Annie Swinton teaches algebra at Open High School of Utah. Annie taught mathematics, from algebra to calculus, for nine years in traditional "brick-and-mortar" classrooms. She'll be starting her second year teaching fully online at OHSU this year. Annie piloted Algebra 1--An Open Course for two semesters in the 2011-2012 school year, and has been teaching her customized version of the course for this school year. Annie shared her pilot results in a recent NROC Webinar, Leveraging Digital Media in the Mathematics Classroom: Early Experiences with NROC's Algebra 1--An Open Course.

Annie's students include homeschoolers, traveling students, students working on credit recovery, and a few students in schools throughout Utah taking the course as a supplemental online course. Annie is available to her students four hours a day through email, phone and chat. Most prefer to contact her through text chat, and a few use video and voice chat.

She has organized the course material into four quarters to reflect the OHSU schedule, with each quarter divided into 9-10 weeks. She breaks up the topics into manageable pieces with usually 3-4 topics covered a week. Students work through the material at their own paces. Some students work ahead in the quarter. Deadlines with grace periods help prevent anyone from falling behind. Topics remain open so students can review or complete something they might have missed the first time around.

Using data collected in MoodleRooms, Annie was able to pinpoint specific areas where her students needed help. As an example, she explains:

"It was really great for me to be able to look back at the stats taken from all the different topics and unit quizzes and see that my students were really struggling with linear equations."

She pulled in some screencasts that a teacher had made in the previous Algebra course. She also added supplemental material like review assignments before each unit quiz. And she directed students to related categories in Khan Academy for extra practice to build proficiency. 

Project-based Learning

The OHSU philosophy emphasizes "virtual" hands-on, project-based learning. Annie has found the Algebra 1--An Open Course to be very supportive of OHSU's project-based learning approach.

"I've had lots of opportunities to teach algebra in previous settings. I love the project-based learning. There are some really fantastic projects--they were able to help the students make more connections to show what they've learned. I got some really great projects back from these students."

Open High School of Utah Pilot Case Study

NROC recently completed the OHSU pilot Case Study and has shared it on the NROCmath website. Read the Case Study for details on how OHSU is customizing the course for the 2012-2013 school year to align with the Common Core Integrated Pathway for Mathematics. You can download the pdf here. In addition to reading case studies from the pilot, you can view samples of the Worked Examples, Practice Problems, Presentations, and other pedagogical features of Algebra 1--An Open Course on the NROC Math website.

Customizing Algebra 1—An Open Course to Meet Student Needs

Algebra teacher Leila Rosemberg is an innovator and a maker. In the spirit of Mozilla Foundation's Hackasaurus, we might even call her an OER hacker. She creates and shares her own content to customize NROC's Algebra 1--An Open Course for her students at the Culver City Adult School in Los Angeles County, California. Ms. Rosemberg prepares students for GED math, CAHSEE math, CBEST and high school credit in algebra. Her students are all adults, eighteen and older. Many are working parents. Most are young to middle-aged, female English Language Learners. Their education and computer skill levels vary widely.

Ms. Rosemberg is piloting Algebra 1--An Open Course in two different formats: a blended classroom and a fully online course. At the time she was introduced to NROC, she was learning how to use MOODLE as a participant in an OTAN technology training. She integrated Algebra 1--An Open Course into the MOODLE class she'd already created, and uses MOODLE as the course structure.

Breaking it Down, Khan-style with a Smartboard

For her blended class, students meet face-to-face twice weekly for interactive lectures, and then continue work on the courseware in the school's computer lab where individualized help is available, or at home. Ms. Rosemberg uses a smartboard for the lectures, reviewing the Presentation, Worked Examples, Practice and Review sections of the course. When an explanation in the Worked Examples goes by too fast for her students, she uses the smartboard to pause. Using her own "Khan-style" approach writing in real-time on top of the Worked Example, she divides the explanation into smaller steps.

Next, she takes a screen capture of each step she's drawn. She then adds these smaller steps into the MOODLE course online, and also emails her students the files along with an outline of where they fit into the course so they have both for later reference.

Fully Online with Face-to-Face Lab--A Powerful Combination

The online class is an Accelerated Math class. For students balancing jobs, parenting and studies, the flexibility to access and study the course online is critical. Ms. Rosemberg believes that learning online is the future for adult education. But starting out, not all of the students have enough background and skills to take an online algebra class. There is a need to teach the basics (both basic math and computer skills) so that students can continue their education online. With a computer lab for the students, they can get one-on-one assistance when they get stuck.

Create and Share

In addition to adding her own content with the smartboard, Ms. Rosemberg created an Algebra survey, a pre-Algebra quiz, and a three-column correlation (shown above) between Algebra 1--An Open Course, the Accelerated Math course she uses, and the Algebra 1 textbook they use to help her students find items of study quickly. To insure her students understand the vocabulary of math, she created vocabulary quizzes and added them after each unit, along with relevant online resources. She has shared all these materials with anyone piloting Algebra 1--An Open Course in MOODLE. 

For Students, Algebra 1 is Like Taking Your Teacher Home 

In the early pilot interviews, students shared what they liked most about Algebra 1--An Open Course. 

• #1 favorite thing--the ability to use it anywhere, any time, and at their own pace. 
• opportunities to practice and get feedback to see if they are doing it right
• ability to repeat sections as many times as needed
• helpful step-by-step approach
• real life examples
• easy to navigate
• improves computer skills while learning math

Student attitudes varied about math before taking the course, but all of the students reported that they like math more after taking the course. They said the course's clear examples were like taking their teacher home with them. For many of her female students, home computers if they have them were used exclusively by their husbands and kids. Since taking the course, they have the skills and confidence they need to use the computer for their own homework and study.

In a recent NROC webinar, Ms. Rosemberg reports that all the students will be taking the placement tests in May at colleges where they're applying.  You can watch Leila Rosemberg's presentation (February, 2012) in the webinar, Leveraging Digital Media in the Mathematics Classroom: Early Experiences with NROC's Algebra 1--An Open Course, here. Her presentation is viewable beginning at 16:45 and ends at 34.36 minutes.  

The Culver City Adult School Pilot Profile and Case Study can be downloaded here. For additional information on Algebra 1--An Open Course, please visit NROCMath.org.

Sierra Vista High School, in Los Angeles County, is an alternative high school offering continuation and independent study programs for at-risk youth and students who choose to study in a more personalized environment. The school offers a year-round, open enrollment program with flexible options for students to complete high school. Faculty have been trying different learning models, different delivery methods, and different curricula to increase student success. Like many schools, they were struggling to find a solution for algebra. Many of the students had failed algebra up to three times. With minimal funding resources available, Carrie Bisgard, Director of Online Courses at Sierra Vista, began researching open education resources. In the process, she discovered NROC's HippoCampus website. She was impressed by the flexible, learning object architecture of the course material in contrast to many of the courses she'd reviewed which weren't adaptable. She contacted NROC just as the new NROC Algebra 1--An Open Course was ready for beta testing.

Sierra Vista became the very first school to pilot the new course. Beginning in October, 2010, in addition to offering the traditional math class, the school implemented Algebra 1 in a hybrid class--students worked independently at their own pace in the computer lab and at home, with teacher support available at all times in the lab. They've been very excited by the initial results. Carrie Bisgard shares what they've learned so far:

Piloting Algebra 1--An Open Course has been a great experience for Sierra Vista's algebra teacher Abbie Bosserman:

Students reported:

• They liked the ability to work at their own pace and repeat and review material as needed
• They like being able to work through the course anywhere: school, library, home.
• They prefer the engaging multimedia format to the more traditional lecture format.
• They are learning math more easily than they'd expected.

Carrie Bisgard, Abbie Bosserman, and the Sierra Vista High School students are featured in the video series Profiles of Next Generation Learning produced by the Next Generation Learning Challenges and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. View it here on the NROCMath website. You can also read a case study of the Sierra Vista pilot here.

For additional resources, you can find an overview of the professional development modules for Algebra 1--An Open Course in a previous Connected PD blog post that you can read here. 

Instructors in three of the pilot schools were recent guest presenters in an NROC Network webinar, Leveraging Digital Media in the Mathematics Classroom: Early Experiences with NROC's Algebra 1--An Open Course. You can access the full webinar archive and slides here.

Algebra 1--An Open Course is currently being piloted in schools in 20 states nationwide. We'll be profiling more of the pilot programs over the next few weeks. 

Developmental Math—An Open Program is a product of an innovative collaborative design model. The previous post describes the significant role students play in the design and continuous improvement of the course experience. This post focuses on the role of administrators and faculty from the NROC Network in initiating and shaping the course. The NROC Network is currently made up of 140 member institutions including K-12 schools, districts, systems, community colleges and universities, agencies and state-wide members. 

First, in NROC Netwwork members meetings, and then, in extensive focus groups in 29 states and 150 institutions (mostly community colleges) with 126 administrators and 167 instructors, school administrators and faculty told the NROC team that Developmental Math was a serious challenge they needed to solve in new ways—existing solutions were not working for a range of reasons.

Key findings from Administrators and Teachers

• Cost of online resources is the number one concern.
• Online content must be flexible for educators to meet the needs of a variety of students.
• Online content should be adaptable to meet the demands of varied use cases.
• Digital content should be modular, adaptive, and diverse.
• Ease of use and access issues are critical to the success of adoption and implementation.
• Professional development is essential for supporting teacher success.
• Pre-assessment tests that accurately place students improve effectiveness.
• Technology can give students “hints” when they are stuck to aid in the learning process.
• The challenge of working with English language learners deserves special attention.

The detailed Focus Group white paper, Designing Digital Resources for Developmental Math, is available here for download.

Pilots: A Case Study Approach

The program entered the Pilot Phase in Fall, 2011. Ruth Rominger, Director of Learning Design, describes the pilot effort: "Our interest is in getting authentic feedback from students, administrators and instructors about how they're actually using the materials, what they have found useful, and where they can see performance changes. Midway through the first term, we conduct interviews with teachers and students. Interviews are done both in person and online through desktop sharing. So we're getting the experience while they're using the materials."

Results of the midterm interviews—currently underway—have been positive. A community college math instructor with 8 years experience reported: 

"We are an urban environment with 90-95% of our students receiving financial aid. Many students are the first in their family to attend college. They are juggling work and family responsibilities. 85% or more are minority. The NROC course uses a more conceptual approach—taking something from real life and breaking it down. This is great for [our] students. I like the adaptability of the course—that I can move things around and can add components. I like the videos—they are very strong and good for the students we serve. The conceptual approach works well with students."

At the end of the term, the NROC team will collect anonymous performance data tracked by cohort or class. Using a Case Study approach, researchers working with NROC are evaluating students' attitude, persistence and competence compared to traditional models. Attitude, persistence and competence have been identified as key factors in keeping students interested and engaged in developmental courses. Details of the diverse use cases will be shared with everyone involved as they are gathered and analyzed. This will help build effective practice rapidly and support a community approach to professional development.

The pilot program will expand in 2012. If you're interested in participating, visit NROCmath.org to request additional information. You'll find links to a sample unit or you can view the entire course here on the NROCmath.org website. You can view the webinar Building Bridges: New Math Resources for Developmental Educators for an in-depth walkthrough of Developmental Math—An Open Program. 

To participate in conversations about topics like open education, flipped classroom, social media and connected learning from a professional development perspective, please join the Connected PD Linked In group, our experiment in community-sourced professional development. 

Imagine you've decided to continue your education. When you enroll in your local community college and take the required placement tests, you're informed that you'll need to complete two remedial math courses before taking the college math course you need to advance toward your degree. You pay for these courses, but you don’t receive any college credit. The courses differ little from the math courses you failed to understand in high school. You muddle through the first and fail the second.

A Stark Picture Today in the U.S.

About 60% of the students in community college today are referred to one or several developmental courses.

In some community colleges, more than 90% of the students are not prepared for credit-bearing courses.

Approximately two-thirds of the students referred to a developmental math sequence in community college do not complete it. 

Or as Philip Uri Treisman, director of the Charles A. Dana Center, aptly puts it...

Innovative Solutions

Foundations, policy groups and researchers have targeted time, attention and resources over the last 7 years to identify systemic approaches to solving this challenge. For an in-depth look at the issues, read the 2009 report Technology Solutions for Developmental Math: An Overview of Current and Emerging Practices by Rhonda M. Epper and Elaine DeLott Baker, and the 2010 report Improving Developmental Mathematics Education in Community Colleges, by Jenna Cullinane and Philip Uri Treisman, written under a Department of Education grant.

With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education (MITE) began applying substantial experience in digital media, online learning and OER to design a unique solution for the challenges of Developmental Math in high schools and community colleges. To create the new Developmental Math--An Open Program, the MITE team, working with the Evergreen Education Group, went directly to the students themselves.

What Students Want - Individualized Learning, Credible Presenters, Relevant Examples

In focus groups held all over the country starting in 2009, over 250 high school and community college students told the team what they liked and didn't like about Developmental Math - An Open Program. The MITE team took their input seriously, throwing out content that students said failed to engage them, and starting over when needed to give students what they needed to be successful. The team learned these key points from the students in the focus groups:

Developmental Math--An Open Program provides students with different paths through the topics, offering several media-rich approaches for mastering concepts that students can match to their preferred learning styles. You'll find a short overview here (pdf format), a June 30, 2010 webinar about the Developmental Math course--Building Bridges: New Mathematics Resources for Developmental Educators, and a recent presentation at the Sloan Consortium by MITE Special Projects Manager, Ahrash Bissell, explaining MITE's development approach. In a follow up post, we'll cover what instructors and administrators said they need and how the new courses address their requirements, especially the professional development challenge.  

New Collections

• NROC's Algebra 1--An Open Course
• PhET Science & Math simulations
• Khan Academy 
• NROC Developmental Math - Arithmetic Module coming soon!

New Features

• Playlists allow cross-collection mix
• Browse by Subject
• Browse by Collection 
• Multiple collection search and retrieval - by subject, textbook, standards
• Subject-specific blogs with PD and ideas for integrating Hippo content into lessons

With the release of the New HippoCampus website, some backstory is in order...

HippoCampus.org is an outgrowth of the National Repository of Online Courses or NROC (pronounced "n-rock"). The Monterey Institute of Technology and Education (MITE, pronounced "mighty") created NROC and HippoCampus.org to further MITE's mission to improve quality education for everyone. 

With funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2004, MITE launched NROC to provide high-quality, curricularly rigorous, multimedia content on general education subjects for high school and college students. NROC was designed as a member-sustained Open Educational Resource that high schools and colleges could host in their own learning management systems (LMS) and adapt for use by teachers and students at little or no cost. The initial NROC content was developed by colleges and universities around the country and later re-designed by the MITE team, or "NROC-ed" to improve the coverage, augment activities and assessment, and provide interoperability in a shifting technology landscape.

In 2006, the MITE team designed HippoCampus.org. Today it serves over 250,000 teachers and students a month. Initially, the HippoCampus website was intended to make rich media learning objects from the NROC courses available and searchable by topic for student after-school homework help. The site analytics told the MITE team a different story--the majority of usage was happening between the hours of 9 am and 3 pm, rolling across all U.S. time zones. Intrigued by this unexpected pattern, the team sent out a survey to 400+ teachers who had created free accounts on the website in order to better understand how they were using HippoCampus in their classrooms.  

The New HippoCampus site is the result of knowledge gained from the survey and direct teacher input on what features would make HippoCampus more useful. 

Take an in-depth tour of the New HippoCampus with HippoCampus Product Manager Beth Pickett. And then try the New HippoCampus yourself. When you create a free account, you'll be able to use the new playlist feature to create custom drag-and-drop playlists.

NROC Network Members have access to a few additional features like the Standards Correlation tab shown here in the screen shot below of NROC Network member Chattanooga State's custom HippoCampus website. With the support of NROC Network Members, HippoCampus.org is the first self-sustaining OER website. 

Once you've explored the site and tried some of the new features yourself, we'd appreciate your feedback on the Redesign Feedback Survey.

In March, 2011, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation held their annual Open Educational Resources Grantees Meeting, OER 2011: The Impact of Open on Teaching and Learning, in Sausalito, California. At the conference, a panel of OER practitioners moderated by Lisa Petrides of ISKME, and the grantees in attendance discussed some of the benefits and challenges of using and creating OER courses and learning objects in the classroom today.

DeLaina Tonks, Director of the Open High School of Utah, addressed a major challenge and solution head on: 

It’s overwhelming to build a course. If you went to a teacher and said, “I need a World Civ course...can you just toss something together so that we can share that out and get some stuff back?”...that’s not going to happen. But if you take it to a standards-aligned, granular level and ask a teacher to design a lesson plan around a standard that would be shareable, I think you’d get better results by doing that.

Carrie Bisgard, Online Program Coordinator for Whitter Union High School district, described what’s really new about OERs: 

Often, [people] don’t understand how much teachers are already doing in a classroom. You’re in a classroom and you don’t have what you need so you just make it up already. So it’s not as if this is a new thing. The new thing is that now we can share it with other people. We can get stuff from other people. We can network that way. We’ve been creating materials for a long time. Nobody ever gets a textbook and says, “That has everything I need. I won’t need to go anywhere else or make anything on my own.” That just never happens. [Teachers creating content is] already happening. That’s not what we’re facilitating. What we’re facilitating is the sharing and the openness.

A primary goal of the NROC Connected PD project is to catalyze and support a core community of Social Authors and to scaffold the development of new “social-authoring” educators who are currently using NROC content and other OER content in their classrooms but not yet customizing that content. We think a great way to begin that process is by showing examples of course enhancements and original new content created and shared by teachers using NROC courses in their classrooms today.

Abbie Bosserman, a math teacher at the alternative Sierra Vista High School in the Whittier Union High School District, was the very first pilot site for the new NROC Algebra 1–An Open Course. Ms. Bosserman modified the course by rearranging the NROC Algebra 1 course topics to fit new district unit benchmarks, and added links to web sites for basic math help. She also wrote study guides and worksheets for her students, which she shared back through the NROC Network.

Leila Rosemberg, Online Technology Trainer at OTAN, GED Coordinator and Math teacher at Culver City Adult School, customized the Algebra 1 course in her school’s Moodle LMS by integrating her own screen grabs and other resources. Ms. Rosemberg projects portions of the NROC Algebra 1 course on a smartboard and works out problems with her students, then adds the screen shots to the course for her students to reference.

Laura Bost, former Physics teacher and author of the HippoCampus Math blog, has been making her own Kahn-style worked examples and sharing how to create this type of resource with teachers and students.

On Thursday, August 25, NROC is hosting a Connected PD webinar with NROC Network members called DIY & Share: Creating Your Own Open Educational Resources Around the NROC Courses . We’ve invited Carrie Bisgard, Leila Rosemberg and Laura Bost with Ruth Rominger, Director of Learning Design, Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), for a very interactive session on Social Authoring. It's the first in a series of webinars planned on Social Authoring. You'll find a link to access the webinar in the NROC Network webinar archive here shortly after the event.

Studio Connect is an online practice and design collaboratory to support educators and administrators in developing and implementing Next Practices in Learning and Teaching. We’ve attempted to clarify this purpose in v2.0 of our Participatory Learning Ecosystem model, based on some valuable feedback on the PLE v1.0 model.

At the center of v2.0 is Next Practices in Learning and Teaching--the focus of Curating, Scaffolding and Mentoring. Studio Connect is distributed across the Connected PD blog on the Posterous platform, the Connected PD group in Linked In, Twitter, Google+, Webinars (currently in Elluminate) and Facebook. In the future, other Studio Connect locations might include videoconferencing platforms, "virtual worlds" like Second Life and OpenSim, or online communities utilizing platforms like Ning. We welcome your suggestions for additional platforms and tools you'd like to see included.

We'll use this Connected PD blog to feature and explore emerging Next Practices. We'll curate relevant content on Next Practices from the wider OER, DML, Online Education and 21st Century Learning Design communities. And we'll feature occasional interviews with Next Practices exemplars as one form of scaffolding and mentoring.

We’ll use the Connected PD Linked In group to host conversation about Next Practices and to collaborate on projects. If you haven’t joined the group, please join now and introduce yourself and share your current projects, expertise, or burning issues.

We’re experimenting with hosting real time dialogues once a month in Twitter. Inspired by the success of #edchat, we’ve initiated a monthly #connectedpd event called First Friday – on the first Friday of each month, at 9 am PDT. Check the events tab here on the blog for details on how to participate. 

You’ll find the archive (link launches the Elluminate session) of the first Connected PD Webinar on the NROC Network website. We hosted a panel on Next Practices in Learning and Teaching with some excellent input from Next Practices thought leaders Lisa Dawley, Erin Knight, Vanessa Vartabedian, David Young and Peter Arashiro. We’re planning future workshop-style webinars this summer and early fall on the New Library, and Social Authoring and OERs.

Stay tuned for Connected PD on Facebook. Are you using Facebook in Professional Development? If you are, we’d love to hear from you. Look in the Connected PD Linked In group for the discussion about Facebook and tell us what you’re up to. And listen to Peter Arashiro’s presentation in the archived webinar (37:15 minutes into the webinar) for his story about how he’s putting Facebook to work in an innovative approach to Professional Development at Michigan Virtual University.

Today we’re officially launching the Connected PD blog. We “soft-launched” it in March at the NROC Network annual members meeting where we invited NROC Network members to help design the specifications for a Professional Development blog that will meet their needs. 

This course design is the result of asking for input throughout the development process, from the people who will be using it. The student voice has never been included in the design of courses to the extent it has been here.

Renae Bent: We started with our lead subject matter expert, Nigel Nisbet, who helped in the development of the course content itself to do the Instructor Notes.

Ruth Rominger: Nigel had been doing professional development of math teachers for a number of years through LA Unified School District so he had lots of background in the different challenges teachers face.

Renae Bent: He drills right down at a unit level into key concepts that will be covered and what challenges instructors may face in teaching the material. He goes through specific examples of potential challenges and points instructors to where in the course we’ve tackled a particular problem. He also added manipulatives and helps guide instructors or their students to develop more manipulatives to enhance the course.

You'll find all of the video overviews in the NROC Vimeo Channel.

View and download the Instructor Guides here.