E-Learning Synthesis: Curriculum and Standards-Based Content

Terms or concepts that are unfamiliar may be the best place to start exploring findings and conclusions from NCREL's review of the e-learning literature. Please use the list of terms below to review critical e-learning vocabulary and concepts. Each concept has an active link: After the term or phrase, there is a description that identifies one of the best online resources available outside of the NETRO Web site. The key vocabulary offered here are included to help each user build a working knowledge of online learning that is understandable to and appropriate for K-20 educators and educational leaders--anywhere, anytime.

Remember that you can always return to the NCREL E-Learning Knowledge Base by clicking the "back" button on your Web browser.

• Curriculum Standards (Standards / Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning [MCREL]).
• Curricular Integration of Instructional Technologies (Integrating Technology in Curriculum / NCREL).
• Learning Technologies and Higher-Order Skills (Computer-Based Technologies and Learning: Evolving Uses and Expectations / NCREL).
• Digital Age Literacy (enGauge / NCREL).

Curriculum Standards

The most critical component of all learning systems is curriculum content based on formal academic standards that have been developed and approved by regional, state, and professional governing and accrediting agencies. According to a significant, newly released report by the National Association of State Boards of Education (2001):

"Nearly every state has now developed academic standards that detail 'what students should know and be able to do' by the time they graduate from school. As hoped for when the standards and reform movement got underway, it is increasingly clear that standards and aligned assessments are indeed having a profound effect on what happens in classrooms."

Whether the delivery systems use traditional, face-to-face instruction or highly sophisticated online learning environments, engaging content based on standards-based curriculum can provide the most effective learning environments for students of all ages, races, religions, and socioeconomic levels. The majority of K-12 teachers and students with building or classroom access to microcomputers and the Internet already may be using the Internet as a resource and using simple mechanisms to enable online collaboration (e.g., e-mail or simple online forums).

However, use of fully online courses in K-12 classrooms and schools may not yet be a common instructional practice. In addition, the information currently available about e-learning is based almost solely on research conducted in higher-educational institutions and international education. Only a very limited corpus of K-12 educational research is currently available to guide the development and initial implementation of online e-learning in K-12 schools.

Curricular Integration of Instructional Technologies

Plugging In

When it comes to the basics of implementing engaged learning and classroom curricular integration of the newest high-speed telecommunication technologies, new initiatives bringing e-learning into K-12 schools gain much from what we have already learned about computers in the schools. Previous instructional technologies include computer-assisted instruction (e.g., drill and practice), tutorials, simulations, the use of productivity tools, integrated learning systems, and early use of the Internet as an information resource.

NCREL's Plugging In: Choosing and Using Educational Technology was one of the first research-based efforts that addressed the use of microcomputers in K-12 settings and that advocated the use of microcomputers to support engaged learning. Jones, Valdez, Nowakowski, and Rasmussen (1995) present engaged learning as a research-based instructional improvement strategy aimed at improving academic achievement:

"First, there is strong evidence that the traditional models of learning, traditional definitions of technology effectiveness, and traditional models of cost effectiveness of technology don't work. In place of these old assumptions, researchers are positing new ways of looking at learning that promote:

• engaged, meaningful learning and collaboration involving challenging and real-life tasks; and
• technology as a tool for learning and collaboration" (p. 5).

Phase I: Print Automation

Research on use of early microcomputers in classrooms was summarized a few years later by an NCREL meta-analysis examining the effectiveness of computer use in schools. The findings suggested that classrooms in which computers were used to support instruction usually showed gains in student achievement as measured by standardized achievement tests (Valdez et al., 2000).

Findings went on to report that the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) often varied by content area and by the skill being taught. CAI fared better if it was delivered in a content area with a well-defined subject. Factual information from discipline-based subjects was well suited for judging the recall and recognition responses used in the drill and practice software that was common to early use of microcomputers in K-12 schools (Valdez et al., 2000).

Phase II: Expansion of Learning Opportunities

As microcomputer/software systems became cheaper and more powerful, new technologies emerged and computer use in the schools grew both in numbers and with regard to the cognitive complexity of instructional computing. Computers became tools for learner-centered practices rather than content delivery systems. Improvements in graphics displays, faster processors, increased memory, additional storage capacity, and some early telecommunications applications began moving instructional computing from largely isolated activities to applications that involved working in groups.

Teachers increasingly began emphasizing authentic and project-based learning activities. Assignments often were tailored for individuals or collaborative groups, and assessment was based on outcomes that could be scored based on both content and execution. Students processed and manipulated information in interactive hypertext and hypermedia formats. New technology tools amplified, extended, and enhanced human cognition.

Learning Technologies and Higher-Order Skills

With this increasing expansion of learning opportunities, powerful new software provided rapid access to human resources, materials, and information. Students were able to acquire, synthesize, and reconstruct information as unique project-based outcomes. Studies documenting the impact of these more sophisticated technology systems showed increased teacher-student interaction, cooperative learning, and--most important--problem solving, inquiry, and problem-based learning.

Research on technology and learning finally showed evidence that use of these new learning technologies in the schools could demonstrate a positive impact on higher-order thinking skills and cognitive abilities. Appropriately deployed technologies could support exploration and help students obtain achievable goals, form and test hypotheses, and discover new knowledge. These constructivist applications of technologies apparently support developing higher-order thinking skills that can help students strive and succeed with real, open-ended questions, such as those that they will have to face, address, and conquer during their adult lives (Valdez et al., 2000).

Phase III: Data-Driven Virtual Learning

Nearly in parallel with the earliest evidence indicating that constructivist learning activities in technology-rich learning environments promote higher-order skills, new developments in telecommunications and networking technologies matured and became increasingly central to supporting the use of microcomputers in K-12 schools. Online communications, sometimes called computer-mediated communications (CMC), was a generic term that described a variety of systems that enabled communications using computers connected using modems and plain old telephone service (POTS)

Early CMC included telecommunications applications such as e-mail, newsgroups, and e-mail lists. Approximately 30 years ago, the Internet broke over us all like a tidal wave, and both the 20th Century and the world's civilization changed forever. Building on any Internet connection that became available, universities, colleges, and K-12 public schools all across the country began to network their schools and get connected to the Internet. Today, data-driven virtual learning is emerging along with a shift in classroom dynamics resulting from the advent of increasingly constructivist approaches to teaching and learning and the revolutionary changes in computer-mediated technologies that followed the evolution of the Internet (Valdez et al., 2000).

Digital Age Literacy

Classroom and online communications patterns previously present in classroom discourse are being replaced by a wider locus of control, moving responsibility for initiation of interaction from the teacher to the students themselves. In today's connected classrooms and schools, interactive constructivist teaching practices, supported by computers and the Internet, increasingly allow and support the customization of content to meet individual student needs. The advent of these powerful new technologies in our schools and communities, and essential changes in the ways that we all communicate and work, are redefining what it means to be a literate person. This redefining has dramatically changed what today's students need to know and be able to do to succeed in the new Digital Age.

Today, the greatest challenges faced by educators concern redefining literacy in terms of the new skills and competencies that will be relevant to a more international and increasingly technological society. An important and difficult part of this task is to understand the relationship of these new 21st-Century skills with more traditional academic standards. To accomplish this understanding, it is important to recognize the need for assessment standards and strategies that will efficiently measure the new Digital Age proficiencies in the context of traditional academic standards and their continuing importance in today's evolving and increasingly global culture (Lemke, 2001).