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tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt

school spends millions to employ more than 160 “admissions counselors” who man the phones, especially on weekends, guiding prospective students into the right degree program

“College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience

online courses are created centrally and then farmed out to a small army of adjuncts hired for as little as $2,200 a class. Those adjuncts have scant leeway in crafting the learning experience.

highly standardized courses, and adjuncts who act more like coaches than professors

learning to conduct inquiry is itself complex and recursive. These skills need to be developed throughout a research project and throughout a student’s education.

the hybrid nature of libraries today requires students to master both traditional and emerging information formats, but the skills that students need to conduct effective inquiry—for example, those mentioned in your mission statement of reading critically and reasoning analytically—are the same whether the materials they use are in print or electronic.

Too often, traditional research paper assignments defeat their own purpose by implying that research is not discovery, but rather a report on what someone else has already discovered. More than once I’ve had to talk students out of abandoning a paper topic because, to their dismay, they find out it’s original. If they can’t find a source that says for them exactly what they want to say—better yet, five sources—they think they’ll get in trouble.

In reality, students doing researched writing typically spend a huge percentage of their time mapping out the research area before they can focus their research question. This is perfectly legitimate, though they often feel they’re spinning wheels. They have to do a good bit of reading before they really know what they’re looking for.

she has students seek out both primary and secondary sources, make choices among them, and develop some conclusions in presentations that are far from standard literary criticism. One lab focuses on collecting and seeking relationships among assigned literary texts and other primary sources from the second half of the twentieth century to illuminate American society in that time period.

For this lab, groups of students must find ten primary sources that relate in some way to literary texts under discussion and then—here’s the unusual bit—write three new verses of “America the Beautiful” that use the primary sources to illuminate a vision of American society. Instead of amber waves of grain and alabaster cities, they select images that reformulate the form of the song to represent another vision of the country. At the end of the course, her final essay assignment calls upon all of the work the previous labs have done, asking students to apply the skills they’ve practiced through the semester. While students in this course don’t do a single, big research project, they practice skills that will prepare them to do more sophisticated work later.

re-order

order in which the four modules may be used is not critical

ocus and emphasis on the types of texts

What changes

is the

analytic reading

examining its meaning

read and reread deliberately.

understand the central ideas

supporting details

entails the careful gathering of observations

overall understanding and judgment

omparison and synthesis of ideas

drawing on relevant prior knowledge

suggests that educators select a minimum number of grade-level-appropriate short texts

as well as one extended text

in lower grades, chosen texts should include content from across the disciplines.

upper grades, content-area teachers are encouraged to consider how best to implement informational reading across the disciplines

present their analyses in writing and speaking

all students need access to a wide range of materials on a variety of topics and genres

students improve both their reading comprehension and their writing skills when writing in response to texts.

notes, summaries, learning logs, writing to learn tasks, or even a response to a short text selection or an open-ended question.[9]

hese responses can vary in length based on the questions asked and tasks performed, from answering brief questions to crafting multiparagraph responses in upper grades.

narrative story and narrative description

creative fiction, as well as memoirs, anecdotes, biographies, and autobiographies

include writing under time constraints

writing over multiple drafts

generate writing pieces in response to teacher-provided prompts and to their own prompts

For reading and writing in each module

Understand and apply grammar:

Cite evidence and analyze content

Understand and apply vocabulary

Conduct discussions and report findings:

grades 3-5

two standards progression charts for each grade level

Writing

peaking and Listening

Graham, S., and M. A. Hebert. 2010. Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading. A Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Report. Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Excellent Education.

suggests both the number and types

Students

offer one way of organizing the standards

quarterly modules

reflects the integrated nature

four sections

to express an opinion/make an argument or to inform/explain

write

citing evidence

analyzing

grammar

vocabulary

discussions

reporting

What spaces can we build online that aren’t quantified, tracked, scored, graded, assessed, and accredited?

What we have is a series of online classes with no real infrastructure to support the work that students do on college campuses outside and between those classes

Up to now, online learning has taken little notice of the web upon which it’s suspended

Today, the road to access doesn’t necessarily detour through the university, and anyone, of just about any age, can travel it.

We’ve created happy little caskets inside which learning fits too neatly and tidily (like forums, learning management systems, and web conferencing platforms). We’ve timed learning down to the second, developed draconian quality assurance measures, built analytics to track every bit of minutiae, and we’ve championed the stalest, most banal forms of interaction — interaction buried beneath rubrics and quantitative assessment — interaction that looks the same every time in every course with every new set of students.