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C~h - _ a, .~ ~ ~ _ ~ vg AN ~ an ~ ~ ~ ._ "V ~ ~ One strategy for moving from the current patchwork environment with its "islands of innovation" to an TT- transformed educational environment is to create a sustainable ecology for ongoing improvements in IT- enabled educational resources and practices. 9 0 9 0 alas p~19SSI°1~ l'tl906~0 Ilil551 li ~ 5~#. I~' Saws i. Build Community ii. Creata ~rgani~a.ticnal enablers fir ~ '''0 C~rd'nata change The steering committee and workshop participants recognize that the desired changes wall be difficult to achieve, and achieving them wall require coordinated action that brings together all of the constituents to STEM education and TT product development. The committee concluded that generating a detailed road map would not be appropriate at this time. Instead, a series of transitional activities should be undertaken to lay the groundwork for change and to define future actions and initiatives. The recommendations can be divided into three high-priority actions: (~) build community; (~) create organizational enablers; and (3) coordinate change. An active, informed community is essential to an TT-transformed educational environment. An active community would support dissemination and diffusion by encouraging discourse and networking around the development, use, understanding, and sharing of TT-enabled learning resources. Precursor Committee on IT 'Enabled STEM Education. Cultivating community must begin by establishing open, ongoing communication between targeted croups around issues of common interest. , Establishing an interim forward-Iooking leaders lo, lo, ~ committee that would bring together experts and representing the key stakeholders in TT-based STEM education wall bring national attention to the objectives, and spark the interest of a broad spectrum of researchers. The interim committee should coordinate initial activities and generate a detailed plan, pursue the resources necessary to carry out the initial activities and plans, and identify a permanent organizational champion to carry out the long-term plans. The interim committee should be sponsored by one or more organizations that have significant influence on STEM education (e.g., NAE, National Academy of Sciences, NSF, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration). 27
28 IT-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report Follow~n Wor~opse A first step for launching detailed discussions on TT- enabled STEM education is to hold follow-on workshops to: (~) extend the dialogue initiated in the NAE workshop; and (~) promote communities of practice that can define the critical challenges and other issues related to the improvement and use of TT-based educational materials. The critical groups in the discussion will be TT- developers, users (teachers and students), researchers in education, and college administrators. The objectives of the workshops should reflect a coordinated strategy, as determined by the precursor steering committee. The workshop discussions should result in the generation of a detailed plan for achieving broad interoperability, effective learning outcomes, and sustainable solutions. Some of the following tonics could be addressed in the workshops: _ v ~ outline the critical challenges to integrating systems and research among key stakeholder communities in TT-based STEM education, including the alignment of technical, human resource, cultural, organizational, and economic practices with educational objectives . identify scalable best practices in TT-enabled STEM education . develop plans for generating new intellectual capital on effective TT-based pedagogies in STEM education . identify and discuss issues related to the increasingly global context of STEM education and practice Recommendation ~. A multidisciplinary, precursor committee drawn from stakeholders in STEM education should oversee the establishment of a comprehensive national strategy to achieve TT-transformed STEM education and the development of an engaged community that can modify (as needed) and implement the strategy. The precursor committee should be appointed by a national STEM organization, such as the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, National Science Foundation or National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The precursor committee should ultimately identify an organizational champion to serve as a long-term oversight body to coordinate future activities. Recommendation ~. Follow-on workshops should be held to continue the discussion begun at the National Academy of Engineering workshop described in this report. The workshops should be coordinated and reflect the coherent strategy developed by a precursor committee of experts from all relevant disciplines. Workshop participants should represent all relevant constituencies, and the workshops should address issues related to interoperability, sustainability, and wide dissemination.
Workshop Recommendations CREATE 29 Discussions and workshops are important for building community and expanding the ideas brought forward at the initial NAE workshop, but sustainable change requires coordinated action and a stable organizational base. For this reason, the workshop suggested establishing a lean organization to spearhead an evolving action plan over time. This organization must work cooperatively with existing technology- focused and educational groups and coordinate the development and implementation of a national strategy. A national organizational unit (e.g., U.S. Department of Defense, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. department of Energy, U.S. Department of Education, or a coalition of STEM education professional societies) to champion and coordinate activities beyond the precursor stage wall ensure that the activities and goals of various groups (or communities) are coordinated and leveraged. The organizational champion wait promote the advancement of TT-enabled learning to the public and private sectors and cultivate unifying goals and objectives among the various stakeholders to TT-transformed STEM education. The success of the Tnternet Engineering Task Force, with its "rough consensus and working code approach," provides some useful parallels that can inform efforts in TT-based STEM education. The organizational champion should also oversee a national laboratory for research on TT-enabled educational resources and practices (described below). ~ of ~ ~ , o ~ Existing policies and legal frameworks for intellectual property are significant inhibitors to collaborative efforts in TT-enabled resources. Creative Commons, which focuses on openness and sharing, could be a workable model for moving from the current patchwork environment toward an environment that promotes a commons for creativity and dissemination. Recommendation ~. A precursor steering committee should identify and solicit the support of an organizational champion to carry out the long-term activities in support of TT-based STEM education. The organizational champion should, a significant presence in the STEM education community, should carry out the strategy and vision set forth by the precursor committee. This would include the establishment and oversight of multiple communities and a national laboratory that supports research and development objectives for the advancement of TT-enabled resources and practices. The organizational champion should be a national organization such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S.
so IT-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Education, or a coalition of STEM professional societies. Recommendation ~. AI} transitional initiatives should build on the Creative Commons framework, as appropriate. Although significant efforts are under way to develop technologies and applications for sharable learning resources, these efforts are not coordinated to better ensure the creation of a shared educational delivery system comprised of people, organizations, and tools. The development of enabling technologies for operability wall not be enough to fill this gap. The ultimate challenge wall be to achieve interoperability to support learning. This will require holistic approaches that address the full range of factors that impact the educational experience. A national laboratory would provide a real context and an open environment to pilot, test, and evaluate TT-enabled resources for STEM educational purposes. A sustained, highly visible laboratory would establish an infrastructure that supports community exploration of diverse components and processes of the TT-enabled educational experience. The laboratory would also enable research that meets the highest standards of scientific exploration, thereby supporting evidence-based advancements in the reform of STEM education. One mode} for this laboratory might be the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a national laboratory where scientists examine basic questions about the smallest building blocks of matter. Like the Fermilab, the IT laboratory would bring together outstanding scholars from many disciplines to study fundamental academic questions in TT-enabled STEM education: (~) the fundamental processes of learning with IT; and (~) achieving sustainable TT- based education in a STEM-relevant social environment. The laboratory, which would exist in both virtual and physical space, would bring together distributed research on education, learning, and technology; and it would establish a virtual commons for diverse initiatives (e.g., OKT, TMS/SCORM, digital libraries, iUniversity, Connexions, and Sooner City Project) and link the efforts of pioneering developers and practitioners. Functioning as a test-bed and proving ground, the laboratory would bridge the gaps between research, standards initiatives, and the implementation of products. The laboratory would also facilitate data collection and scalability and encourage the adoption of standards-based learning resources through examples and demonstrations. The laboratory would provide a mechanism for sharing experiences and would support the development of quality educational resources. It would enable the identification of exemplary tools and processes and establish a beginning basis for interoperability.
Workshop Recommendations 31 A detailed organizational structure and work plan should be developed for the laboratory before the laboratory is established. The organizational champion should be responsible for planning and implementing activities leading to the laboratory's creation. Initial activities would be focused on current projects and available tools, but, as the laboratory informs and catalyzes developers, vendors, and adopters, it would become a spawning ground for new tools and new investigators. By combining advanced anthropological, psychological, and sociological research with other research strands in TT-based STEM education, the national laboratory effort, implemented in a distributed mode} format (e.g., located across diverse institutional types), wait be ideally suited to provide insight into the human and organizational challenges associated with the use and deployment of TT-enabled learning resources. Research programs that integrate social and technical studies of effective STEM teaching and learning would reflect the overall holistic approach discussed at the NAE workshop. The following general themes were suggested at the workshop: . the creation of pedagogical and cognitive models on how people learn STEM concepts, including how retention rates can be improved for women and students from underrepresented groups the creation of pedagogical and cognitive models for how TT-enabled resources influence STEM teaching and learning processes . the creation of social models characterizing STEM faculty cultures and models for encouraging the adoption of new teaching and learning practices, as well as strategies for collaborative and teamwork . the creation of economic models that support a sustainable ecology for TT- transformed teaching and learning Recommendation ~. A national laboratory should be established to pilot test TT- enabled resources and practices for STEM educational applications. The laboratory should engage leading scholars in research on fundamental processes in TT-enabled STEM learning, provide a test-bed for interoperability, and provide a mechanism for documenting the impact of specific resources and practices on STEM learning. The laboratory should be developed under the leadership of an organizational champion and with the support of leading government agencies (e.g., National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Defense, and U.S. Department of Education)
32 IT-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report Recommendation 6. A targeted research agenda should be established for the development of social, educational, and economic models for improved STEM learning in an TT-enabled context. Details of the research agenda should be generated through follow-on workshops and funded by agencies involved in the advancement of research on STEM education (e.g., National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Education, and leading private foundations).
