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The education futurists see the development of Web 2.0 as the final death knell of the 20th century learning model. The proliferation of open source learning tools, social media technology, mobile learning tools, and the ability of educators to cheaply and effectively construct rich, complex, individualized learning experiences for students is bound to revolutionize education.

In some ways, integrating technology with high school and college curriculum may seem like a simple task, but any experienced educator will tell you it’s definitely not. Shifting from a classroom mindset to an online mindset not only presents significant practical problems, but the transformation can be very difficult for teachers to conceptualize.

Although the potential benefits online learning presents are exciting, shifting the way educators think about teaching and learning is definitely not an easy task. Nevertheless, the more students and their parents demand highly individualized and inexpensive curriculum, educators will be forced to change the way they deliver instruction. The market forces that are shaping today’s schools will, at the most fundamental level, disrupt the current educational model. The problem we face as educators is deciding which tools we should use and the best ways to use them. Finding a solution to this problems might require the sort of radical thinking the edupunks like to embrace.

The elements that make up this approach are not necessarily new — great teachers have been employing these tactics for years. But now there’s a movement to codify the different pieces that define the deeper learning approach, and to spread the knowledge from teacher to teacher, school to school in the form of a Deeper Learning MOOC (massive open online course), organized by a group of schools, non-profits, and sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation.

So what defines deeper learning? This group has identified six competencies: mastering content, critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, collaboration, learning how to learn, and developing academic mindsets.

“Before we assess, we need to know what we are assessing for,” said Marc Chun, program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. What does effective collaboration look like? What does it really look like to be a critical thinker? These skill are more oriented towards process than content, making them difficult to assess in a standardized way.