The United States Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology recently released its National Education Technology Plan for 2016. The plan calls for an increase in research and development efforts to integrate technology in education at every level in order to keep the United States competitive internationally.
The plan hopes to correct the “digital use divide” between those who use technology in active, creative ways to support their learning and those who often use technology for passive content consumption, like scrolling through Facebook or watching YouTube videos.
Among the NETP’s conclusions for the best path for education is that institutions should “develop funding models and plans for sustainable technology purchases and leverage openly licensed content while paying special attention to eliminating those resources and tasks that can be made obsolete by technology.”
The state of North Carolina has an opportunity to take a step forward in this area, as the Board of Governors is currently considering adopting State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements, or SARA.
SARA is a volunteer agreement between its member states that establishes national standards for out-of-state distance-education courses and programs which greatly reduce the amount of licensing required for member institutions when offering distance-education courses to out-of-state students.
Up for discussion in the board is whether every college in North Carolina, not just in the UNC System, could become a member, thus allowing them to expand online/distance education offerings nationwide.
Elsewhere in education, President Barack Obama has made improving education policy a priority for his final months in office. In December, Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaces the No Child Left Behind Act put in place by the Bush administration in 2002.
This bipartisan bill builds on the successes of NCLB, which the Department of Education praised for “[shining] a light on where students were making progress and where they needed additional support, regardless of race, income, zip code, disability, home language or background,” but also acknowledged that the legislation was in need of updating because of its prescriptive methods of testing.
After months of conducting extensive interviews with educators across the country, the Center for American Progress has called the current standardized testing practices in place as a result of NCLB “disconnected from the curriculum,” which can often “halt or disrupt actual schooling for weeks on end” adding that “[standardized tests] create significant anxiety for both students and teachers.”
In his State of the Union Address in January, the president called the ESSA “an important start” but implored Congress to build on this progress by seeking to provide every student “the hands-on computer science and math classes that make them job-ready.”
With this goal in mind, Obama released his proposal for the Computer Science for All Saturday, which calls for $4 billion in funding for states and $100 million directly for school districts in his upcoming budget to expand K-12 computer science.
The initiative also calls for $135 million in computer science funding to be made available this year with contributions from the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service, according to the Computer Science for All Fact Sheet.
These proposals are based on White House-generated numbers claiming that last year there were more than 600,000 high-paying tech jobs that went unfilled and projections that by 2018, 51 percent of all STEM jobs will be in fields requiring higher education computer science experience.
