Balancing Tech-Time and Face-Time

In a feature story in today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed, Adapting to Developmental Education, Steve Kolowich reports on private companies—from publishers to test-makers—that are marketing products specifically designed for college developmental education instruction, many of which include sophisticated diagnostic tools to tailor instruction to a particular user:

“It is similar to what Google and Netflix and other web applications are using, where they measure activity that user is doing and bringing back the data … based upon actions that you’ve taken,” says David Liu, Knewton’s chief operating officer. “Not only do we data mine all [your] activities as a student, but we also begin to understand some of the tendencies you have and compare you to cohorts that we have using the system.”

Technology-supported tailored instruction has been in the news elsewhere this week; in her coverage of this week’s annual meeting of the American Council on Education, EdWeek reporter Caralee Adams lifts up how such innovations can save scarce faculty and space resources. DEI colleges are showing how this can be done: Housatonic Community College’s “Open Entry/Open Exit” program allows students to move through material at their own pace and allows fewer faculty members to serve a greater number of students. El Paso Community College is expanding its “Math Emporium” model, which allows students to work only on the concepts and skills in which they are deficient, completing courses in less time.


But tailoring takes serious coordination. Yesterday on this blog, Kathleen Cleary of Sinclair Community College called for “technology to help us organize the sheer logistics of more individualized instruction.” Are these adaptive programs the way to get there?  Cleary notes that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all tailor, so colleges must “take advantage of peer and social learning” to find methods that work for all students. Models like the School of One are one way to incorporate technology and face-to-face instruction. How does your college integrate tech-time with face-time?

Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative. 

Guest Post: School of One in 26,000?

Yesterday, Mickey Muldoon introduced us to New York City Public Schools’ School of One program. Today, Dr. Kathleen Cleary, Dean and DEI Project Director at Sinclair Community College, explores how this concept might be applied to developmental education at the community college.

I attended the Big Ideas Fest at Half Moon Bay in December and heard an inspiring presentation on the School of One in New York City.  According to its website, “the mission of School of One is to provide students with personalized, effective, and dynamic classroom instruction so that teachers have more time to focus on the quality of their instruction.”  Each student receives a different schedule each day to allow them opportunities to learn in different modalities and to maximize the ways he or she learns best.

I left the festival pondering how the School of One mission might play out in a community college setting, particularly with developmental education students.  I was immediately struck by the challenges of scaling an individualized approach to instruction.  At Sinclair Community College, a 26,000-student campus, we currently offer developmental mathematics in multiple modalities: classroom-based instruction that heavily emphasizes inquiry-based and group learning; online classes to reach students who are unable to come to campus; an intensive boot camp experience for students who only need a quick refresher to catch up on their math readiness; and finally, a technologically-rich lab setting where students learn the material at their own pace, with an instructor and tutors to guide them along the way.  At first glance, the lab setting would seem to be the closest fit with the School of One philosophy, and, in fact, 80% of students surveyed would take a class again in this format.  Their success rates are higher than those for the traditional classroom or online formats, but not all students are able to learn this way, either because they are home-bound, or because they are social learners who benefit from the peer and instructor interaction of the traditional, group-based classroom.  How do we find the best fit for each individual student and scale that for the 7,000 developmental education students we serve?

My current thinking is that we need to become much more sophisticated in our ability to use predictive analytics: a student who places into developmental education after passing Algebra II in high school has completely different needs than a displaced worker who may never have gotten through Algebra in the first place.  We need technology to help us organize the sheer logistics of more individualized instruction, but we also need to take advantage of peer and social learning through processes such as block scheduling, learning communities, and far more robust orientation programs.  Finally, we need to figure out how to build more flexibility into our system, so that if a student discovers he or she is not a good fit with a learning modality, we can quickly move the student to a different type of class and not make him or her sit through an entire term in a form that compromises the student’s ability to succeed.

It would take champions from student services, information technology, and instruction to figure out what it would take for a School of One model to work in a large community college, but the benefits for developmental education students could be substantial.

Kathleen Cleary is Project Director of DEI at Sinclair Community College.

Guest Post: Applying Promising K-12 Models

In December 2010, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) hosted a Big Ideas Fest, an “inspirational extravaganza” where participants shared “ideas and real world results that prove when you put the learner in the center of all systems, anything is possible.” Big ideas, indeed! Thanks to support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, three DEI colleges were able to send representatives. Dr. Kathleen Cleary, from Sinclair Community College attended the event; she was particularly struck by a presentation from the New York City Public Schools’ School of One program. Today’s post is an introduction to the School of One approach from Mickey Muldoon, School of One’s manager of external affairs. Tomorrow, we’ll feature a post from Dr. Cleary, exploring how such an approach might be applied in developmental education at the community college level.

School of One was inspired by the simple insight that students in New York City classrooms – and across the country – have incredibly variable skills, knowledge, abilities, and challenges. Treating all the students in any classroom as identical cogs doesn’t do justice to their differences – and can be inefficient and taxing on teachers. So just like Amazon.com and Pandora.com respond to the unique preferences of their users, we are building a classroom that adapts to every student, with the help of sophisticated technology behind the scenes.

Below are some of the key principles of our philosophy and design:

• Multiple modalities enable personalization. Our classrooms are large (~2,000 square feet) and divided into learning stations in different modalities: large and small group instruction, small group collaboration, software-based instruction, live remote tutoring, and independent practice. Because students are distributed across the stations at any given time, the fast students can work on advanced material, and slower students are not left behind in the back of class. Moreover, students who struggle in traditional classrooms often thrive in small groups, one-on-one, or with software or online tutors.
• Data-driven scheduling. All School of One students take a short, custom online quiz at the end of each math period. Then at the end of each day, School of One’s learning algorithm processes all the quiz results and generates a unique plan for every student for the following day. Students who pass their quizzes are automatically moved on to new material; students who don’t will continue on the same material on the following day, often with extra help from the teaching staff.
• Classroom tools should empower teachers to do what they do best. Our technology and data systems streamline administrative tasks, assessments, grading, and data analysis. This means that School of One teachers can easily access the key information they need, and spend more time planning and delivering great instruction and working directly with students.
• Constant performance evaluation. In addition to daily online quizzes, School of One students participate in mandatory and voluntary evaluation and testing. So far, the results are promising: in the most recent in-school and after-school pilots, School of One students significantly outperformed their peers. For more information, go here.

To learn more about School of One, please visit www.schoolofone.org.

Thanks to DEI and Accelerating Achievement for the opportunity to share our work.


Mickey Muldoon is School of One’s manager of external affairs.