As we enter the last weeks of the 2019-20 school year, it is becoming increasingly clear that many communities across the nation will not be ready to return students to physical attendance at their public schools. Many schools have experimented with technology during the past six weeks. We have a brief summer to help schools prepare to build on their experiences with remote/distance/online instruction as they begin the 2020-21 school year in the fall. Here are some suggestions for how higher education institutions involved in online learning can help their K-12 colleagues in this crisis.
1. Build a national Open Educational Resources library for K-12. Many institutions have begun to build libraries of open educational resources (OERs) to reduce cost and avoid duplication. Community colleges have collaborated for several years to create a national collection of online texts, lectures, interviews with experts, laboratory experiments and other demonstrations, and a wide variety of other experiences. Other collaborative efforts are underway among public and land grant universities. Over the summer, institutions should work together to gather and collect OERs keyed to specific areas of the K-12 curriculum, creating a national library of free online materials, organized around K-12 grade levels and subject areas. The goal would be to have at least one higher education institution in each state that would coordinate with the national network and with local schools to match OERs to the state’s curriculum and make them available to local teachers.
2. Create a national catalog of online higher education courses that can be taken as dual enrollment courses. Many lower-division college/university courses can be taken as “dual enrollment” courses that allow students to simultaneously earn credit toward high school graduation and college credit at the offering institution. The resulting credits are transferrable to other institutions. Higher education institutions should work together to create a catalog of online higher education courses that qualify for dual enrollment. Within each state, at least one community college and one public university should then promote the availability of these courses to high schools in the institution’s service area and offer to accept credit for those courses if taken successfully by a high school senior.
3. Universities that offer online webinars for teachers should collaborate to develop webinars and professional development courses to help prepare K-12 teachers in key disciplines (English, mathematics, the sciences, history, U.S. government, and social sciences) to make effective use of online content and methods. Given the short time available to prepare for fall, this initiative might begin by universities working together to develop a series of webinars on effective online communication and teaching skills in the different disciplines. Ideally, these would extend through the first six-weeks of K-12 instruction, so that teachers have a network through which they can learn, but also share successes and problems. In time, though, this could evolve into a collection of courses that teachers could use for advanced certification, as well as ongoing networks of K-12 teachers guided by experienced online university instructors in their disciplines.
4. Work with public media outlets to effectively extend K-3 programming to the schools. Around the country, local Public Broadcasting Service stations were among the first educational media outlets to work with local school districts and state Departments of Education to match their daytime children’s programs with state curriculum standards in order to provide at-home learning opportunities for students in elementary and middle school grades. Public broadcasters have a decades-long experience in serving local school curricular needs in their daytime broadcast schedules. The next step in reviving this mission is for stations—through their state and regional networks and in close coordination with state Departments of Education—to identify unmet needs and then seek federal funds to produced new programs and OERs (along with necessary professional development resources) to meet those needs. This is an opportunity to revive a program development relationship among colleges of education, discipline-based faculty, and public broadcasters to establish a new relationship with K-12 teachers and students.
Collaboration as a Key
This is an immediate problem that requires a quick, but comprehensive solution. The key to success, I believe, is for higher education institutions to collaborate within the various families of institutions (community colleges, public/land grant universities, liberal arts colleges, etc.) to share the load and share the resulting professional development programs. We have seen this kind of collaboration already in several aspects of the online movement. The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCOER) is one example. CourseShare, a collaboration among the land grant Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions, is another. The key to quick success is to use these and other similar alliances to get a head start on creating a sustainable new environment that can support the curricula—and expand the capabilities--of local K-12 schools in the future.
This, I believe, could be the hallmark achievement of the new decade, not only creating new content but encouraging new ways to engage students at all levels in learning across the curriculum in a maturing information society.
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