open Courseware Consortium”, at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

2. Credit recovery: most schools/districts will adopt an accelerated credit recovery strategy that involves an outside provider–an ESP like AdvancePath (a Revolution portfolio company) or vendor like Compass, Plato, NovaNet or SuccessMaker.

Speakers…..

Education Sector’s Erin Dillon andBill Tucker; Courtney Bell of Educational Testing Services;Julie Evans of Project Tomorrow; Curt Johnson of Education/Evolving and co-author of Disrupting Class; Brian Dixon, teacher and director of High Tech High’s Flex program; andTom Vander Ark of Vander Ark/Ratcliff Partners and former executive director of education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.