Jingwei Viola Liu
Systemic Improvement Indicator E
Indicator E: Establish and maintain a robust infrastructure for technology integrated, interoperable
technology systems to support management, operations, teaching and learning.
Artifact:
Artifact & Course Description:
Course Title
A305: Deeper Learning for All (Harvard University transferred credit)
Course Description
This course explores the nature of good teaching and learning at the classroom and school level, and encourages students to rethink assumptions and design anew. How districts, states, and countries organize their educational system to aim for high-quality schooling will be reviewed.
Project Description
This project involved developing an online supplemental environment to complement traditional classroom teaching. This online environment includes the following features:
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The ability for students to submit and classify assignments online
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The ability for students to do online collaborative activities with each other
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A dashboard displaying student progress that allows navigation
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Areas where students can document their own work and progress
The environment has three main areas: Profile (the dashboard), Knowledge (where students can turn in assignments), and Learning (where the teacher can post assignments and instructions). These were designed based on the three-legged stool approach, where the legs were metacognition, personalization, and documentation.
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Metacognition: This involved allowing students the ability to reflect on the video content to gain mastery of it and increase memory of it. This was facilitated through collaboration features that allowed for shared peer and mentor sessions. It also provides the student opportunity for reflection at the end of each project or unit.
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Personalization: This involves cultivating identity through encouraging the student to self-identify strengths and weaknesses. It also leverages data analytics to provide feedback on the dashboard.
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Documentation: This supplemental environment makes learning from in school during the day visible at home. It helps organize learning within as well as across disciplines.
Reflection
As I have described under other artifacts, Chinese children in rural areas face many challenges in trying to attend school, and in actually learning in school. Right now, China has not adopted online learning platforms to supplement public school education, and therefore, there is no technological infrastructure for this.
Hannum reviewed why rural Chinese students face so many challenges to traditional classroom learning. Rural students often face going on long rides in a bus to the nearest school, and may even need to climb a cliff to get to school. Therefore, many try to go to private schools, but even so, there are children left behind. Statistics show there is a high dropout rate in rural schools; there are family reasons for this, but most of the dropouts are due to economic conditions. The high school graduation rates in the cities are much higher than in rural areas, increasing the inequity between rural and urban areas in terms of education.
This prototype and project proposes establishing and maintaining a robust online infrastructure for technology-based learning aimed at rural Chinese children. The management and operations of the technology would be used to support what is happening in the public school classroom. It is intended to establish a robust technological infrastructure for teaching and learning to support these activities outside the classroom.
References
Hannum, E. (2011). Examinations and Educational Opportunity in China: Mobility and Bottlenecks for the Rural Poor. Oxford Review of Education, 37(2), 267–305.
Qian, X., & Smyth, R. (2008). Measuring regional inequality of education in China: widening coast–inland gap or widening rural–urban gap? Journal of International Development, 20(2), 132–144. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.1396