Getting There

A ten year long commitment with steadfast patience in the early years. The intellectual infrastructure must first be built along with pilot schools. It will be several years before there are enough eLearningi Centered Schools with eLearning savvy teachers to begin the significant rise in Arizona statistics. With these innovation drivers, the academic performancei curve will be a hockey stick.

Champions. Leadership and stewards are needed at all levels. From the Governor, Superintendent of Public Instruction and legislative leaders to school level educators, each must provide collaborative leadership across the state to implement the school by school transformationi.

Strategic Focus. Short range focus of one time purchase of computers and wired schools is behind us. Strategic focus on implementing a long term, total system solution is the road to success.

Strong public-private collaboration. Arizona has a strong history of working together with the great example of Arizona’s Biosciences initiative. The Southern Arizona and Arizona Technology, Arizona Business Education, Business Education Roundtable, Innovation and Technology, and P20 Councils are now joined by the new eLearning Task Force. They are aggressively addressing 21st Century public-private policy issues. eLearning is on an ascendancy as the K-12 transformation is implemented.

Acceptance by educators. The eSATSi system design places an awesome responsibility of transformation on our Arizona Department of Education (ADEi), colleges of education, school districts, schools and classrooms. This transformation will be effective only with creative and enthusiastic commitment at all levels.

Active state level support. Systems must be in place for success. These include an extended and integrated ADE-School District data driven decision support and instructional delivery system. Colleges of education must transform to produce eLearning savvy teacher graduates. The Arizona university system will be home to the Digital Curriculum Institute (DCI) to assess the quality of, and provide access to the best available digital curricula. The DCI will use a portal and instructional technologist extension service to the classroom. Arizona universities and ADE will create a Teacher Education and Professional Development Institute. It will provide access to the most effective learning sources to transform the practice of 50,000 going on 70,000 educators to a set of certification standards. The auditor general will be tasked to create the rules for funding individual students based on subject mastery of an academic year. The Communication Infrastructure Advisory Committee is expected to be successful with their statewide Broadbandi Initiative.