Eb81117DefenseIndustry, eLearning and STEM

The current issue of Education Week, November 12, 2008 has a front page article by their intrepid writer Andrew Trotter, “Schools Enlisting Defense Industry to Boost STEM”  http://tinyurl.com/6gxywk. The article highlights the work of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin plus Johns Hopkins researchers in developing virtual reality simulators to bring real-world actives to STEM classrooms. They also connect company employees to Baltimore County schools students who are in STEM programs. 

Baltimore County Superintendent Joe Hairston said “Technology goes to the military first…and 20 years later…they give it to the commercial sector.”

I concur with Mr. Hairston's assessment of the lack of technology transfer but there are reasons that do not lie at the feet of the “military-industrial complex”:

After 20 years of deep experiences with the DOD education and training simulation communityi I would opine that: our military and NASA are by far the lead eLearningi entities in the United States. They have invested in inventive researchi and developing technology to support their education and training. Over the past 50 years they have reaped huge benefits from increased speed and mastery of learning in their domain. They have also invested in developing and handing off research and digital curriculum to K-12 education. A lead DOD contactor, Institute for Advanced Development, has done a number of studies for DOD that show digital curriculum used correctly in K-12 education will increase student learning by a full letter grade. NASA and Air Force laboratories have created research based science, math and reading digital curricula. They also have many programs for technology transfer to the commercial sector.

I would extend Joe Hairson's statement if I were he:

“We in leadership of the incumbent K-12 education system have lacked foresight and failed our schools. We have not invested in transforming our teaching and learning system to reap the benefits from eLearning that has been available over the past 20 years from open sources, commercial vendors and DOD research. Our military has reduced costs and increased effectiveness. Business has also adopted eLearning with the same results. It’s our responsibility to belatedly transform our K-12 systems to eLearning. But society is still not yet willing to make a significant investment. Therefore we will accept this support of the business and higher education community to marginally improve the education of a very small number of our 105,000 students with a supplementary activity.”

Fortunately Arizona is moving toward a K-12 systems transformationi approach. We are recognizing that a disruptive innovation model is required which has three major drivers.

The first is online courses delivered by multiple means from virtual schools to a National Repository for Online Courses out of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education.

Second is the “thousand points of light” within Arizona classrooms and schools where champions are adopting whatever eLearning means are available including simulators from Boeing and support from Intel, Raytheon and many other eLearning savvy businesses.

Third is the host of web based student centered digital curricula (both open source and purchased) that are developed, delivered and supported by user networks. Arizona has an outstanding resource in IDEAL (Integrated Data to Enhance Arizona Learning) developed by ASSET (Arizona School Services through Educational Technology) and now hosted and being expanded to server all teachers and students from ASU’s ALT^I (Applied Learning Technology Institute) and Arizona Department of Education.

These three innovations are the initial drivers for the change that will sweep through K-12 education toward student centered eLearning.