Saturday 30 March 2013

Computers at home--no academic impact?

Having a computer at home produces no identifiable impact on academic achievement--positive or negative--according to a study released in February 2013.  The study was conducted by two professors at the University of California, Santa Cruz--Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson.

Unlike most previous research on the topic, this was a randomized study.  It included 1,123 students in grades 6-10 in 15 California schools.  All students in the study had no computers at home.  Half the students were given a computer to use at home, the other half were not given a computer to have at home until after the study was completed.  All students were able to keep the computers permanently.
About 75% of students in California have access to computers at home; the students in the study were from the 25% who do not.  Access to computers in school is ubiquitous, the authors report, with 15.5 million in US schools, about one computer for every three students.

In their literature review, the authors identify a few studies reporting large positive impact on grades, test scores and cognitive skills.  An equal number of studiesreported no impact or negative impact of having a computer at home.
The researchers found "that even though the experiment had a large effect on computer ownership and total hours of computer use, there is no evidence of an effect on a host of educational outcomes, including grades, standardized test scores, credits earned, attendance, and disciplinary actions...Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even moderately-sized positive or negative effects."

As well, "the pattern of usage is also consistent with a negligible effect of the computers--while treatment students did report spending more time on computers for schoolwork, they also spent more time on games, social networking and other entertainment."

The context is an environment where computers are widely available at school and in the great majority of homes so students may find other ways of carrying out work that requires a computer even if they don't have one at home. 
Similar research on the impact of computers at home in countries where they are not ubiquitous might produce different results.  Several Latin American countries, including Peru, Argentina and Uruguay have undertaken large scale provision of computers to students who can use them at home and at school.

The authors of this study, though, suggest that those in the US proposing to give computers to students for their use at home "need to be realistic about their potential to reduce the current achievement gap."

Reference:  Fairlie, R. and Robinson, J.  (2013).  "Experimental evidence on the effects of home computers on academic achievement among schoolchildren." 
http://www.policypointers.org/Page/View/15174

The Forschungsinstitute zur Zunkunft der Arbeit-Institute for the Study of Labor that published the study is a German economics research institute.

 

 

 

 

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Finland's boys read better online


Computers find very little use in Finland's schools, well behind the OECD average for classroom use, although Finnish students always score highly on the PISA tests.  Most of the ITC experience of students is leisure at home.

A study of students' reading showed that this out-of-school experience produces different reading results for boys and girls, according to an article in the Finnish Journal of Education.
Girls in Finland, like most other countries, come out on top in reading scores in international PISA tests.  However, the results were reversed when the reading was online with hypertext links rather than hard copy material.

Meri-Tuulia Kaarakainen, a researcher at the University of Turku, speculated that boys are playing computer games at home and they seem to be learning from these, despite the general feeling that they are bad.  She said "we found that boys who were very active internet users and who studied computer programming performed best of all on hypertext reading. "

Practice makes a difference, not surprisingly.  Enough research has shown that the brain organizes itself around the uses that are made of it to expect that the students whose use of computers is consistent with what is being tested will do better than those who use them in different ways.
Boys who were judged by teachers to be below average readers in hard copy tended to do better with online reading.  Girls who were better readers, performed less well reading the digital resources.  Boys and girls seemed to use the digital environment differently.

The researchers are concerned that girls not be left behind in ability to perform in the information society. 
Followup research is planned by Kaarakainen:  pupils will "set their own problems and find the solutions because this is what life on the internet is like." 

This is an assessment that would send a powerful message about valuing the student role in taking control of their own learning.

Reference:  Times Education Supplement, TESPro, March 1, 2013

Friday 22 March 2013

DL funding falls behind f-2-f in BC


DL funding falls further behind

Funding for British Columbia Distributed Learning programs for the 203-14 school year will fall further behind the provincial funding provided for face-to-face students.

It sometimes seems like the only serious issue in DL in British Columbia is about funding.  Questions of quality, completion, online pedagogy and professional development all take a second place to financial issues and audits.  This is not likely to change under the current system.
The announcement of funding for the 2013-14 school year remains frozen at $5,851 per DL student, which is $1049 less than for a student enrolled in a face-to-face program.  That is a slightly larger gap than last year since the f2f amount increased by  $116 per student.
Some districts are looking at ways of getting more of their students back on f2f programs to increase the funds coming to the district.  For example, a district with 600 students loses more than $600,000, a not insignificant amount given the tight budgets.

At least one district is looking at breaking up their DL school, reassigning teachers to schools where students would take a blended program.  If 51% of their courses are in f2f and 49% in DL, the district will get $1049 per student more.
Research consistently shows that students in blended programs do better than in online-only programs.  However, the restructuring in BC is happening on the basis of funding, not educational value.

Details of funding for 2013-14 are found in the Operating Grants Manual on the Ministry of Education website:  http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/k12funding/funding/13-14/welcome.htm

Funding details specific to Distributed Learning:

*For each eligible schoolage fulltime equivalent (FTE) student enrolled in Distributed Learning schools and reported in the September enrolment count, 2013/14 is $5,851

 *For each eligible schoolage fulltime equivalent (FTE) student enrolled in Distributed Learning in Kindergarten to Grade 9 and reported in the February enrolment count $2,926

 *For each eligible schoolage fulltime equivalent (FTE) student enrolled in Distributed Learning in Grades 10 to 12 and reported in the February enrolment count $5,851

 *For each eligible schoolage fulltime equivalent (FTE) student enrolled in Distributed
Learning in Kindergarten to Grade 9 and reported in the May enrolment count $1,950

 *For each eligible schoolage fulltime equivalent (FTE) student enrolled in Distributed Learning in Grades 10 to 12 and reported in the May enrolment count $5,851

*The estimates of total full-time-equivalent DL students reported over the three counts is anticipated at 10,721 for K-12 and 652 for the non-graduated adult students
*The Ministry will not fund summer programs for Distributed Learning.  If programs run on a 12-month basis, the funding for the summer period must come from the annual allocation per student.

Regulations for cross enrolled K-9 students
Regulations for several years have required K-9 students to be enrolled in one school only.  That meant that a student would have to take their full program either at a f2f school or at a DL school. 

The regulation was based on the difficulty of having a student in an elementary school or junior secondary taking a course from DL while the rest of their program was in a f2f program.  For example, if a Grade 4 student took math online, but everything else in the school, what would the student do while the rest of her class was taking math from the classroom teacher.

Bill 36 passed by the BC Legislature allowed for students from K-9 to cross-enroll between f2f and DL.  However, regulations were not defined and cross-enrolling has still not possible this year.  The Ministry is carrying out a consultation with stakeholder groups (although not the BCTF) on how this change should be carried out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday 21 March 2013

Celebrate when users profit, not corporations


Open education week
One approach to challenging expanding corporate control of education is open education resources.  These are digital education resources anyone can download for free.

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) Consortium declared March 11 to 15 as "open education week" to help publicize the tremendous educational resources and courses that are now available for free online.
Many resources are from universities and are used by higher education students.  However, a survey by OCW found that secondary students made up more than ten percent of its users.  The survey also showed that the reason most often given for going to the site was "personal learning."

Open textbooks offer alternatives to hugely expensive post-secondary texts.  They become "open" when the copyright-holder gives public rights through an open license.  The textbook author retains copyright to the content, not the publisher. 
A leader in Canada is the BC Open Textbook project.  It provides information and resources to assist in developing and making available open textbooks and other open resources.  Its list of sources of open textbooks gives quick access to finding what is already available.

All the massive access now available online is great, but who judges the quality of the content or the accuracy of the information?

Some sources of open education resources:
The British Columbia Open Textbook project:  http://open.bccampus.ca

ITunes U has more than 500,000 free lectures, videos, books and other content.
OCW Consortium portal--links to courses that can be used for free:  http://ocwconsortium.org/

The UK Open University portal OpenLearn: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/

 

Monday 11 March 2013

An education "tech bubble" ready to burst?


An education "tech bubble" ready to burst?
We should be so lucky! 

A report from a MIT-associated organization that aims to support education technology entrepreneurs is issuing a caution--the situation may be developing somewhat similar to the "tech bubble" that burst in the dot com business at the end of the 1990s.
Investors are expecting that education is rapidly going digital and consequently it is a huge growth area for investment, according to Education Week, whose coverage of the "education industry" is funded by the Gates Foundation. 

Investment is from social-financing websites, large foundations (e.g., Gates), and venture capital funds.
One of the consultants quoted in the Edweek article says that many of the startup ideas don't make any sense as a business proposition.  Marguerite Roza contends "school districts aren't going to pay for edtech products unless they replace existing functions--such as allowing districts to hire fewer teachers."

School districts that do buy new programs face the challenge that startup companies go out of business or change their business model, leaving adventurous school administrators with a white elephant.  It doesn’t take many of these failures to make schools more reluctant to buy the products newly developed.  A danger is that this may lead some schools to turn to the big guys in the field, such as Pearson and News Corps’ Amplify.
The realities of capitalism were described by a spokesman for the Education Industry Association:

"All businesses go through a cycle of wild effervescence, and this excitement will ultimately reach a peak and plateau, and we'll probably have a downward trend as maturing takes place.  We're experiencing that cycle with the current ed-tech trend."

Education Week, February 18, 2013, Flood of Investment, Products Stirs Fears of Education 'Tech Bubble'
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/01/16/17techbubble_ep.h32.html

Sunday 10 March 2013

Every child defined in a database


A new database is in place to capture every US student in the name of "personalizing" their education.  It is a $100 million database called inBloom, funded by the Gates foundation to track students from kindergarten through high school.  The database was built by News Corps' Amplify Education subsidiary and turned over to a non-profit to run.

A Reuters report says that in its first "three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school -- even homework completion."
Who is most excited about this product?  Entrepreneurs who see education as a market.

By the public release of information about the database, some two dozen companies already had developed applications that mine the database to create products--educational games, lesson plans and progress reports for principals.  The Gates Foundation has promised another $70 million to private companies that develop applications.
Promoters say that the database will transform education by "personalizing." Some examples:

Does Johnny have trouble converting decimals to fractions? The database will have  
recorded that - and may have recorded as well that he finds textbooks boring, adores    animation and plays baseball after school. Personalized learning software can use that   data to serve up a tailor-made math lesson, perhaps an animated game that uses baseball statistics to teach decimals.

Johnny's teacher can watch his development on a "dashboard" that uses bright graphic to map each of her students' progress on dozens, even hundreds, of discrete skills.

"You can start to see what's effective for each particular student," said Adria Moersen, a high   school teacher in Colorado who has tested some of the new products.
Companies with access to the database will also be able to identify struggling teachers and pinpoint which concepts their students are failing to master.
 
One startup that couldbenefit: BloomBoard, which sells schools professional development plans customized to each teacher.

Privacy concerns are bound to arise with so much data collected in one place from many sources.  InBloom promises to guard the data, but its privacy policy correctly points out that it "cannot guarantee the security of the information stored...or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted."
Not everyone, of course, sees this database as an advance.  Education technology consultant Frank Catalano told Reuters "The hype in the tech press is that education is an engineering problem that can be fixed by technology. To my mind, that's a very naive and destructive view."


With thanks to Susan Ohanian:  http://susanohanian.org/core.php?id=443

 

 

 

Friday 8 March 2013

News Corp to capture education with a tablet


The corporate dream is to dominate a market.  Two corporations are after the K-12 market in the US, with the global market to follow.
Pearson has its plan in place and has been joined by News Corporation in a race to dominate education as a market.  News Corp is owned by Rupert Murdoch and its entry was slowed by the scandal in Britain over its phone hacking.

News Corp's education arm is called Amplify and it has just announced its own Android tablet aimed specifically at education, according to the New York Times (March 6, 2013).
"Amplify will not sell just its curriculum on existing tablets, but will also offer the Amplify Tablet, its own 10-inch Android tablet for K-12 schoolchildren.  In addition to tablets and curriculum, Amplify will also provide schools with infrastructure to store students’ data," the Times reports.  This is the student information system that News Corp bought as part of its move into education.

The Amplify tablet has the usual touch screen.  If it appears the student's attention is focused elsewhere, an "eyes on teacher" prompt pops up.  Tests on the content provided on the tablet use emoticons of smiley and sad faces--the teacher is supposed to use these to tell which students need help.
The curriculum will include video games and students can take the tablet home to play games as well.

The tablet, preloaded, costs $299 along with a two-year subscription for $99.  It depends on wireless access, but is also available with a data plan.
The US market for textbooks is about $3 billion a year, but districts are holding back on some purchases, waiting for texts that are geared to the new standard national curriculum being adopted by most states.  The handful of textbook corporations will have a more uniform market than in the past when each state has had a different curriculum.

News Corp also owns publisher HarperCollins which will supply content for the Amplify tablet and is also a player in the testing market.
Blogger Walt Gardner asks if the News Corp's move is a case of a camel's nose in the education tent.