We are two weeks into ExcelinEd’s My School Information Design Challenge, with the goal of making state report cards on schools more useful to parents, teachers, policymakers, and the broader community. Rebecca Shah, on Data Quality Campaign’s Blog, highlighted the need for not just making data available, but putting it in a usable format: We use information…
Upgrading High Schools with MOOCs
By: Nathan Martin edX believes that students who want to learn deserve access to the best classes in the world. Since launching in 2012, the non-profit collaboration governed by MIT and Harvard has expanded opportunities for driven and motivated students to take Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from some of the best universities in the…
23 Sep 2014
It’s Time to Reimagine School Information
By John Bailey and Tom Vander Ark This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post. “Let me Google that.” “Google” has become a universal term for finding information online, and was officially recognized as a verb by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. Quick, simple access to useful information online has transformed the way we…
22 Sep 2014
Time to Act Now to Improve Today’s Education for Tomorrow’s Economy
Dear Friends, Last month, I wrote an urgent call to action based on ACT’s Conditions of College & Career Readiness report. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Leaders & Laggards, A State-by-State Report Card on K-12 Educational Effectiveness, released today, reinforces the importance of acting now to improve the quality of education for tomorrow’s economy. I applaud…
12 Sep 2014
Improving Student Engagement With Course Access
By: Neil Campbell As someone who is lucky to have friends all over the Southeast, Midwest, and Northeast – every week from early August through early September involves a new round of pictures on my Facebook feed with captions to the effect of, “I can’t believe (…) is already in (…) grade!” These pictures are…
29 Aug 2014
Course Access Roundup: The Fordham Institute
In July, ExcelinEd published Leading in an Era of Change in collaboration with EducationCounsel. The whitepaper discusses the challenges facing Course Access programs, and offers recommendations to help states identify, assess, and monitor clear indicators of program effectiveness. The Fordham Institute has also been engaged in the encouraging Course Access, and published Expanding the Education Universe:…
27 Aug 2014
21st Century Classroom Innovation Act
By: Neil Campbell We were excited to see that U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers from Washington introduced a bill just before Congress’ August recess, H.R. 5303, to promote high-quality blended learning schools across the country. Successful blended learning schools are created when teachers and school leaders design and implement new instructional models to personalize learning for…
14 Aug 2014
MOOCs: Questions Answered
This is the fourth post in a series on taking a MOOC. Read Parts One, Two, and Three. I am four weeks and four blogs into my first experience with a Massive Open Online Course, an offering from Cornell entitled: “Wiretaps to Big Data: Privacy and Surveillance in the Age of Interconnection”: I started this…
30 Jul 2014