Eb71111SystemsThinkingandFuture

There was an article in the New York Times this Sunday that was a shocker. Boeing spy satellite program for a new generation of both optical and radar satellites had failed after many $billion and ten years. The shocker was not the program failure itself or the funding. Costly high technology aerospace programs that push the envelope hard have a significant risk of failing. The four underlying reasons that caught my attention were:

 The program contract was technically flawed, rigid controls for an R&D project, and under-funded from the beginning;

1. The less than qualified subcontractors produced defective and ill-designed components;
2. The bright young engineers that propelled our early space program are attracted to commercial fields such as Google and Apple.
3. Decline of American expertise in systems engineering.

These four reasons are playing out in K-12 eLearningi:

1. Most technology adoptions in schools are technically flawed in that they do not start with teacher professional development and digital curriculum, but focus on the hardware. Episodic funding that does not address lifecycle investments is almost a given.

2. Without a stable and robust market for eLearning there is a host of digital curriculum vendors with a wide range of products, most with limited researchi and ongoing field testing. In the hardware side K-12 education is still dependent on computers and servers developed for “office” not instructional education use. 

1. Our bright potential young math and science teachers quickly learn (i.e. they are bright) of the potential career paths of teachers pay with intrinsic rewards and the not only huge extrinsic rewards of information and high technology industry but also the vision and challenges for inventing the future of the world.

1. I started my professional MIT and Garrett-AiResearch career as a systems engineer (1956-1969) who worked on advanced gas turbine engines, supersonic combustion ram jets, and the Saturn SIVb 2^nd stage of the Apollo rocket. This rocket put the largest satellite ever in orbit which promptly launched one of my classmates, Buzz Aldrin to the moon. To hear that America is on the decline on systems engineering is to me stunning. I can abide with China producing our entertainment goodies, and India delivering incredible software code. But the US falling systems thinking and systems design, and systems engineering, no-way.

eSATSi used systems engineering to design in 2004 the eLearning System for Arizona’s Teachers and Students. Over the past three years it has achieved small but critical components of that system. This year we are holding to our guns and requesting that all critical system aspects be initiated this year. 

Our space program was driven by a simple vision, John F. Kennedy proclaimed in 1961 “ We will send a men to the moon and return them safely by the end of the decade.” We need that same simple declaration and goal from our state leadership for transforming K-12 education to an eLearning system design by 2017. 

We also need the underlying K-12 education outcomes design which is now encode as 21^st Century Skills to be flexible in addressing emerging issues. Along with the other Learning and Thinking skills, lets include systems thinking, the granddaddy of all skills that makes a nation great over the long haul.