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test-based accountability is “doing untold damage to the profession of teaching.”

The main thing that works is treating teaching as a profession, and teachers as professionals.

That means that teachers are as well paid as other professionals, that they have a career ladder, that they go to elite schools where they learn their craft, and that they are among the top quartile of college graduates instead of the bottom quartile.

When I suggested that American cities couldn’t afford to pay teachers the way we pay engineers or lawyers, Tucker scoffed. With rare exception, he said, the cost per pupil in the places with the best educational systems is less than the American system, even though their teachers are far better paid. “They are not spending more money; they are spending money differently,” he said.

Tucker would not abolish tests, but he would have fewer of them.

And they would have a different purpose: In the high-performing countries, the tests exist to hold the students accountable, rather than the teachers.

When a school falls short, instead of looking to fire teachers, the high-performing countries “use the data to decide which schools will receive visits from teams of expert school inspectors. These inspectors are highly regarded educators.”

Tucker envisions the same kind of accountability for teachers as exists for, say, lawyers in a firm — where it is peers holding each other accountable rather than some outside force. People who don’t pull their own weight are asked to leave. The ethos is that people help each other to become better for the good of the firm. Those who successfully rise through the ranks are rewarded with higher pay and status.

Would the teachers’ unions go along with such a scheme? The unions would certainly have to shed some of the things they now have, such as control of work rules.

fixation with test-based accountability

every other successful country has

Traditional, lecture-based classrooms are designed as passive learning environments in which the teacher conveys knowledge and the student responds (Chen, 2009).

"He or she supports the students in their search and supply of relevant material, coordinates the students' presentations of individual milestones of their projects, moderates discussions, consults in all kinds of problem-solving and seeking for solutions, lectures on topics that are selected in plenary discussions with the students and conforms to the curriculum" (Motschnig-Pitrik & Holzinger, 2002, p. 166).

scaffold the learning process

Examples of emerging web applications for each of these categories are highlighted. The Networked Student Model establishes a baseline that begins to address what level of structure is needed to facilitate networked learning while providing a foundation for greater student control over the personal learning environment.

Networked learning, constructivism, and principles of connectivism inform the instructional design and provide a foundation on which future studies can explore the impact of networked learning on K-12 students and teachers.

It is the combination of these connections, especially in concert with human to human contact, that provide the most powerful learning potential (Goodyear, 2005).

The significant connections in Couros' view of the network include colleagues, popular media, print and digital resources, the local community, blogs, wikis, video conferencing, chat/IRC, social networking services, online communities, social bookmarking, digital photo sharing, and content development communities (Couros, 2008).

The networked student follows a constructivist approach to learning.

The Networked Student Model of constructing personal learning environments is reflected in many connectivist principles.

The networked student constructs knowledge that can be built upon in other contexts. That knowledge resides within the network to be activated by the learner at any time in the future. There is always the capacity to add nodes to the network (Siemens, 2009).

Ultimately, meaningful learning occurs with knowledge construction, not reproduction; conversation, not reception; articulation, not repetition; collaboration, not competition; and reflection, not prescription (Jonassen et al., 2003).

Learning potential exists in what the student does with the compilation of content and how it is synthesised.

exploring problems, asking questions, making discoveries, achieving new understanding and fulfilling personal curiosity" (National Science Foundation, as quoted by Chang & Wang, 2009, p. 169)

The networked student test case follows a single iteration, design based research process (Ma & Harmon, 2009) for analysing a problem, developing a solution, testing a prototype, and reflecting on the results.

The students had never participated in networked learning, so a significant amount of time was allotted at the beginning of the project to address digital literacy as well as task and organisational skills that would be required in the online environment.

The process and tools are overwhelming to students if presented all at once.

Achieving the delicate balance between teacher control and student autonomy is an ongoing challenge when facilitating student use of new technologies for self-regulated learning

e expected to be

The following are several specific examples of what the open standards and services must enable to make this new architecture for learning a reality: Digital content and applications must be easily, quickly (ideally, within a few minutes versus months), and seamlessly integrated into any platform that supports a set of vendor-neutral open standards and, importantly, are not trapped inside a single platform. User, course, and context information must be synchronized among selected applications so that neither the manual transfer of information nor multiple logins to different applications are required—thus making set-up and use of new software much easier for all concerned. Data that describes usage, activities, and outcomes must flow from learning content apps to the enterprise system of record, learning platforms, and analytics platforms. Systems, services, and tools must be virtualized and must increasingly move toward the elastic computing model that enables sharing scenarios across systems or other federations of users.Imagine what would happen if CIOs could safely add services and applications in a matter of days instead of months, if instructors could seamlessly combine these tools into their courses with one click, and if analytics data would begin to flow immediately thereafter. This new IT architecture would revolutionize the support for academic technology in the same way that the app movement has revolutionized what is available on mobile devices. A key difference with the new IT architecture, however, is that these educational apps are built using standards adopted and managed by the educational community and would be connected into the educational enterprise IT infrastructure.

The rise of the MOOC illustrates how important innovations often happen outside of established channels: by faculty who, interested in innovation, put together their own technology solutions outside their college or university. This should be a wake-up call for the higher education community to do better. Enterprise IT organizations need to enable such innovation, not stand in its way.