Eb71118LandmarkWeek-LegislationandPilotResearch

This has been a good week for Arizona K-12 eLearningi. 

Tuesday: Legislator eLearning study committee

Representative Andrew Tobin met with 20 educator leaders to get input on his idea to create a virtual classroom-library. His concept has the intention of building anytime online courses for Arizona high school students. This would supplement their classroom work both at school and communityi and home. A live internet classroom would allow the best math and science (and other subject) teachers to provide instruction. Time line is by fall of 2008. 

The response was informative on the wealth of current sources proving these resources. These leaders expressed the need for a cost effective system that would deliver these and new resources to all students. 

Significant discussion focused on critical details. 

Representative Tobin’s drive for immediate availability was stimulating to the need to ratchet up the historically excruciating slow process of eLearning adoption. The longer range system transformationi types at the meeting were encouraged that “picking this low hanging fruit” would accelerate their work. 

The education administrators are having increasing difficulty with the “Carnegie seat time” requirement. Assessment based eLearning accelerates learning by 30% to 40%. Students need to move on at their own pace, and not twiddle their thumbs and waste 70 out of 180 academic days. The Auditor General has been asked to create a solution to this problem of funding mastery learning, see eSATSi bill below. 

The 14 Arizona TAPBE (Technology Assisted Project-Based Instructional Program) virtual/cyber schools have been developing this type of program for many years for about 15,000 students. The Arizona eLearning Task Force heard a presentation from Mesa Unified Schools TAPBE schools last month. It has spent years developing many of the attributes of the Representative Tobin concept. 

Critical aspects needed are for school education leadership’s ability to integrate hybrid/blended eLearning solutions. The classroom and online teachers are still a critical aspect for success. Hosting is also critical and it should be centralized. The current and most mature public sector system is IDEAL that is hosted out of ASU and supported under the Arizona Department of Education.
 

Wednesday: 2008 Legislationi out of Leg Council

Legislative council completed the intro-set for the eLearning bill and sent it to itsi Sponsor – Representative Mark Anderson. The next steps are reviewing the education staff, signatures from co-sponsors and then “dropping the bill” to get a number (HB 2???.) As soon as the bill has a number we will get a copy to you. The upper left “Legislation” button on www.azelearning.org  is a 2 page descriptor of the current proposed bill.

Thursday: Bidders Conference for Middle School Math RFP

The turn-out for the Middle School Math Pilot Project potential bidders conference was incredible.  There were more than 60 people representing 36 companies.  Thanks goes to Richard Adickes, Arizona Department of  Education Contracts person, who facilitated the meeting. His able panel of experts were Cathy J. Poplin Deputy Associate Superintendent for Educational Technology,  and ADEi consultants Hank Stabler and Ruth Catalano. They answer nearly two hours of probing questions.  The majority of the questions were about the hardware aspects of the RFP, the nature of the bidding team with one contact on one responsible party, and the numbers to be served. A couple of vendors commented that the RFP was well written. In two hours a few minor problems were uncovered. An amendment to the original RFP will be made based on the questions asked and will be presented at the December 18^th eLearning Taskforce meeting, 10-noon, 4^th floor of 1535 West Jefferson.

Have a happy Thanksgiving.