Transforming American Education:

DRAFT

National Educational Technology Plan 2010

March 5, 2010

Office of Educational Technology

U.S. Department of Education

Learning 

Powered by Technology
ii Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

National Educational Technology Plan

Technical Working Group

Daniel E. Atkins, University of Michigan

John Bennett, Akron Public Schools

John Seely Brown, Deloitte Center for the Edge 

Aneesh Chopra, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Chris Dede, Harvard University

Barry Fishman, University of Michigan

Louis Gomez, University of Pittsburgh

Margaret Honey, New York Hall of Science

Yasmin Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

Maribeth Luftglass, Fairfax County Public Schools

Roy Pea, Stanford University

Jim Pellegrino, University of Illinois, Chicago

David Rose, Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)

Candace Thille, Carnegie Mellon University

Brenda Williams, West Virginia Department of Education
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology iii

Contents

Executive Summary v

Introduction 1

Learning: A Model for the 21st Century 9

Assessment: Measuring What Matters 25

Teaching: Improving Learning Through Connected Teaching 39

Infrastructure: People, Processes, and Technologies for Learning 51

Productivity: Improving Learning Outcomes While Managing Costs 63

R&D: Solving Grand Challenge Problems 75

References 81

Appendix A—How This Plan Was Developed A-1

Appendix B—Contributors B-1

Appendix C—Acknowledgments C-1

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary v

Executive Summary

Education is the key to America’s economic growth and prosperity and to our ability to 

compete in the global economy. It is the path to good jobs and higher earning power for 

Americans. It is necessary for our democracy to work. It fosters the cross-border, crosscultural collaboration required to solve the most challenging problems of our time.

Under the Obama administration, education has become an urgent priority driven by two 

clear goals. By 2020,

 • We will raise the proportion of college graduates from where it now stands [39%] so that 

60% of our population holds a 2-year or 4-year degree.

 • We will close the achievement gap so that all students – regardless of race, income, or 

neighborhood – graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and careers.

These are aggressive goals and achieving them is a sizable challenge. Add to the challenge 

the projections of most states and the federal government of reduced revenues for the foreseeable future, and it is clear we need cost-effective and cost-saving strategies that improve 

learning outcomes and graduation rates for millions of Americans.

Specifically, we must embrace innovation, prompt implementation, regular evaluation, and 

continuous improvement. The programs and projects that work must be brought to scale 

so every school has the opportunity to take advantage of that success. Our regulations, 

policies, actions, and investments must be strategic and coherent.

Transforming American Education

To achieve these goals, the National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) calls for 

revolutionary transformation rather than evolutionary tinkering. It urges our education system 

at all levels to

 • Be clear about the outcomes we seek.

 • Collaborate to redesign structures and processes for effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility.

 • Continually monitor and measure our performance.

 • Hold ourselves accountable for progress and results every step of the way.

Just as technology is at the core of virtually every aspect of our daily lives and work, we must 

leverage it to provide engaging and powerful learning experiences, content, and resources and 

assessments that measure student achievement in more complete, authentic, and meaningful 

ways. Technology-based learning and assessment systems will be pivotal in improving student 

learning and generating data that can be used to continuously improve the education system 

at all levels. Technology will help us execute collaborative teaching strategies combined with 

professional learning that better prepare and enhance educators’ competencies and expertise 

over the course of their careers. To shorten our learning curve, we can learn from other kinds of 

enterprises that have used technology to improve outcomes while increasing productivity.
vi Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

A 21st Century Model of Learning Powered by Technology

The NETP presents a model of 21st century learning powered by technology, with goals and 

recommendations in five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and 

productivity. The plan also identifies far-reaching “grand challenge problems” that should be 

funded and coordinated at a national level.

The challenging and rapidly changing demands of our global economy tell us what people 

need to know and who needs to learn. Advances in learning sciences show us how people 

learn. Technology makes it possible for us to act on this knowledge and understanding.

Learning

The model of 21st century learning described in this plan calls for engaging and empowering 

learning experiences for all learners. The model asks that we focus what and how we teach 

to match what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and 

who needs to learn. It brings state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, 

and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve. It 

leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-sizefits-all curriculum, pace of teaching, and instructional practices.

Many students’ lives today are filled with technology that gives them mobile access to 

information and resources 24/7, enables them to create multimedia content and share it with 

the world, and allows them to participate in online social networks where people from all 

over the world share ideas, collaborate, and learn new things. Outside school, students are 

free to pursue their passions in their own way and at their own pace. The opportunities are 

limitless, borderless, and instantaneous.

The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern 

technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all 

learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures. In contrast to 

traditional classroom instruction, this requires that we put students at the center and 

empower them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several 

dimensions. A core set of standards-based concepts and competencies should form the 

basis of what all students should learn, but beyond that students and educators should have 

options for engaging in learning: large groups, small groups, and work tailored to individual 

goals, needs, interests, and prior experience of each learner. By supporting student learning 

in areas that are of real concern or particular interest to them, personalized learning adds to 

its relevance, inspiring higher levels of motivation and achievement.

In addition, technology provides access to more learning resources than are available in 

classrooms and connections to a wider set of “educators,” including teachers, parents, 

experts, and mentors outside the classroom. On-demand learning is now within reach, 

supporting learning that is life-long and life-wide (Bransford et al., 2006).

What and How People Need to Learn

Whether the domain is English language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, 

art, or music, 21st century competencies and expertise such as critical thinking, complex 

problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication should be woven into all 

content areas. These competencies are necessary to become expert learners, which we all 

must be if we are to adapt to our rapidly changing world over the course of our lives, and 

that involves developing deep understanding within specific content areas and making the 

connections between them.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary vii

How we need to learn includes using the technology that professionals in various disciplines 

use. Professionals routinely use the web and tools such as wikis, blogs, and digital content 

for the research, collaboration, and communication demanded in their jobs. They gather data 

and analyze it using inquiry and visualization tools. They use graphical and 3D modeling 

tools for design. For students, using these real-world tools creates learning opportunities that 

allow them to grapple with real-world problems – opportunities that prepare them to be more 

productive members of a globally competitive workforce.

Assessment

The model of 21st century learning requires new and better ways to measure what matters, 

diagnose strengths and weaknesses in the course of learning when there is still time to 

improve student performance, and involve multiple stakeholders in the process of designing, 

conducting, and using assessment. In all these activities, technology-based assessments 

can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student 

and that in aggregate will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education 

system.

President Obama has called on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop 

standards and assessments that measure 21st century competencies and expertise – critical 

thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication – in all 

content areas. Technology-based assessments that combine cognitive research and theory 

about how students think with multimedia, interactivity, and connectivity make it possible to 

directly assess these types of skills. And we can do so within the context of relevant societal 

issues and problems that people care about in everyday life.

When combined with learning systems, technology-based assessments can be used 

formatively to diagnose and modify the conditions of learning and instructional practices 

while at the same time determining what students have learned for grading and 

accountability purposes. Both uses are important, but the former can improve student 

learning in the moment (Black & William, 1998; Black et al., 2004). Furthermore, systems 

can be designed to capture students’ inputs and collect evidence of their knowledge and 

problem solving abilities as they work. Over time, the system “learns” more about students’

abilities and can provide increasingly appropriate support.

Using Data to Drive Continuous Improvement

With assessments in place that assess the full range of expertise and competencies 

reflected in standards, student learning data can be collected and used to continually 

improve learning outcomes and productivity. For example, such data could be used to create 

a system of interconnected feedback for students, educators, parents, school leaders, and 

district administrators.

For this to work, relevant data must be made available to the right people at the right time 

and in the right form. Educators and leaders at all levels of our education system also must 

be provided with support – tools and training – that can help them manage the assessment 

process, analyze data, and take appropriate action.
viii Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

Teaching

Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, the model 

of 21st century learning calls for using technology to help build the capacity of educators 

by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching. In such a teaching model, teams 

of connected educators replace solo practitioners and classrooms are fully connected to 

provide educators with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools as well as to resources that 

help them act on the insights the data provide.

The expectation of effective teaching and accountability for professional educators is a 

critical component of transforming our education system, but equally important is recognizing 

that we need to strengthen and elevate the teaching profession. This is necessary if we 

are to attract and retain the most effective educators and achieve the learning outcomes 

we seek. Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, 

technology can help us build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of 

connected teaching.

In a connected teaching model, connection replaces isolation. Classroom educators are 

fully connected to learning data and tools for using the data; to content, resources, and 

systems that empower them to create, manage, and assess engaging and relevant learning 

experiences; and directly to their students in support of learning both inside and outside 

school. The same connections give them access to resources and expertise that improve 

their own instructional practices and guide them in becoming facilitators and collaborators in 

their students’ increasingly self-directed learning.

In connected teaching, teaching is a team activity. Individual educators build online learning 

communities consisting of their students and their students’ peers; fellow educators in their 

schools, libraries, and afterschool programs; professional experts in various disciplines 

around the world; members of community organizations that serve students in the hours they 

are not in school; and parents who desire greater participation in their children’s education.

Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that 

is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses 

and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by 

online environments full of resources and opportunities for collaboration. For their part, the 

colleges of education and other institutions that prepare teachers play an ongoing role in the 

professional growth of their graduates throughout the entire course of their careers.

Connected teaching enables our education system to provide access to effective teaching 

and learning resources where they are not otherwise available and provide more options 

for all learners at all levels. This is accomplished by augmenting the expertise and competencies of specialized and exceptional educators with online learning systems and through 

on-demand courses and other self-directed learning opportunities. Clearly, more teachers will 

need to be expert at providing online instruction.

21st Century Resources for Professional Educators

The technology that enables connected teaching is available now, but not all the 

conditions necessary to leverage it are. Many of our existing educators do not have the 

same understanding of and ease with using technology that is part of the daily lives of 

professionals in other sectors. The same can be said of many of the education leaders and 

policymakers in schools, districts, and states and of the higher education institutions that 

prepare new educators for the field.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary ix

This gap in technology understanding influences program and curriculum development, 

funding and purchasing decisions about educational and information technology in schools, 

and pre-service and in-service professional learning. This gap prevents technology from 

being used in ways that would improve instructional practices and learning outcomes.

Still, we must introduce connected teaching into our education system rapidly, and therefore 

we need innovation in the organizations that support educators in their profession – schools 

and districts, colleges of education, professional learning providers, and professional 

organizations.

Infrastructure

An essential component of the 21st century learning model is a comprehensive infrastructure 

for learning that provides every student, educator, and level of our education system with 

the resources they need when and where they are needed. The underlying principle is that 

infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable 

models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, 

management systems, and administration tools. Building this infrastructure is a far-reaching 

project that will demand concerted and coordinated effort.

Although we have adopted technology in many aspects of education today, a comprehensive 

infrastructure for learning is necessary to move us beyond the traditional model of educators 

and students in classrooms to a learning model that brings together teaching teams and 

students in classrooms, labs, libraries, museums, workplaces, and homes – anywhere in the 

world where people have access devices and an adequate Internet connection.

Over the past 40 years, we have seen unprecedented advances in computing and 

communications that have led to powerful technology resources and tools for learning. 

Today, low-cost Internet access devices, easy-to-use digital authoring tools, and the web 

facilitate access to information and multimedia learning content, communication, and 

collaboration. They provide the ability to participate in online learning communities that cross 

disciplines, organizations, international boundaries, and cultures.

Many of these technology resources and tools already are being used within our 

public education system. We are now, however, at an inflection point for a much bolder 

transformation of education powered by technology. This revolutionary opportunity for 

change is driven by the continuing push of emerging technology and the pull of the critical 

national need to radically improve our education system.

Always-on Learning Resources

Our model of an infrastructure for learning is always on, available to students, educators, 

and administrators regardless of their location or the time of day. It supports not just access 

to information, but access to people and participation in online learning communities. It offers 

a platform on which developers can build and tailor applications.

An infrastructure for learning unleashes new ways of capturing and sharing knowledge 

based on multimedia that integrate text, still and moving images, audio, and applications 

that run on a variety of devices. It enables seamless integration of in- and out-of-school 

learning. It frees learning from a rigid information transfer model (from book or educator to 

students) and enables a much more motivating intertwine of learning about, learning to do, 

and learning to be.
x Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

On a more operational level, an infrastructure for learning brings together and enables 

access to data from multiple sources while ensuring appropriate levels of security and 

privacy. It integrates computer hardware, data and networks, information resources, 

interoperable software, middleware services and tools, and devices and connects 

and supports interdisciplinary teams of professionals responsible for its development, 

maintenance, and management and its use in transformative approaches to teaching and 

learning.

Productivity

To achieve our goal of transforming American education, we must rethink basic assumptions 

and redesign our education system. We must apply technology to implement personalized 

learning and ensure that students are making appropriate progress through our K-16 system 

so they graduate. These and other initiatives require investment, but tight economic times 

and basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend. We 

must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decisionmakers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our 

education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to meeting our goals for educational 

attainment within the budgets we can afford.

Improving productivity is a daily focus of most American organizations in all sectors – 

both for-profit and nonprofit – and especially so in tight economic times. Education has 

not, however, incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use to improve 

productivity and manage costs, nor has it leveraged technology to enable or enhance them. 

We can learn much from the experience in other sectors.

What education can learn from the experience of business is that we need to make 

the fundamental structural changes that technology enables if we are to see dramatic 

improvements in productivity. As we do so, we should recognize that although the 

fundamental purpose of our public education system is the same, the roles and processes 

of schools, educators, and the system itself should change to reflect the times we live in and 

our goals as a world leader. Such rethinking applies to learning, assessment, and teaching 

processes, and to the infrastructure and operational and financial sides of running schools 

and school systems.

Rethinking Basic Assumptions

One of the most basic assumptions in our education system is time-based or “seat-time” 

measures of educational attainment. These measures were created in the late 1800s and 

early 1900s to smooth transitions from K-12 into higher education by translating high school 

work to college admissions offices (Shedd, 2003) and made their way into higher education 

when institutions began moving away from standardized curricula.

Another basic assumption is the way we organize students into age-determined groups, 

structure separate academic disciplines, organize learning into classes of roughly equal size 

with all the students in a particular class receiving the same content at the same pace, and 

keep these groups in place all year.

The last decade has seen the emergence of some radically redesigned schools, 

demonstrating the range of possibilities for structuring education. These include schools 

that organize around competence rather than seat time and others that enable more flexible 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xi

scheduling that fits students’ individual needs rather than traditional academic periods and 

lockstep curriculum pacing. In addition, schools are beginning to incorporate online learning, 

which gives us the opportunity to extend the learning day, week, or year.

The United States has a long way to go if we are to see every student complete at least a 

year of higher education or postsecondary career training. There is no way to achieve this 

target unless we can dramatically reduce the number of students who leave high school 

without getting a diploma and/or who are unprepared for postsecondary education.

A complex set of personal and academic factors underlie students’ decision to leave 

school or to disengage from learning, but support should start as early as possible, before 

children enter school, and should become intensified for those students who need it as they 

move through school. Practices supported with technology can help address the problem, 

including learning dashboards that keep students on track with their course requirements 

and earning credits for courses taken online.

Redesigning education in America for improved productivity is a complex challenge that will 

require all 50 states, the thousands of districts and schools across the country, the federal 

government, and other education stakeholders in the public and private sector coming 

together to design and implement innovative solutions. It is a challenge for educators – 

leaders, teachers, and policymakers committed to learning – as well as technologists, and 

ideally they will come together to lead the effort.

A Rigorous and Inclusive Process

The NETP, led by the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, was 

developed using a rigorous and inclusive process built on the report of a technical working 

group of leading education researchers and practitioners.

In keeping with the White House’s Open Government Directive, the Department invited 

extensive public participation in the development of the NETP. Broad outreach efforts and 

state-of-the-art communications and collaboration technology enabled tens of thousands of 

individuals to learn about and contribute to the development of the NETP over its 9-month 

development period.

The Time To Act Is Now

The NETP accepts that we do not have the luxury of time – we must act now and commit 

to fine-tuning and midcourse corrections as we go. Success will require leadership, 

collaboration, and investment at all levels of our education system – states, districts, 

schools, and the federal government – as well as partnerships with higher education 

institutions, private enterprises, and not-for-profit entities.

In the United States, education is primarily a state and local responsibility. State and local 

public education institutions must ensure equitable access to learning experiences for all 

students and especially students in underserved populations – low-income and minority 

students, students with disabilities, English language learners, preschool-aged children, 

and others. States and districts need to build capacity for transformation. The Department 

of Education has a role in identifying effective strategies and implementation practices; 

encouraging, promoting, and actively supporting innovation in states and districts; and 

nurturing collaborations that help states and districts leverage resources so the best ideas 

can be scaled up.
xii Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

Postsecondary education institutions – community colleges and 4-year colleges and 

universities – will need to partner more closely with K-12 schools to remove barriers to 

postsecondary education and put plans of their own in place to decrease dropout rates. 

Clearly, postsecondary institutions would be key players in the national R&D efforts 

recommended in this plan.

Education has long relied on the contributions of organizations in both the private and notfor-profit sectors, and this will not change.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, there has never been a more pressing 

need to transform American education and there will never be a better time to act. The NETP 

is a 5-year action plan that responds to an urgent national priority and a growing understanding 

of what the United States needs to do to remain competitive in a global economy.

Goals and Recommendations

The NETP presents five goals with recommendations for states, districts, the federal 

government, and other stakeholders in our education system that address learning, 

assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. The plan also identifies far-reaching 

grand challenge problems that should be funded and coordinated at a national level.

1.0 Learning

All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and outside of 

school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in 

our globally networked society.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

1.1 Revise, create, and adopt standards and learning objectives for all content areas that 

reflect 21st century expertise and the power of technology to improve learning.

1.2 Develop and adopt learning resources that use technology to embody design principles 

from the learning sciences.

1.3 Develop and adopt learning resources that exploit the flexibility and power of technology 

to reach all learners anytime and anywhere.

1.4 Use advances in the learning sciences and technology to enhance STEM (science, 

technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning and develop, adopt, and evaluate new 

methodologies with the potential to enable all learners to excel in STEM.

2.0 Assessment

Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure what 

matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

2.1 Design, develop, and adopt assessments that give students, educators, and other 

stakeholders timely and actionable feedback about student learning to improve achievement 

and instructional practices.

2.2 Build the capacity of educators and educational institutions to use technology to improve 

assessment materials and processes for both formative and summative uses.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xiii

2.3 Conduct research and development that explore how gaming technology, simulations, 

collaboration environments, and virtual worlds can be used in assessments to engage and 

motivate learners and to assess complex skills and performances embedded in standards.

2.4 Revise practices, policies, and regulations to ensure privacy and information protection 

while enabling a model of assessment that includes ongoing student learning data gathering 

and sharing for continuous improvement.

3.0 Teaching

Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that 

connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that enable 

and inspire more effective teaching for all learners.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

3.1 Design, develop, and adopt technology-based content, resources, and online learning 

communities that create opportunities for educators to collaborate for more effective 

teaching, inspire and attract new people into the profession, and encourage our best 

educators to continue teaching.

3.2 Provide pre-service and in-service educators with preparation and professional learning 

experiences powered by technology that close the gap between students’ and educators’ 

fluencies with technology and promote and enable technology use in ways that improve 

learning, assessment, and instructional practices.

3.3 Transform the preparation and professional learning of educators and education leaders 

by leveraging technology to create career-long personal learning networks within and across 

schools, pre-service preparation and in-service educational institutions, and sprofessional 

organizations.

3.4 Use technology to provide access to the most effective teaching and learning resources, 

especially where they are not otherwise available, and to provide more options for all 

learners at all levels.

3.5 Develop a teaching force skilled in online instruction.

4.0 Infrastructure

All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning 

when and where they need it.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

4.1 Ensure that students and educators have adequate broadband access to the Internet 

and adequate wireless connectivity both inside and outside school.

4.2 Ensure that every student and educator has at least one Internet access device and 

software and resources for research, communication, multimedia content creation, and 

collaboration for use in and out of school.

4.3 Leverage open educational resources to promote innovative and creative opportunities 

for all learners and accelerate the development and adoption of new open technology-based 

learning tools and courses.

4.4 Build state and local education agency capacity for evolving an infrastructure for learning.

4.5 Support “meaningful use” of educational and information technology in states and 

districts by establishing definitions, goals, and metrics.
xiv Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

5.0 Productivity

Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take advantage 

of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of 

time, money, and staff.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

5.1 Develop and adopt a common definition of productivity in education and more relevant 

and meaningful measures of learning outcomes and costs.

5.2 Improve policies and use technology to manage costs including those for procurement.

5.3 Fund the development and use of interoperability standards for content, student learning 

data, and financial data to enable collecting, sharing, and analyzing data to improve 

decision-making at all levels of our education system.

5.4 Rethink basic assumptions in our education system that inhibit leveraging technology 

to improve learning, starting with our current practice of organizing student and educator 

learning around seat time instead of the demonstration of competencies.

5.5 Design, implement, and evaluate technology-powered programs and interventions to 

ensure that students progress through our K-16 education system and emerge prepared for 

the workplace and citizenship.

A New Kind of R&D for Education

To design and implement more efficient and effective education system, this plan calls for an 

organization with the mission of serving the public good through research and development 

at the intersection of learning sciences, technology, and education (Pea & Lazowska, 2003).

The Higher Education Act (P.L. 110-315) passed in August 2008 authorizes establishment 

of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies (also 

called the Digital Promise). Housed in the Department of Education, the center is authorized 

as a 501(c)3 that would bring together contributions from the public and private sectors to 

support the R&D needed to transform learning in America. The Digital Promise’s intent of 

involving private sector technology companies in precompetitive R&D with the center can be 

realized only if the federal government provides the funding that would demonstrate its own 

commitment to a major program of R&D addressing the complex problems associated with 

redesigning our education system.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offers an example of how 

such a research agency can promote work that builds basic understanding and addresses 

practical problems. DARPA sponsors high-risk/high-gain research on behalf of Department 

of Defense agencies, but it is independently managed and staffed by individuals from both 

industry and academia who are experts in the relevant research areas. DARPA program 

officers are given considerable discretion, both in defining the research agenda and making 

decisions about the funding and structuring of research (Cooke-Deegan, 2007).
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xv

In a similar manner, the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital 

Technologies should identify key emerging trends and priorities and recruit and bring together the 

best minds and organizations to collaborate on high-risk/high-gain R&D projects. It should aim 

for radical, orders-of-magnitude improvements by envisioning the impact of innovations and then 

working backward to identify the fundamental breakthroughs required to make them possible.

Grand Challenge Problems

This plan also urges the national research center to focus on grand challenge problems in 

education research and development. “Grand challenge problems” are important problems that 

require bringing together a community of scientists and researchers to work toward their solution.

The following grand challenge problems illustrate the kinds of ambitious R&D efforts that 

should be coordinated at a national level. Notably, although each of these problems is 

a grand challenge in its own right, they all combine to form the ultimate grand challenge 

problem in education: establishing an integrated end-to-end real-time system for managing 

learning outcomes and costs across our entire education system at all levels.

1.0: Design and validate an integrated system that provides real-time access to learning 

experiences tuned to the levels of difficulty and assistance that optimizes learning for all 

learners and that incorporates self-improving features that enable it to become increasingly 

effective through interaction with learners.

2.0: Design and validate an integrated system for designing and implementing valid, 

reliable, and cost-effective assessments of complex aspects of 21st century expertise and 

competencies across academic disciplines.

3.0: Design and validate an integrated approach for capturing, aggregating, mining, and 

sharing content, student learning, and financial data cost-effectively for multiple purposes 

across many learning platforms and data systems in near real time.

4.0: Identify and validate design principles for efficient and effective online learning systems 

and combined online and offline learning systems that produce content expertise and 

competencies equal to or better than those produced by the best conventional instruction in 

half the time at half the cost. 

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 1

Introduction

“By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates 

in the world.”

—President Barack Obama,

Address to Congress, February 24, 2009

Education is the key to America’s economic growth and prosperity and to our ability to 

compete in the global economy. It is the path to good jobs and higher earning power for 

Americans. It is necessary for our democracy to work.

With this in mind, America needs a public education system that provides all students with 

engaging and empowering learning experiences to help them set goals, stay in school 

despite obstacles, earn a high school diploma, and obtain the further education and training 

needed for success in their personal lives, the workplace, and their communities.

We want to develop inquisitive, creative, resourceful thinkers; informed citizens; effective 

problem-solvers; groundbreaking pioneers; and visionary leaders. We want to foster the 

excellence that flows from the ability to use today’s information, tools, and technologies 

effectively and a commitment to life-long learning. All these are necessary for Americans 

to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked 

society.

To accomplish this, schools must be more than information factories; they must be 

incubators of exploration and invention. Educators must be more than information experts; 

they must be collaborators in learning, seeking new knowledge and constantly acquiring 

new skills alongside their students. Students must be fully engaged in school – intellectually, 

socially, and emotionally. This level of engagement requires the chance to work on 

interesting and relevant projects, the use of technology environments and resources, and 

access to an extended social network of adults and peers who are supportive and safe.

Education reform has been on the national agenda for decades. Still, we no longer have the 

highest proportion of college graduates in the world and we have a system that too often 

fails our students. According to current data,

 • Twenty-four percent of young people in the United States drop out of high school 

(OECD, 2007). That number jumps to almost 50% of Latino and African American 

students (Orfield, Losen, Wald, & Swanson, 2004).
2 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

 • Some 5,000 schools persistently fail year after year, and about 2,000 high schools 

produce about half the nation’s dropouts and three-quarters of minority dropouts 

(Balfanz & Letgers, 2004; Tucci, 2009). 

 • Of students who do graduate from high school, one third are unprepared for 

postsecondary education, forcing community colleges and four-year colleges and 

universities to devote precious time and resources to remedial work for incoming 

students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). 

 • By 2016 – just six years from now – 4 out of every 10 new jobs will require some 

advanced education or training (Dohm & Shnipe, 2007). Fifteen of the thirty fastest 

growing fields will require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree (Bureau of Labor 

Statistics, 2008).

 • Today, just 39% of young people earn a two-year or four-year college degree (National 

Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 2008). Enrollment rates are unequal: 

69% of qualified White high school graduates enter four-year colleges compared with 

just 58% of comparable Latino graduates and 56% of African American graduates 

(National Center for Education Statistics, 2007).

As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, the current state of our education system 

is “economically unsustainable and morally unacceptable.”

Transforming American Education: An Urgent Priority

Under the Obama administration, education has become an urgent priority driven by two 

clear goals set by the President:

 • By 2020, we will raise the proportion of college graduates from where it now stands 

(39%) so that 60% of our population holds a two-year or four-year degree (National 

Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 2008).

 • We will close the achievement gap so that all students – regardless of race, income, or 

neighborhood – graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and careers.

To accomplish these goals, we must embrace a strategy of innovation, prompt 

implementation, regular evaluation, and continuous improvement. The programs and 

projects that work must be brought to scale so that every school has the opportunity to take 

advantage of that success. Our regulations, policies, actions, and investments must be 

strategic and coherent.

To this end, Secretary Duncan has identified four major areas where our investments and 

efforts can have the greatest impact:

 • States should adopt standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in 

college and the workplace and compete in the global economy.

 • States should build data systems that measure student growth and success and inform 

educators about how they can improve instruction.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 3

 • States should recruit, reward, and retain effective educators, especially in underserved 

areas where they are needed most.

 • States should turn around their lowest achieving schools.

In November 2009, President Obama launched the Educate to Innovate campaign to 

improve the participation and performance of U.S. students in science, technology, 

engineering and mathematics (STEM). The campaign brings together the federal 

government, leading companies, foundations, not-for-profits, and science and engineering 

societies to work with young people across the country to achieve the following goals:

 • Increase STEM literacy so that all students can learn deeply and think critically in 

STEM subject areas

 • Move American students from the middle of the pack internationally to the top in the 

next decade

 • Expand STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, 

including girls and women.

Technology is critical to addressing each of these needs.

We are guided in these and other education initiatives by Secretary Duncan’s conviction 

that we need revolutionary transformation, not evolutionary tinkering, and we know that 

transformation cannot be achieved through outdated reform strategies that take decades to 

unfold.

We must be clear about the outcomes we seek. We must redesign processes, put them in 

place, and constantly evaluate them for effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. We must 

monitor and measure our performance to improve learning outcomes while managing costs. 

We must hold ourselves accountable.

We also must apply the advanced technology available in our daily lives to student learning 

and to our entire education system in innovative ways that improve designs, accelerate 

adoption, and measure outcomes.

Above all, we must accept that we do not have the luxury of time. We must act now and 

commit to fine-tuning and midcourse corrections as we go. We must learn from other kinds 

of enterprises that have used technology to improve outcomes and increase productivity.
4 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Drivers of Change

The Department of Education’s decisions and actions – and those of the entire education 

system and its stakeholders throughout the United States – must be guided by the world 

we live in, which demands that we think differently about education. Technology and the 

Internet have fostered an increasingly competitive and interdependent global economy and 

transformed nearly every aspect of our daily lives – how we work; play; interact with family, 

friends, and communities; and learn new things.

The context of global interdependence is especially important for this generation of 

students because many of today’s challenges will be solved only by individuals and nations 

working together. The leadership of the United States in the world depends on educating 

a generation of young people who are capable of navigating an interdependent world and 

collaborating across borders and cultures to address today’s great problems.

Another important context is the growing disparity between students’ experiences in and 

out of school. Students use computers, mobile devices, and the Internet to create their own 

engaging learning experiences outside school and after school hours – experiences that too 

often are radically different from what they are exposed to in school. Our leadership in the 

world depends on educating a generation of young people who know how to use technology 

to learn both formally and informally.

Technology itself is an important driver of change. Contemporary technology offers 

unprecedented performance, adaptability, and cost effectiveness.

Technology can enable transforming education but only if we commit to the change that it will 

bring to our education system. For example, students come to school with mobile devices 

that let them carry the Internet in their pockets and search the web for the answers to test 

questions. Is this cheating, or with such ubiquitous access to information is it time to change 

what and how we teach? Similarly, do we ignore the informal learning enabled by technology 

outside school, or do we create equally engaging and relevant experiences inside school 

and blend the two?

We know from our rankings in the world in terms of academic achievement and graduation 

rates that what we have been doing to fill our education pipeline and ensure that students 

graduate is not working. Getting students to stay in school is crucial, and equipping them 

with the skills they need to learn to be successful throughout their lives is equally important.

The essential question facing us as we transform the U.S. education system is this: 

What should learning in the 21st century look like? 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 5

Learning Powered by Technology

Building on the report of a technical working group of leading researchers and practitioners 

and on input received from many respected education leaders and the public, this National 

Education Technology Plan tackles this and other important questions. The plan presents 

goals, recommendations, and actions for a model of 21st century learning informed by the 

learning sciences and powered by technology. Advances in the learning sciences give us 

valuable insights into how people learn. Technology innovations give us the ability to act on 

these insights as never before.

Our plan is based on the following assumptions:

 • Much of the failure of our education system stems from a failure to engage students.

 • What students need to learn and what we know about how they learn have changed 

and therefore the learning experiences we provide should change.

 • How we assess learning focuses too much on what has been learned after the fact and 

not enough on improving learning in the moment.

 • We miss a huge opportunity to improve our entire education system when we gather 

student-learning data in silos and fail to integrate it and make it broadly available to 

decision-makers at all levels of our education system – individual educators, schools, 

districts, states, and the federal government.

 • Learning depends on effective teaching, and we need to expand our view of teaching 

to include extended teams of educators with different roles who collaborate across time 

and distance and use technology resources and tools that can augment human talent.

 • Making engaging learning experiences and resources available to all learners 

anytime and anywhere will require state-of-the-art technology and specialized people, 

processes, and tools.

 • Education can learn much from industry about leveraging technology to continuously 

improve learning outcomes while increasing the productivity of our education system at 

all levels.

 • Just as in health, energy, and defense, the federal government has an important 

role to play in funding and coordinating some of the more far-reaching research and 

development challenges associated with leveraging technology in education.

Just as technology is at the core of virtually every aspect of our daily lives and work, it is 

central to implementing the model of 21st century learning in this plan.

The model depends on technology to provide engaging and powerful learning content, 

resources, and experiences and assessment systems that measure student achievement in 

more complete, authentic and meaningful ways. Technology-based learning and assessment 

systems will be pivotal in improving student learning and generating data that can be used to 

continuously improve the education system at all levels. The model depends on technology 
6 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

to execute collaborative teaching strategies combined with professional learning strategies 

that better prepare and enhance educators’ competencies and expertise over the course of 

their careers.

The model also depends on every student and educator having Internet access devices 

and broadband Internet connections and every student and educator being comfortable 

using them. It depends on technology to redesign and implement processes to produce 

better outcomes while achieving ever-higher levels of productivity and efficiency across the 

education system.

Collaboration and Investment for Success

Transforming U.S. education is no small task, and accomplishing it will take leadership at all 

levels of our education system – states, districts, schools, and the federal government – as 

well as partnerships with higher education institutions, private enterprises, and not-for-profit 

entities.

In the United States education is primarily a state and local responsibility. State and local 

public education institutions must ensure equitable access to learning experiences for all 

students and especially students in underserved populations – low-income and minority 

students, students with disabilities, English language learners, preschool-aged children, 

and others. States and districts need to build capacity for transformation. The Department 

of Education has a role in identifying effective strategies and implementation practices; 

encouraging, promoting, and actively supporting innovation in states and districts; and 

nurturing collaborations that help states and districts leverage resources so the best ideas 

can be scaled up.

Building capacity for transformation also will require investment. But we must resolve to 

spend investment dollars more wisely, with clear expectations about what we expect in terms 

of learning outcomes and process improvements. 

Achievement of the vision set forth in this plan will rely on the broadband initiatives of 

the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which are intended to accelerate 

deployment of Internet services in unserved, underserved, and rural areas and to strategic 

institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits. These are the 

Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) of the Department of Commerce’s 

National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the Rural Development 

Broadband Program (BOTP) of the Department of Agriculture’s USDA Rural Utility Services 

(RUS), and a cross-agency National Broadband Plan that is being developed by the Federal 

Communications Commission (FCC).

This plan also draws guidance and inspiration from the report of the National Science 

Foundation (NSF) Task Force on Cyberlearning, “Fostering Learning in the Networked 

World: The Cyberlearning Challenge and Opportunity,” published in June 2008.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 7

This plan will be best served if postsecondary education institutions – community colleges, 

and four-year colleges and universities – partner with K-12 schools to remove barriers to 

postsecondary education and put plans of their own in place to decrease dropout rates. 

In addition, postsecondary institutions would be key players in the national R&D efforts 

recommended in this plan.

Education has long relied on the contributions of organizations in both the private and notfor-profit sectors, and this will not change.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, there has never been a more pressing 

need to transform American education and there will never be a better time to act. In keeping 

with the appropriate role of the federal government, this National Education Technology Plan 

is not a prescription but rather a common definition and a five-year action plan that responds 

to an urgent national priority and a growing understanding of what the United States needs 

to do to remain competitive in a global economy.

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 9

Learning: 

A Model for the 21st Century

Goal: All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and 

outside of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical 

participants in our globally networked society.

Our education system today supports learning mostly in classrooms and from textbooks 

and depends on the relationship between individual educators and their students. The role 

technology plays in the nation’s classrooms varies dramatically depending on the funding 

priorities of states, districts, and schools and individual educators’ understanding of how to 

leverage it in learning in meaningful ways.

Meanwhile, many students’ lives outside school are filled with technology that gives them 

mobile access to information and resources 24/7, enables them to create multimedia content 

and share it with the world, and allows them to participate in online social networks and 

communities where people from all over the world share ideas, collaborate, and learn new 

things. According to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 8- to 18-year-olds 

today devote an average of 7 hours, 38 minutes to using entertainment media in a typical 

day – more than 53 hours a week (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2009). The opportunities, 

access, and information are limitless, borderless, and instantaneous.

Technology brings similar opportunities to professionals in many fields. Physicians 

use mobile Internet access devices to download X-rays and test results or to access 

specialized applications such as medicine dosage calculators. Earthquake geologists 

install underground sensors along fault lines, monitor them remotely, and tie them into early 

warning systems that signal the approach of seismic waves. Filmmakers use everyday 

computers and affordable software for every phase of the filmmaking process – from editing 

and special effects to music and sound mixing. Technology dominates the workplaces of 

most professionals and managers in business, where working in distributed teams that need 

to communicate and collaborate is the norm.

The challenge for our education system is to leverage technology to create relevant learning 

experiences that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures. We live in a highly 

mobile, globally connected society in which young Americans will have more jobs and more 

careers in their lifetimes than their parents. Learning can no longer be confined to the years 

we spend in school or the hours we spend in the classroom: It must be life-long, life-wide, 

and available on demand (Bransford et al., 2006).
10 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

To prepare students to learn throughout their lives and in settings far beyond classrooms, we 

must change what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, 

and where and when they learn and change our perception of who needs to learn. We must 

bring 21st century technology into learning in meaningful ways to engage, motivate, and 

inspire learners of all ages to achieve.

The challenging and rapidly changing demands of our global economy tell us what people 

need to know and who needs to learn. Advances in learning sciences show us how people 

learn. Technology makes it possible for us to act on this knowledge and understanding.

What 21st Century Learning Should Look Like

Figure 1 depicts a model of 21st century learning powered by technology. In contrast to 

traditional classroom instruction, which often consists of a single educator transmitting the 

same information to all learners in the same way, the model puts students at the center 

and empowers them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several 

dimensions. A core set of standards-based concepts and competencies form the basis of 

what all students should learn, but beyond that students and educators have options for 

engaging in learning: large groups, small groups, and work tailored to individual goals, 

needs, and interests.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 11

Figure 1. A Model of Learning

This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
12 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

In this model, technology supports learning by providing engaging 

environments and tools for understanding and remembering 

content. For example, game-based courses use features familiar to 

game players to teach core subject content such as history. 

Technology provides access to a much wider and more flexible 

set of learning resources than is available in classrooms and 

connections to a wider and more flexible set of “educators,” 

including teachers, parents, experts, and mentors outside the 

classroom. Engaging and effective learning experiences can 

be individualized or differentiated for particular learners (either 

paced or tailored to fit their learning needs) or personalized, which 

combines paced and tailored learning with flexibility in content 

or theme to fit the interests and prior experience of each learner. 

(See sidebar for definitions of individualized, differentiated, and 

personalized learning.)

An example of individualized and differentiated learning can be 

found in New York City’s School of One pilot, a 2009 summer 

program that allowed students learning mathematics to learn at 

their own pace and in a variety of ways. On the basis of its initial 

success, the School of One concept will be expanded throughout 

2010 and 2011. 

Personalized learning supports student learning in areas of 

particular interest to them. For example, a student who learns 

Russian to read the works of Dostoevsky in their original form and 

another who orders a surgical kit on eBay to practice sutures on 

oranges are learning things we would never ask all students to do. 

But these things are important because they are driven by learners’

own passions.

Within specific content areas, although standards exist for what 

we expect all students to know and be able to do, the model also 

provides options for how the learning can take place. Among these 

options is working with others in project-based learning built around 

challenges with real-world relevance. Well-designed projects help 

students acquire knowledge in specific content areas and also 

support the development of more specialized adaptive expertise 

that can be applied in other areas (Trilling & Fadel, 2009). 

Technology also gives students opportunities for taking ownership of their learning. Studentmanaged electronic learning portfolios can be part of a persistent learning record and help 

students develop the self-awareness required to set their own learning goals, express 

their own views of their strengths, weaknesses, and achievements, and take responsibility 

for them. Educators can use them to gauge students’ development, and they also can be 

shared with peers, parents, and others who are part of students’ extended network.

Individualized, Personalized, and 

Differentiated Instruction

Words like individualization, differentiation, and 

personalization have become buzzwords in 

education, but little agreement exists on what 

exactly they mean beyond the broad concept that 

each is an alternative to the one-size-fits-all model 

of teaching and learning. For example, some 

education professionals use personalization to 

mean that students are given the choice of what 

and how they learn according to their interests, 

and others use it to suggest that instruction is 

paced differently for different students. Throughout 

this plan, we use the following definitions:

Individualization refers to instruction that is 

paced to the learning needs of different learners. 

Learning goals are the same for all students, 

but students can progress through the material 

at different speeds according to their learning 

needs. For example, students might take longer 

to progress through a given topic, skip topics that 

cover information they already know, or repeat 

topics they need more help on. 

Differentiation refers to instruction that is tailored 

to the learning preferences of different learners. 

Learning goals are the same for all students, 

but the method or approach of instruction varies 

according to the preferences of each student or 

what research has found works best for students 

like them.

Personalization refers to instruction that is 

paced to learning needs, tailored to learning 

preferences, and tailored to the specific interests 

of different learners. In an environment that is fully 

personalized, the learning objectives and content 

as well as the method and pace may all vary (so 

personalization encompasses differentiation and 

individualization).
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 13

What People Need to Learn

Education is an enterprise that asks: What’s worth knowing and 

being able to do?

Education experts have proposed answers to this question, 

and although they differ in the details all recognize that what we 

need to know goes beyond the traditional three Rs of Reading, 

’Riting, and ’Rithmetic. Whether the domain is English language 

arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or 

music, 21st century competencies and expertise such as critical 

thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia 

communication should be woven into all content areas.

Experts also agree that people no longer can learn everything there 

is to know in a lifetime, and the economic reality is that most people 

will change jobs throughout their lifetime. Therefore, we need 

adaptive learning skills that blend content knowledge with the ability 

to learn new things. This requires developing deep understanding 

within specific domains and the ability to make connections that 

cut across domains – learning activities that should replace the 

broad but shallow exposure to many topics that is the norm in our 

education system today. We also need to know how to use the 

same technology in learning that professionals in various 

disciplines do.

Professionals routinely use web resources and participatory 

technology such as wikis, blogs, and user-generated content for 

the research, collaboration, and communication demanded in their 

jobs. For students, these tools create new learning activities that 

allow them to grapple with real-world problems, develop search 

strategies, evaluate the credibility and authority of websites and 

authors, and create and communicate with multimedia (Jenkins, 

2009; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004). For example:

 • In the study of mathematics, professional-level interactive 

graphing and statistical programs make complex topics more 

accessible to all learners and help them connect to datasets 

that are current and relevant to their lives.

 • In earth sciences, collecting data with inquiry tools, adding 

geotags with GPS tools, and interactively analyzing 

visualizations of data patterns through web browsers bring 

professional scientific methods and techniques to learners of all 

ages and abilities.

Individualizing and Differentiating Learning in 

New York’s School of One

During summer 2009, the New York City school 

system conducted a two-month pilot test of a 

radically new education concept, the School of 

One. Conducted at Middle School 131 in New 

York’s Chinatown, the pilot program focused on a 

single subject, mathematics, and a single grade 

level (sixth grade). The New York City Department 

of Education views it as demonstration of a 

concept that is equally applicable in other subjects 

and grades. 

Instead of organizing the 80 participating students 

into classes with one of the school’s four teachers 

assigned to each class, the School of One used 

flexible arrangements of students and teachers 

and a large collection of alternative ways for 

students to learn the 77 mathematics skills that 

were the objectives for the program. The School 

of One lesson bank included more than 1,000 

lessons covering those 77 mathematics skills. 

Rather than giving every student the same 

content, the School of One used data from 

prior assessments to identify which skills each 

student should work on during the summer. 

Inputs from teachers and from students provided 

information about how each student learned best 

(for example, “likes to learn through games” or 

“likes to learn alone”). A computer algorithm used 

information about each student’s demonstrated 

mathematics skills and his or her learning 

preferences to generate individual “playlists” of 

appropriate learning activities. 

The summer pilot included four teachers whose efforts 

were focused on large-group instruction, four teacherresidents (college students studying to be teachers) 

who focused on small-group instruction and online 

instructional support, and two high school students who 

focused on tutoring and the grading of assessments. 

The staff met at the end of each day to collectively 

monitor student growth and prepare for the next day’s 

instruction.

In this model, technology was used to develop a unique 

learning path for each student based on a database of 

possible lessons, with supporting instruction on common 

content that was both individualized and differentiated 

for each student. The New York City Department of 

Education expects the School of One program to 

operate in three middle schools by the spring of 2010 

and in 20 schools by 2012.

Source: Submitted to the NETP web-site, edtechfuture.org. 
14 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

 • In history, original documents available to historians as 

digital resources from the Smithsonian and other institutions are 

available to engage learners in historical thinking and reasoning.

As these examples illustrate, the world’s information and 

sophisticated tools for using it, which are available anytime and 

anywhere, demand that rather than being content experts we be 

expert learners in at least three ways: 

 • As skillful and strategic learners who have learned how to 

learn new things and communicate what we have learned

 • As motivated and engaged learners who identify ourselves as 

growing in competence and want to learn even more

 • As networked learners, with the ability to tap expertise anytime 

and anywhere that can advance our learning.

A crucial step in transforming American education to produce expert 

learners is creating, revising, and adopting content standards and 

learning objectives for all content areas that reflect 21st century 

expertise and the power of technology to improve learning.

How People Need to Learn

Advances in the learning sciences, including cognitive science, 

neuroscience, education, and social sciences, give us greater 

understanding of three connected types of human learning – factual 

knowledge, procedural knowledge, and motivational engagement. 

Neuroscience tells us that these three different types of learning 

are supported by three different brain systems. (See sidebar on 

the Neuroscience of Learning.) Social sciences reveal that human 

expertise integrates all three types of learning. Technology has 

increased our ability to both study and enhance how people learn 

(National Research Council, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2009; National 

Science Foundation, 2008b) and can augment all three types of 

learning.

Factual knowledge

Students are surrounded with information in a variety of forms, 

and specific features of information design affect how and whether 

students build usable knowledge from the information they 

encounter. For example, computers can replicate and integrate a 

wide variety of media for learning and education: text, video/film, 

Winona Middle School’s Cultural History 

Project

In 1995, when the Internet was just arriving 

in schools, students at Winona Middle School 

began to use it to support and showcase a class 

project about local history and the changing 

demographics of their town. Students gathered 

information about their community by visiting 

local museums, searching texts, and interviewing 

local residents. They built a website to share 

their findings with one another and with their 

community. The website began to take on a life 

of its own, attracting the interest of community 

leaders, professional historians, and individuals 

living halfway around the world who found they 

were distant relatives of the town’s earliest 

immigrants. Students expanded the website to 

include the contributions of the wider community 

and built a searchable database of genealogical 

information and other artifacts. 

Today, the Winona Cultural History website 

continues to be a valuable resource for the school 

and its community, and students continue to 

interact with others in or outside their local area 

to evolve an ongoing knowledge base. One of the 

secrets of this project’s success is that it leverages 

very simple technology so that it can be sustained 

with minimal funding and maintenance.

Source: Submitted to the NETP web-site, edtechfuture.org.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 15

animations, graphics, photos, diagrams, simulations, and more. 

As a result, technology can be designed to provide much richer 

learning experiences without sacrificing what traditional learning 

media offer. Technology can

 • Represent information through a much richer mix of 

media types. This allows the integration of media and 

representations to illustrate, explain, or explore complex ideas 

and phenomena, such as interactive visualizations of data in 

earth and environmental sciences, chemistry, or astronomy. 

Technology can help learners explore phenomena at extreme 

spatial or temporal scales through simulation and modeling 

tools. This opens up many domains and ways of learning that 

were formerly impossible or impractical. 

 • Facilitate knowledge connections through interactive tools. 

These include interactive concept maps, data displays, and 

timelines that provide visual connections between existing 

knowledge and new ideas.

Procedural knowledge

Procedural knowledge learning includes both content-related 

procedures (learning how to do science inquiry, for example) and 

learning-related strategies (learning how to figure out how to solve 

a new problem or self-monitor progress on a task). Technology can 

expand and support a growing repertoire of strategies for individual 

learners by

 • Providing scaffolds to guide learners through the learning 

process. Many programs use interactive prompts embedded 

directly into the learning resources, live or virtual modeling 

of helpful strategies, interactive queries that prompt effective 

processing, and timely and informative feedback on results. 

These scaffolds can be designed to respond to differences in 

individual learning styles and be available on demand when 

the learner needs help and then evolve or fade as the learner 

builds stronger skills.

 • Providing tools for communicating learning beyond written or 

spoken language. This can be accomplished through webbased multimedia, multimedia presentations, or gestural 

expressions such as those that drive interactions in 

gaming systems.

The Neuroscience of Learning

Three broad types of learning – learning that, 

learning how, and learning why – each correspond 

to one of three main human brain divisions. 

Learning that is associated with the posterior 

brain regions (the parietal, occipital, and temporal 

lobes within the cerebral cortex). These regions 

primarily take information in from the senses, 

transforming it into usable knowledge – the 

patterns, facts, concepts, objects, principles, and 

regularities of our world. The medial temporal 

lobe, including the hippocampus, provides a 

system of anatomically related structures essential 

to conscious memory for facts and events, what 

is called declarative knowledge (Squire, Stark, & 

Clark, 2004). 

Learning how is associated with the anterior 

parts of the brain (the frontal lobe, from primary 

motor cortex to prefrontal cortex), specialized 

for learning how to do things, and is expressed 

through performance (Squire, 2004). This has 

also been called procedural knowledge, implicit 

memory, and knowing-how. This type includes 

learning “low level” motor skills but also higher 

level skills and strategies known as executive 

functions. 

Learning why is associated with the interior or 

central brain regions, including the extended 

limbic system and amygdale. These evolutionarily 

primitive brain regions are specialized for affective 

and emotional learning (LeDoux, 2000). They 

contribute to learning and remembering not what 

an object is or how to use it but why it is important 

to us. These structures underlie what attracts 

our attention and interest, sustains our effort, 

motivates our behavior, and guides our goalsetting and priorities. With these regions, we learn 

our values and priorities: our image as a person 

and as a learner and the values and goals that 

comprise it.
16 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

 • Fostering online communities. Technology can provide 

platforms for connecting learners in online communities where 

they can support each other as they explore and develop 

deeper understanding of new ideas, share resources, work 

together beyond the walls of a school or home, and gain 

access to a much wider pool of expertise, guidance, and 

support (Ito, 2009).

Motivational engagement

The field of affective neuroscience has drawn attention to the critical 

importance of motivation in how the brain learns. We learn and 

remember what attracts our interest and attention, and what attracts 

interest and attention can vary for different learners. Therefore, 

the most effective learning experiences are not only individualized 

in terms of pacing and differentiated to fit the learning needs of 

particular learners, but also personalized in the sense that they are 

flexible in content or theme to fit the interests of particular learners. 

To stimulate motivational engagement, technology can

 • Engage interest and attention. Digital learning resources 

enable engaging individual learners’ personal interests by 

connecting web learning resources to learning standards, 

providing options for adjusting the challenge level of learning 

tasks to avoid boredom or frustration, and bridging informal 

and formal learning in and outside school (Brown & Adler, 

2008; Collins & Halverson, 2009; National Science Foundation, 

2008b). Technology can also be used to create learning 

resources that provide immediate feedback modeled on games 

to help engage and motivate learners (Gee, 2004).

 • Sustain effort and academic motivation. Technology-based learning resources can give 

learners choices that keep them engaged in learning, for example, personally relevant 

content, a customized interface, options for difficulty level or alternative learning 

pathways, or choices for support and guidance.

 • Develop a positive image as a life-long learner. Technology can inspire imagination 

and intellectual curiosity that help people engage actively as learners and open new 

channels for success or visions of career possibilities. For example, when students 

use the tools of professionals to engage in real-world problems, they can begin to see 

themselves in productive professional roles (“I am a graphic artist,” “I am a scientist,” 

“I am a teacher”). Technology also provides opportunities for students to express 

themselves by engaging in online communities and sharing content they have created 

with the world.

Chesapeake Bay FieldScope: Analyzing 

Authentic Scientific Phenomena

Chesapeake Bay FieldScope is a collaborative 

high school science project that combines 

traditional hands-on fieldwork with webbased geospatial technology and other tools 

to help students build a rich understanding 

of the ecosystem around them. Students use 

National Geographic FieldScope, a web-based 

mapping, analysis, and collaboration tool, to 

investigate water quality issues in and around the 

Chesapeake Bay. In the classroom, students learn 

about the bay using a multimedia database of 

scientific information. In the field, students gather 

their own scientific observations (such as water 

quality samples, written notes, or digital photos of 

wildlife) and then upload them to the FieldScope 

database. All database information is organized as 

points on a map, providing an intuitive geospacial 

format to scaffold student learning. 

Source: Submitted to the NETP web-site, edtechfuture.org.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 17

Where and When People Learn

When the material that knowledge learners require cannot be covered in school or when 

they are not in school, learners need on-demand opportunities for learning anytime and 

anywhere. On-demand learning is essential to life-long and life-wide learning (Figure 2), and 

technology produces a vital bridge, enabling productive use of learning resources across 

formal and informal learning settings (Barron, 2006).

Figure 2. Life-long and life-wide learning

On-demand learning is facilitated by the vast information and learning resources on the web 

that are available in an always-on connection to the Internet. This is powerful for individual 

learners but even more so when accessed by groups of learners and learning communities 

– from small groups with different roles and responsibilities in pursuit of a learning project to 

far larger communities that may be pursuing ambitious design and learning products, such 

as developing an entry for Wikipedia or planning the reinvigoration of the environment of 

their city.

Collaborative environments are enhanced by social and participatory approaches such as 

wikis, in which learners and teachers regardless of their location – in a classroom or halfway 

around the world – or the time of day can build knowledge structures or tackle inquiry 

problems that are posed together. Social media content created by teachers and learners, 

from blogs to podcasts to YouTube videos or creations and performances in virtual worlds 

(Jenkins, 2009; Johnson, Levine, & Smith, 2009; OECD, 2008, 2009) enrich on-demand learning.

This image by the LIFE Center is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
18 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Specific examples of on-demand learning include the following:

 • Inquiry and adventure environments with games and activities that foster learning. 

 • Online “collaboratories” (National Science Foundation, 2008a) in which scientists 

establish protocols for collecting data with sensors from local environments across the 

planet. Learners and teachers learn science by doing science as they capture, upload, 

and then visualize and analyze geospatial and temporal data patterns from the data 

contributed by the globally networked community.

 • Earth- and sky-mapping web resources with data from the sciences and other fields 

of scholarly inquiry that anyone can use to develop virtual travel tours to be applied in 

learning and teaching activities.

 • Augmented reality platforms and games that bring locally relevant learning resources 

into view for users of mobile devices with a GPS (Johnson, Levine, Smith, & Stone, 

2010). 

 • Use of the power of collective intelligence and crowdsourcing to tackle complex 

interdisciplinary problems. 

 • Powerful learning applications for mobile Internet access devices such as musical 

instrument simulators, language learning tools, and mathematical games.

 • Sites and communities that publish academic content, including user-generated 

content. One notable example is the videotaped lectures of MIT physics professor 

Walter Lewin, available on MIT’s OpenCourseWare site as well as through commercial 

courseware and video sharing sites. Lewin’s engaging and entertaining lectures have 

earned him a following of millions worldwide. 

Who Needs to Learn

The United States cannot prosper economically, culturally, or politically if major parts of our 

citizenry lack a strong educational foundation, yet far too many students are not served by 

our current one-size-fits all education system. The learning sciences and technology can 

help us design and provide more effective learning experiences for all learners.

Universal Design for Learning

Making learning experiences accessible to all learners requires universal design, a concept 

well established in the field of architecture, where all modern public buildings, including 

schools, are designed to be accessible by everyone. Principles and guidelines have been 

established for universal design in education based on decades of research and are known 

as Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The UDL principles reflect the way students take in 

and process information (Rose & Meyer, 2002). Using them to develop goals, instructional 

methods, classroom materials, and assessments, educators can improve outcomes for 

diverse learners by providing fair opportunities for learning by improving access to content. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 19

The UDL principles are as follows:

 • Provide multiple and flexible methods of presentation of information and knowledge. 

Examples include digital books, specialized software and websites, text-to-speech 

applications, and screen readers. 

 • Provide multiple and flexible means of expression with alternatives for students to 

demonstrate what they have learned. Examples include online concept mapping and 

speech-to-text programs. 

 • Provide multiple and flexible means of engagement to tap in to diverse learners’

interests, challenge them appropriately, and motivate them to learn. Examples include 

choices among different scenarios or content for learning the same competency and 

opportunities for increased collaboration or scaffolding.

The definition of UDL that appears in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (103 

U.S.C. § 42) has come to dominate the field because of its broad applicability and its 

research foundation in the learning sciences, both cognitive and neurosciences. 

Serving the underserved

The goal of UDL is to reach all learners, but some groups are especially underserved. In the 

past two decades, the disparities in access to and the use of technology have been closely 

associated with socioeconomic status, ethnicity, geographical location, and gender; primary 

language; disability; educational level; and generational characteristics (Pew Internet & 

American Life Project, 2007). The FCC now refers to “digital exclusion” as what must be 

overcome, because job applications, health information, and many other crucial information 

resources appear only in the digital realm (http://www.fcc.gov/recovery/broadband/). As we 

use technology to reach all learners, the following groups need special attention:

 • Low-income and minority learners. Despite significant gains, learners from low-income 

communities and underserved minority groups still are less likely to have computers 

and Internet access and have fewer people in their social circles with the skills to 

support technology-based learning at home (Warschauer & Matuchniak, in press). 

Some of the solutions to the access problem are capitalizing on existing programs 

in the public sphere – extended hours for use of networked computers in schools, 

libraries, community centers, and so on.

 • English language learners. English is the predominant language of instruction in most 

U.S. classrooms and in the vast majority of web resources. The challenges of learning 

the content and skills necessary to function as a 21st century citizen are heightened 

if English is not a person’s first language. Recent advances in language translation 

technology provide powerful tools for reducing language barriers. With proper design, 

technology can easily represent information so that there are multiple alternatives for 

English, multiple options for unfamiliar vocabulary or syntax, and even alternatives to 

language itself (use of image, video, and audio).
20 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

 • Learners with disabilities. In public schools, many learners 

are identified as having special needs. These students need 

accommodations to have the opportunity to achieve at the 

same levels as their peers. In addition to UDL for learners 

with significant physical and sensory disabilities, powerful new 

assistive technologies are increasingly becoming available 

to improve access to learning opportunities. These include 

electronic mobility switches and alternative keyboards for 

students with physical disabil ities; computer-screen enlargers 

and text-to-speech and screen readers for individuals with 

visual disabilities; electronic sign-language dictionaries and 

signing avatars for learners with hearing disabilities; and 

calculators and spellcheckers for individuals with learning 

disabilities. Many of these devices are difficult or impossible 

to use with traditional learning materials such as printed 

textbooks. The advantage of digital resources, especially 

those that are universally designed, is that they can easily 

be made accessible through assistive technologies. (See the 

sidebar on NIMAS).

 • Pre-K. For underserved children, learning gaps in literacy 

begin in early childhood and become increasingly difficult to 

overcome as their education progresses. Early intervention 

is crucial if these children are to keep pace with their peers, 

especially to augment the linguistic, visual, and symbolic 

worlds that learners experience and seek to emulate. Ready 

to Learn is an example of technology-based resources that 

target school readiness skills (Penuel et al., 2009). 

 • Adult workforce. Many adults in the workforce are 

underproductive, have no postsecondary credential, and 

face limited opportunities because they lack fluency in basic 

skills. Unfortunately, they have little time or opportunity for 

the sustained learning and development that becoming fluent 

would require. For these learners, technology expands the 

opportunities for where and when they can learn. Working 

adults can take online courses at anytime and anywhere. 

While individual adults benefit with more opportunities for 

advancement, companies and agencies benefit from the 

increased productivity of a fully literate workforce, one 

continuously preparing for the future. (See the sidebar on 

Online Skills Laboratory.) 

Universal Design for Textbooks: 

NIMAS – National Instructional Materials 

Accessibility Standard

Traditional textbooks, like any standardized learning 

technology, are much more accessible to some 

learners than others. For students who are blind, 

who have physical disabilities, or who have reading 

disabilities, textbooks impose barriers rather 

than opportunities for learning. In the past, each 

classroom teacher or school had to generate some 

kind of work-around to overcome these barriers 

– contracting for a Braille version of the book, 

engaging an aide to help with the physical demands 

of textbooks, recording or purchasing an audio 

version for students with dyslexia, and so forth. The 

costs - in time, resources, learning opportunities – of 

retrofitting in these ways are high. Most important, 

the costs of such one-off accommodations are 

repeated in every classroom and district throughout 

the country – a staggering waste of money and time. 

In 2006 a very new and more universally designed 

approach was mandated by the U.S. Congress. 

In that year, regulations for NIMAS – the National 

Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard – went 

into effect. That standard stipulates that all U.S. 

textbooks be available as a “digital source file” 

(a fully marked up XML source file based on the 

Daisy international standard). The power of that 

digital source file is in its flexibility: It can be easily 

transformed into many different student-ready 

versions, including a Braille book, a digital talking 

book, a large-text version, and so forth. The same 

content can be generated once by a publisher but 

can be displayed in many different ways to match the 

different needs of diverse students. 

The dramatic effect of the NIMAS legislation is not 

really in the technology itself, but in the change in 

how we think about diversity that the technology 

promotes. The conceptual shift is evident in that 

Congress calls for schools to provide alternative 

versions for all students who have “print disabilities.” 

In that remarkable wording shift, “learning disabilities” 

to “print disabilities,” lies a profound alteration in the 

response to diversity and disability. By recognizing 

that many learning problems are resident not just in 

the child but in the medium of instruction, the NIMAS 

legislation also recognizes that the limits of print are 

too costly for American education. Printed textbooks 

cannot adequately meet the challenge of diversity, and 

we will need to shift our educational practices to new 

technologies that – through more universal designs – 

are equitable and effective for all of our learners.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 21

 • Seniors. The aging population is rapidly expanding, and elders 

have specific disabilities – visual, hearing, motor, cognitive 

– that accompany the neurology of aging. At the same 

time, seniors have special strengths that come from their 

accumulated wisdom and experience. Capitalizing on those 

strengths in supporting life-long learning for seniors requires 

careful design of learning environments and the use of 

technology so that sensory weaknesses (in vision or hearing) 

and mnemonic capacity (in working and associative memory) 

do not erect insurmountable barriers to continued learning, 

independence, and socialization.

Improving Secondary and 

Postsecondary Graduation Rates

Among the consequences of our education system’s failure to 

reach all learners is a higher dropout rate than in other developed 

countries. Overall, 24% of young people in the United States drop 

out of high school (OECD, 2007), but the dropout rate for Latino 

and African American students is nearly 50% (Orfield, Losen, Wald, 

& Swanson, 2004).

The long-term impact of both high school and college dropout 

rates on our society is catastrophic, both in terms of the success 

prospects of individuals in life and work and for our nation’s ability 

to compete in a global economy (McKinsey & Company, 2009).

Most students report that dropping out of school is a gradual process of disengagement 

that can be reversed with more relevant learning experiences and social and emotional 

interactions at school. Technology-based programs and resources, including online learning, 

tutoring and mentoring, and social networks and participatory communities within and 

across educational institutions, can provide both. They can also give students guidance and 

information about their own learning progress and opportunities for the future. Specifically, 

students need to know what is expected of them as they move from middle school to high 

school and from high school to postsecondary education.

Secondary and postsecondary institutions should work separately and together to support 

at-risk students in all phases of their education. This support should start early in students’ 

educational career and intensify if they need it.

Online Skills Laboratory

Community colleges are an essential enabler for a 

wide variety of learners to build the skills necessary for 

success in the workforce. They serve both collegeage students, often those who are academically 

underprepared for or who lack the financial resources 

for a four-year college, and adult learners who need 

to prepare for new jobs or simply desire to continue 

learning. Both types of learners may be working one 

or more jobs while they attend school and have other 

adult responsibilities that make it difficult to attend 

physical classes on a set schedule. 

A new federal program, the Online Skills Laboratory, 

intends to build a set of open resources for learning, 

with the help of teams of experts in content, pedagogy, 

and technology. These courses will be offered free of 

charge through a network of community colleges and 

will be openly available to adapt and share to meet the 

needs of individual teachers or learners. This resource 

will supplement the resources currently available in 

physical community college spaces and may become 

an alternative path to earning a degree. For learners 

who are raising a family or working a full-time job, this 

flexibility offers opportunities for learning that would 

otherwise not be available.
22 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Enabling All Learners to Excel in STEM

The state of science and engineering in the United States is strong, but U.S. dominance 

worldwide has eroded significantly in recent years, primarily because of rapidly increasing 

capability in East Asian nations, particularly China (National Science Board, 2010). In 

addition, new data show that U.S. 15-year-olds are losing ground in science and math 

achievement compared with their peers around the world (McKinsey & Company, 2009).

In November 2009, President Obama launched the Educate to Innovate campaign to 

improve the participation and performance of America’s students in STEM with the goal of 

enabling all learners to excel in STEM. In January 2010, the President announced a new set 

of public-private partnerships committing $250 million in private resources to attract, develop, 

reward, and retain STEM educators.

In addition, the NSF through its cyberlearning task force initiatives and the President’s 

Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is recommending research and 

development to guide the restructuring of STEM domains for more effective learning with 

technology. 

Whereas technology has dramatically changed how students learn in all disciplines, 

perhaps nowhere are its effects more profound than in STEM subjects. New technologies 

for representing, manipulating, and communicating information and ideas have changed 

professional practices and what students need to learn to be prepared for STEM professions. 

In particular, technology can be used to support student interaction with STEM content in 

ways that promote deeper understanding of complex ideas, engage students in solving 

complex problems, and create new opportunities for STEM learning at all levels of our 

education system. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 23

Reaching Our Goal

All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and outside of 

school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in 

our globally networked society.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

1.1 Recommendation: Revise, create, and adopt standards and learning objectives for all 

content areas that reflect 21st century expertise and the power of technology to improve 

learning.

Our education system relies on core sets of standards-based concepts and competencies 

that form the basis of what all students should learn. Standard-setting bodies for every 

academic domain should ensure that their standards reflect 21st century expertise 

recognizing the role of technology in contemporary practice. Standards should establish 

that in every content area students have learning experiences that exploit the power 

and flexibility of technology. The work of revising and disseminating standards should 

exploit online collaboration tools. The Department of Education should support standards 

development and revision efforts by connecting the various groups and organizations 

working on these issues. The Department also should identify and disseminate examples of 

standards that reflect the transformative power of technology in learning.

1.2 Recommendation: Develop and adopt learning resources that use technology to embody 

design principles from the learning sciences.

Advances in the learning sciences have improved our understanding of how people learn. 

The Department of Education should encourage learning science researchers to make their 

findings broadly available to private and public sector developers of educational technology 

and ask curriculum developers to draw on advances in the learning sciences as they 

design and deliver the next generation of technology-based learning content, resources, 

courses, and tools. Specifically, new resources should give learners choices about how 

they learn, stimulate active engagement, and provide real-time feedback that fosters 

learning. Resources also should include self-improving features that enable them to become 

increasingly effective through interaction with learners. To expand the availability of these 

resources and ensure their continuous improvement, the Department should fund research 

and the development of exemplary resources that implement learning science principles. 

Schools and districts should adopt effective technology-based resources as they become 

available.

1.3 Recommendation: Develop and adopt learning resources that exploit the flexibility and 

power of technology to reach all learners anytime and anywhere.

The “always on” nature of the Internet, mobile access devices, and students’ technology 

fluency give states, districts, and schools opportunities to offer on-demand learning 

experiences that are available anytime and anywhere. Private and public sector developers 
24 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

of instructional materials should exploit the flexibility and adaptability of technology, paying 

special attention to learners who have been marginalized in many educational settings: 

students from low-income communities and minorities, English language learners, students 

with disabilities, students who are gifted and talented, students from diverse cultures and 

linguistic backgrounds, and students in rural areas. Developers should combine technology 

with design principles for individualized, differentiated, and personalized learning and with 

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to support multiple options for representing 

ideas and for embedding supportive structures and processes within both commercially 

available and open learning resources. States and districts should adopt and implement 

these resources to the extent possible.

1.4 Recommendation: Use advances in the learning sciences and technology to enhance 

STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning, and develop, adopt, 

and evaluate new methodologies with the potential to enable all learners to excel in STEM.

New technologies for representing, manipulating, and communicating information and 

ideas have changed professional practices in STEM fields and what students need to learn 

to be prepared for STEM professions. The Department of Education should cooperate 

with the National Science Foundation (NSF), its cyberlearning task force initiatives, and 

the President’s Council of Advisors on Science Technology (PCAST) Subcommittee on 

Education to restructure instruction in the STEM knowledge domains to mirror contemporary 

professional practice and reflect the use of technology. States, districts, and schools should 

use the vast array of online resources in STEM fields and the technology tools and resources 

currently used by STEM professionals to create relevant and applied curricula that engage 

students in complex problem solving and collaborative learning with their peers and with 

experts in the field. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 25

Assessment: 

Measuring What Matters

Goal: Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure 

what matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.

Most of the assessment done in schools today is after the fact and designed to indicate only 

whether students have learned. Little is done to assess students’ thinking during learning 

so we can help them learn better. Nor do we collect and aggregate student learning data in 

ways that make the information valuable to and accessible by educators, schools, districts, 

states, and the nation to support continuous improvement and innovation. We are not using 

the full flexibility and power of technology to design, develop, and validate new assessment 

materials and processes for both formative and summative uses.

Just as learning sciences and technology play an essential role in helping us create 

more effective learning experiences, when combined with assessment theory they also 

can provide a foundation for much-needed improvements in assessment (Pellegrino, 

Chudowsky, & Glaser, 2001; Tucker, 2009). These improvements include finding new and 

better ways to assess what matters, doing assessment in the course of learning when 

there is still time to improve student performance, and involving multiple stakeholders in the 

process of designing, conducting, and using assessment.

Equally important, we now are acutely aware of the need to make data-driven decisions at 

every level of our education system on the basis of what is best for each and every student 

– decisions that in aggregate will lead to better performance and greater efficiency across 

the entire system. 
26 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

What We Should Be Assessing

To change our thinking about what we should be assessing, President Obama has issued 

the following challenge:

“I’m calling on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards 

and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a 

test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.” 

—President Barack Obama, March 10, 2009

Measuring these complex skills requires designing and developing assessments that 

address the full range of expertise and competencies implied by the standards. Cognitive 

research and theory provide rich models and representations of how students understand 

and think about key concepts in the curriculum, and how the knowledge structures we want 

students to have by the time they reach college develop over time. An illustration of the 

power of combining research and theory with technology is provided by the work of Jim 

Minstrell, a former high school physics teacher who developed an approach to teaching and 

assessment that carefully considers learners’ thinking.

Minstrell’s work began with a compilation of student ideas about force and motion based 

on both the research literature and the observations of educators. Some of these student 

ideas, or “facets” in Minstrell’s terminology, are considered scientifically correct to the degree 

one would expect at the stage of introductory physics. Others are partially incorrect and 

still others are seriously flawed. Using these facets as a foundation, Minstrell designed a 

web-based assessment program with sets of questions that can be used to inform learning 

about force and motion, rather than simply test how much students have learned (Minstrell & 

Kraus, 2005). Minstrell’s facet assessments and instructional materials are available on the 

web (www.diagnoser.com). 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 27

Technology Supports Assessing 

Complex Competencies

As Minstrell’s and others’ work shows, through multimedia, interactivity, and connectivity 

it is possible to assess competencies that we believe are important and that are aspects 

of thinking highlighted in cognitive research. It also is possible to directly assess 

problem-solving skills; make visible sequences of actions taken by learners in simulated 

environments; model complex reasoning tasks; and do it all within the contexts of relevant 

societal issues and problems that people care about in everyday life (Vendlenski & Stevens, 

2002).

Other technologies enable us to assess how well students communicate for a variety of 

purposes and in a variety of ways, including in virtual environments. An example of this is 

River City, a decade-long effort at Harvard University funded by the NSF. River City is a 

multi-user virtual environment designed by researchers to study how students learn through 

using it (Dede, 2009). This virtual environment was built as a context in which middle school 

students could acquire concepts in biology, ecology, and epidemiology while planning and 

implementing scientific investigations in a virtual world.

River City takes students into an industrial city at the time in the 18th-century when scientists 

were just beginning to discover bacteria. Each student is represented as an avatar and 

communicates with other student avatars through chat and gestures. Students work in 

teams of three, moving through River City to collect data and run tests in response to the 

mayor’s challenge to find out why River City residents are falling ill. The student teams form 

and test hypotheses within the virtual city, analyze data, and write up their research in a 

report they deliver to the mayor.

Student performance in River City can be assessed by analyzing the reports that are the 

culmination of their experiences, and also by looking at the kinds of information each 

student and each student team chose to examine and their moment-to-moment movements, 

actions, and utterances. On the basis of student actions in River City, researchers developed 

measures of students’ science inquiry skills, sense of efficacy as a scientist, and science 

concept knowledge (Dede, 2009; Dieterle, 2009). Materials and other resources have been 

developed to support educators in implementing River City in their classrooms. 

As the River City example illustrates, just as technology has changed the nature of inquiry 

among professionals, it can change how the corresponding academic subjects can be 

taught and tested. Technology allows representation of domains, systems, models, data, 

and their manipulation in ways that previously were not possible. Technology enables the 

use of dynamic models of systems, such as an energy-efficient car, a recycling program, or 

a molecular structure. Technology makes it possible to assess students by asking them to 

design products or experiments, to manipulate parameters, run tests, record data, and graph 

and describe their results.

Another advantage to technology-based assessments is we can use them to assess 

what students learn outside school walls and hours as well as inside. Assuming that we 
28 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

have standards for the competencies students must have and valid, reliable techniques 

for measuring these competencies, technology can help us assess (and reward) learning 

regardless of when and where it takes place.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has designed and fielded several 

technology-based assessments involving complex tasks and problem situations (Bennett, 

Persky, Weiss, & Jenkins, 2007). One of these calls on students to interact with a simulation 

of a hot-air balloon (see sidebar).

Technology-based Assessment Using a Hot-Air Balloon Simulation

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been exploring the use of more 

complex assessment tasks enabled by technology. In one technology-based simulation task, for 

example, eighth-graders are asked to use a hot-air balloon simulation to design and conduct an 

experiment to determine the relationship between payload mass and balloon altitude (see screen 

shot below). After completing the tutorial about the simulation tool interface, students select 

values for the independent variable payload mass. They can observe the balloon rise in the flight 

box and note changes in the values of the dependent variables of altitude, balloon volume, and 

time to final altitude.

In another problem, the amount of helium, another independent variable, is held constant to 

reduce the task’s difficulty. Students can construct tables and graphs and draw conclusions by 

clicking on the buttons below the heading Interpret Results. As they work with the simulation, 

students can get help if they need it: a glossary of science terms, science help about the 

substance of the problem, and computer help about the buttons and functions of the simulation 

interface are built in to the technology environment. The simulation task takes 60 minutes to complete, 

and student performance is used to derive measures of the student’s computer skills, scientific inquiry 

exploration skills, and scientific inquiry synthesis skills within the context of physics.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 29

Using Technology to Assess in Ways That 

Improve Learning

There is a difference between using assessments to determine what students have learned 

for grading and accountability purposes (summative uses) and using assessments to 

diagnose and modify the conditions of learning and instruction (formative uses). Both uses 

are important, but the latter can improve student learning in the moment (Black & Wiliam, 

1998; Black et al., 2004). Concepts that are widely misunderstood can be explained and 

demonstrated in a way that directly addresses students’ misconceptions. Strategic pairing of 

students who think about a concept in different ways can lead to conceptual growth for both 

of them as a result of experiences trying to communicate and support their ideas.

Assessing in the classroom

Educators routinely try to gather information about their students’ learning on the basis of 

what students do in class. But for any question posed in the classroom, only a few students 

respond. Educators’ insight into what the remaining students do and do not understand is 

informed only by selected students’ facial expressions of interest, boredom, or puzzlement.

To solve this problem, a number of groups are exploring the use of various technologies to 

“instrument” the classroom in an attempt to find out what students are thinking. One example 

is the use of simple response devices designed to work with multiple-choice and true/false 

questions. Useful information can be gained from answers to these types of questions if they 

are carefully designed and used in meaningful ways. Physics professor Eric Mazur poses 

multiple-choice physics problems to his college classes, has the students use response 

devices to answer questions, and then has them discuss the problem with a peer who gave 

a different answer. Mazur reports much higher levels of engagement and better student 

learning from this combination of a classroom response system and peer instruction 

(Mazur, 1997).

Science educators in Singapore have adopted a more sophisticated system that supports 

peer instruction by capturing more complex kinds of student responses. Called Group 

Scribbles, the system allows every student to contribute to a classroom discussion by 

placing and arranging sketches or small notes (drawn with a stylus on a tablet or handheld 

computer) on an electronic whiteboard. One educator using Group Scribbles asked groups 

of students to sketch different ways of forming an electric circuit with a light bulb and to 

share them by placing them on a whiteboard. Students learned by explaining their work to 

others, and through providing and receiving feedback (Looi, Chen, & Ng, 2010).
30 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Assessing during online learning

When students are learning online, there are multiple opportunities 

to exploit the power of technology for formative assessment. The 

same technology that supports learning activities gathers data in 

the course of learning that can be used for assessment (Lovett, 

Meyer, & Thille, 2008). An online system can collect much more 

and much more detailed information about how students are 

learning than manual methods. As students work, the system can 

capture their inputs and collect evidence of their problem-solving 

sequences, knowledge, and strategy use, as reflected by the 

information each student selects or inputs, the number of attempts 

they make, the number of hints and feedback given, and the time 

allocation across parts of the problem.

The ASSISTment system, currently used by more than 4,000 

students in Worcester County Public Schools in Massachusetts, is 

an example of a web-based tutoring system that combines online 

learning and assessment activities (Feng, Heffernan, & Koedinger, 

2009). The name “ASSISTment” is a blend of tutoring “assistance” 

with “assessment” reporting to educators. The ASSISTment system 

was designed by researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute 

and Carnegie Mellon University to teach middle school math 

concepts and to provide educators with a detailed assessment 

of students’ developing math skills and their skills as learners. It 

gives educators detailed reports of students’ mastery of 100 math 

skills, as well as their accuracy, speed, help-seeking behavior, and 

number of problem-solving attempts. The ASSISTment system 

can identify the difficulties that individual students are having and 

the weaknesses demonstrated by the class as a whole so that 

educators can tailor the focus of their upcoming instruction.

 When students respond to ASSISTment problems, they receive 

hints and tutoring to the extent they need them. At the same time, 

how individual students respond to the problems and how much 

support they need from the system to generate correct responses 

constitute valuable assessment information. Each week, when 

students work on the ASSISTment website, the system “learns” 

more about the students’ abilities and thus can provide increasingly 

appropriate tutoring and can generate increasingly accurate 

predictions of how well the students will do on the end-of-year 

standardized test. In fact the ASSISTment system has been 

found to be more accurate at predicting students’ performance on 

the state examination than the pen-and-paper benchmark tests 

developed for that purpose (Feng, Heffernan, & Koedinger, 2009).

Using Networked Graphing Calculators for 

Formative Assessment

Over a wireless network, students can contribute 

mathematical content to the classroom, such as 

algebraic functions or graphs – content that is much 

richer than the answer to a multiple-choice question.

Mrs. J, an experienced science teacher in an urban 

middle school, participated in a large field trial testing 

the effectiveness of networked graphing calculators. 

When district-level tests had revealed that her 

students struggled to interpret graphs, Mrs. J used 

the graphing calculator-based wireless system to 

implement weekly practice on graph interpretations, 

overcoming her initial feeling that “technology is just 

overwhelming.” She reported that “I have taught for 

18 years and I have been in seventh-grade science for 

about 15 of the 18...and there are things that I have 

always been really sure that...kids have understood 

completely. Now I see what they are thinking. And I 

am like, whoa, I am just amazed.”

Mrs. J used the insights into her students’ 

misunderstandings as revealed by the graphs they 

constructed to guide her instructional decisions.

Mrs. J also found the classroom network 

technology beneficial for providing specific help for 

individual students: “We were doing earth and sun 

relationships...revolution versus rotation...and...I was 

able to...see who was making those mistakes still.... 

So it helped me because I could pinpoint [students’ 

weaknesses] without embarrassing them.” 

Source: Case study submitted to the NETP web-site, 

edtechfuture.org.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 31

How Technology Supports Better Assessment

Adaptive assessment facilitates differentiated learning

As we move to a model where learners have options in terms of how they learn, there is 

a new role for assessment in diagnosing how best to support an individual learner. This 

new role should not be confused with computerized adaptive testing, which has been used 

for years to give examinees different assessment items depending on their responses to 

previous items on the test in order to get more precise estimates of ability using fewer test 

items. 

Adaptive assessment has a different goal. It is designed to identify the next kind of learning 

experience that will most benefit the particular learner. The School of One demonstration 

project (see the sidebar on the School of One in the Learning section) used adaptive 

assessment to differentiate learning by combining information from inventories that students 

completed on how they like to learn with information on students’ actual learning gains after 

different types of experiences (working with a tutor, small-group instruction, learning on line, 

learning through games). This information was used to generate individual “playlists” of 

customized learning activities for every student.

An example of adaptive assessment in higher education is Carnegie Mellon’s Online 

Learning Initiative (OLI) as described in the sidebar on Meshing Learning and Assessment 

in Online and Blended Instruction. 

Universal Design for Learning improves accessibility

Technology allows the development of assessments designed using Universal Design for 

Learning (UDL) principles that make them more accessible, effective, and valid for students 

with greater diversity in terms of disability and English language capability. (See the sidebar 

on Universal Design for Learning in the Learning section.)

Most traditional tests are written in English and can be taken only by sighted learners who 

are fluent in English. Technology allows for presentation and assessment using alternative 

representations of the same concept or skill and can accommodate various student 

disabilities and strengths. Moreover, having the option of presenting information through 

multiple modalities enlarges the proportion of the population that can be assessed fairly. 

Technology also can support the application of UDL principles to assessment design. For 

example, the Principled-Assessment Designs for Inquiry (PADI) system developed by 

Geneva Haertel, Robert Mislevy and associates (Zhang et al., 2010) is being used to help 

states develop science assessment items that tap the science concepts the states want 

to measure and minimize the influence of extraneous factors such as general English 

vocabulary or vision. Technology can support doing this labor-intensive work more efficiently 

and provides a record of all the steps taken to make each assessment item accessible and 

fair for the broadest number of students.
32 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Technology speeds development and testing of 

new assessments

One challenge associated with developing new technologybased assessments is the time and cost of developing, 

testing for validity and reliability, and implementation. Here, 

too, technology can help. When an assessment item is 

developed, it can be field tested automatically by putting 

it into a web-based learning environment with thousands 

of students responding to it in the course of their online 

learning. Data collected in this way can help clarify the 

inferences derived from student performance and can be 

used to improve features of the assessment task prior to its 

large-scale use.

Technology enables broader involvement in 

providing feedback

Some performances are so complex and varied that we 

do not have automated scoring options at present. In such 

cases, technology makes it possible for experts located 

thousands of miles away to provide students with authentic 

feedback. This is especially useful as educators work to 

incorporate authentic problems and access to experts into 

their instruction.

The expectation of having an audience outside the classroom 

is highly motivating for many students. Students can post 

their poems to a social networking site or make videotaped 

public service announcements for posting on video-sharing 

sites and get comments and critiques. Students who are 

developing design skills by writing mobile device applications 

can share their code with others, creating communities of 

application developers who provide feedback on each other’s 

applications. Ultimately, their success can be measured by 

the number of downloads of their finished applications. 

For many academic efforts, the free-for-all of the Internet 

would not provide a meaningful assessment of student 

work, but technology can support connections with online 

communities of individuals who do have the expertise and 

interest to be judges of students’ work. Practicing scientists 

can respond to student projects in online science fairs. 

Readers of online literary magazines can review student 

Meshing Learning and Assessment in Online and 

Blended Instruction

The online learning systems being developed through the 

Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University 

illustrate the advantages of the kind of integration of learning 

and assessment activities that is possible with technologybased instruction. The R&D team at Carnegie Mellon set out 

to both design and study learning systems based on learning 

science principles. One of those key principles is to provide 

learners with goal-directed practice and feedback on their 

performance. In the OLI courses, feedback is woven into a 

wide variety of activities. In a biology course, for example, 

there are: 

 • Interactive simulations of biological processes that students 

can manipulate; the student’s interaction with the simulation 

is interspersed with probes to get at their understanding of 

how it works

 • “Did I Get This?” quizzes following presentation of new 

material so that students can check for themselves whether 

or not they understood, without any risk of hurting their 

course grade

 • Short essay questions embedded throughout the course 

material that call on students to make connections across 

concepts

 • “Muddiest Point” requests that ask students what they 

thought was confusing

Tutored problem solving gives students a chance to work 

through complex problems with the opportunity to get scaffolds 

and hints to help them. The students receive feedback on their 

solution success after doing each problem, and the system 

keeps track of how much assistance students needed for each 

problem as well as whether or not they successfully solved it.

When OLI courses are implemented in a blended instruction 

mode that combines online and classroom learning, the 

instructor can use the data that the learning system collects as 

students work online to identify the topics students most need 

help on so that they can focus upcoming classroom activities 

on those misconceptions and errors (Brown, Lovett, Bajzek, & 

Burnette, 2006). OLI is now doing R&D on a digital dashboard 

to give instructors an easy-to-read summary of the online 

learning data from students taking their course.

The OLI has developed learning systems for engineering 

statics, statistics, causal reasoning, economics, French, logic 

and proofs, biology, chemistry, physics, and calculus. A study 

contrasting the performance of students randomly assigned to 

the OLI statistics course with those in conventional classroom 

instruction found that the former led to better student learning 

outcomes in half the time (Lovett, Meyer, & Thille, 2008).
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 33

writing. Professional animators can judge online filmmaking 

competitions. Especially in contests and competitions, rubrics are 

useful in communicating expectations to participants and external 

judges and in helping promote judgment consistency.

Technology also has the potential to make both the assessment 

process itself and the data resulting from that process more 

transparent and inclusive. Currently, only average scores and 

proficiency levels on state assessments are widely available 

through both public and private systems. Still, parents, 

policymakers, and the public at large can see schools’ and districts’ 

test scores and in some instances, test items. This transparency 

increases public understanding of the current assessment system.

Technology could reduce test-taking for 

accountability only

Many educators, parents, and students are concerned with the 

amount of class time devoted to taking tests for accountability 

purposes. Students are not only completing the tests required every 

year by their states, they also are taking tests of the same content 

throughout the year to predict how well they will perform on the 

end-of-year state assessment (Perie, Marion, & Gong, 2009).

When teaching and learning are mediated through technology, it 

is possible to reduce the number of external assessments needed 

to audit the education system’s quality. Data streams captured by 

an online learning system can provide the information needed to 

make judgments about students’ competencies. These data-based 

judgments about individual students could then be aggregated to 

generate judgments about classes, schools, districts, and states.

West Virginia uses this strategy in its assessment of students’ technology skills. As this 

example, described in the sidebar, illustrates, the need for year-end summative tests can 

be reduced if the student data collected, analyzed, and recorded by formative, embedded 

assessments are valid, reliable, and of a manageable and actionable level of detail. 

Prospects for Electronic Learning Records

Technology provides new options for documenting student accomplishments. At New Tech 

High School in Napa, California, for example, students are continuously assessed on a set 

of core competencies as well as on the specific content in their courses. Students receive 

separate ratings for critical thinking, written and oral communication, technology literacy, and 

collaboration in addition to their grades on course content. These ratings are posted on an 

online grade book available to students, their parents, and teachers.

Moving Assessment Data from the Classroom to 

the State 

West Virginia’s techSteps program is an example of 

an assessment system coordinated across levels of 

the education system. TechSteps is organized around 

six technology integration activities per grade level. 

The activities are sequenced to introduce technology 

skills developmentally and in a 21st century context, 

and are largely open-ended and flexible, so they can 

be integrated into county and school curricula.

Each techSteps activity includes a classroom 

assessment rubric. After a student completes a 

techSteps activity, the teacher enters an assessment 

of his or her performance against the rubric into 

the techSteps web site. TechSteps uses the 

teacher-completed rubric form to identify the target 

skills demonstrated by that student and uses this 

information to build the student’s Technology Literacy 

Assessment Profile.

Through techSteps, West Virginia is able to have 

statewide student data on technology proficiencies at 

each grade level without requiring a separate “drop-infrom-the-sky” technology test.

Source: Submitted to the NETP web-site, edtechfuture.org.
34 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Much like electronic medical records in this country, electronic 

learning records could stay with students throughout their lives, 

accumulating evidence of student growth across courses and 

across school years. A logical extension of online grade books 

and other electronic assessments, these electronic learning 

records would include learning experiences and demonstrated 

competencies, including samples of student work.

The way collaboration skills are assessed at New Tech offers an 

example. Students learn through interdisciplinary projects, almost 

all of which they tackle in groups. At the end of each project, each 

student provides an anonymous online rating of the quality of 

collaboration of every other member in the group. The collaboration 

ratings that a student has received across projects and across 

years at New Tech are part of his or her electronic learning portfolio.

Many schools are using electronic portfolios and other digital 

records of students’ work as a way to demonstrate what they have 

learned. Although students’ digital products are often impressive on 

their face, a portfolio of student work should be linked to an analytic 

framework if it is to serve assessment purposes. The portfolio 

reviewer needs to know what competencies the work is intended 

to demonstrate, what the standard or criteria for competence are 

in each area, and what aspects of the work provide evidence of 

meeting those criteria. Definitions of desired outcomes and criteria 

for levels of accomplishment can be expressed in the form of 

rubrics.

An advantage of using rubrics is that they can be communicated 

not only to the people judging students’ work but also to the 

students themselves. When students receive assessment rubrics 

before doing an assignment – and especially when students 

participate in developing the rubrics – they can develop an 

understanding of how quality is judged in the particular field they 

are working in (for example, an essay of literary criticism, the 

design of a scientific experiment, or a data analysis).

As with any other kind of assessment score, ratings derived from 

rubrics should be both valid (demonstrated to measure what they 

are intended to measure) and reliable (consistent no matter who the 

rater is). Before rubrics are used on a larger scale for assessments 

that have consequences for schools and students, their validity and 

reliability must be established. Widely used writing assessments 

offer one example of how this process works.

Using Technology to Make the Link Between 

Assessment Data and Instructional Resources

To encourage teachers to make formative use of 

assessment data, Fairfax County Public Schools 

(FCPS) developed eCART (Electronic Curriculum 

Assessment Resource Tool). This web-based system 

allows teachers to access everything, from lesson plans 

to assessment tools, all in one place.

eCART’s searchable database provides access to 

district-approved resources and curriculum correlated 

to specific standards, benchmarks, and indicators. It 

allows teachers to create assessments using varied 

combinations of FCPS common assessment items.

The eCART assessment items were developed by 

district teachers and designed to provide diagnostic 

information. The assessments are used to reveal 

student misconceptions and skills that need to be 

reinforced.

Using assessment results for their students, 

Fairfax teachers can follow links to a large library 

of instructional resources including supplementary 

materials, lesson plans, work sheets, and web links. 

Students can take eCART assessments online or using 

pencil and paper (in which case teachers have answer 

sheets scanned and entered into the system).

According to Mike Foland, project manager for the 

district’s Instructional Technology Support Services, 

eCART was developed in response to teachers’ 

needs. Foland said, “A need was identified for a single 

one-stop shop to allow teachers access to resources, 

standards, assessments, and the results from those 

assessments, and then the ability based on those 

results to mine resources and use them to support 

instruction in the classroom and beyond.”

Student eCART assessment results are stored in the 

district’s data system so that classroom assessment 

data can be viewed along with benchmark assessment 

data and results from state tests. Having a common 

set of formative assessments enables comparisons of 

student performance across classrooms and schools. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 35

Using Assessment Data to 

Drive Continuous Improvement

Once we have assessments in place that assess the full range of expertise and 

competencies reflected in standards, we could collect student learning data and use the data 

to continually improve learning outcomes and productivity. For example, such data could be 

used to create a system of interconnected feedback for students, educators, parents, school 

leaders, and district administrators.

The goal of creating an interconnected feedback system would be to ensure that key 

decisions about learning are informed by data and that data are aggregated and made 

accessible at all levels of the education system for continuous improvement. The challenge 

associated with this idea is to make relevant data available to the right people, at the right 

time, and in the right form.

Included in this system should be assessment data to support educators’ efforts to improve 

their professional practice. Data from student assessments can enable teachers to become 

more effective by giving them evidence regarding the effectiveness of the things they do.

In addition, teams of educators reflecting on student data together can identify colleagues 

who have the most success teaching particular competencies or types of students, and 

then all team members can learn from the practices used by their most effective colleagues 

(Darling-Hammond, 2010; U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Using student data in this 

way could also improve educators’ collaboration skills and skills in using data to improve 

instruction. At times, it might be useful to have educators use common assessments to 

facilitate this kind of professional learning.

The same student learning data that guide students and educators in their decision-making 

can inform the work of principals and district administrators. Administrators and policymakers 

should be able to mine assessment data over time to examine the effectiveness of their 

programs and interventions.

The need for student data plays out at the district level as well. Districts adopt learning 

interventions they believe will address specific learning needs, but these interventions 

often rely on untested assumptions and intuition. In a data-driven continuous improvement 

process, the district could review data on the intervention’s implementation and student 

learning outcomes after each cycle of use, and then use the data as the basis for refining 

the learning activities or supports for their implementation to provide a better experience for 

the next group of students.

As good as technology-based assessment and data systems might be, educators 

need support in learning how to use them. An important direction for development and 

implementation of technology-based assessment systems is the design of technology-based 

tools that can help educators manage the assessment process, analyze data, and take 

appropriate action.
36 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Removing Technical and Regulatory Barriers 

Two types of challenges to realizing the vision of sharing data 

across systems are technical and regulatory. On the technical front, 

multiple student data systems, the lack of common standards for 

data formats, and system interoperability pose formidable barriers 

to the development of multi-level assessment systems.

For example, student and program data today are collected at 

various levels and in various grain sizes to address different needs 

in the educational system. State data systems generally provide 

macro solutions, institution-level performance management 

systems are micro solutions, and student data generated by 

embedded assessment are nano solutions. Providing meaningful, 

actionable information that is collected across multiple systems will 

require building agreement on the technical format for sharing data.

On the regulatory front, regulations such as the Family Educational 

Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) serve the very important purpose 

of protecting the rights of individuals but also can present barriers to 

data sharing and the improvement of education through research. 

Many of the barriers to research and data sharing posed by 

FERPA in its original form were reduced or eliminated through a 

2008 revision of the act. Still, varying interpretations of FERPA 

requirements and differences in district and state policies have made 

data sharing a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. 

Reducing the technical and regulatory barriers to data aggregation 

and sharing would facilitate efficient use of data that are already 

being collected to make judgments about students’ learning 

progress and the effectiveness of education programs.

FERPA

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act 

(FERPA) is a federal law that protects students’ privacy 

by prohibiting disclosure of education records without 

adult consent. FERPA also allows parents and students 

over age 18 to inspect and review education records 

and request that inaccuracies be corrected.

Schools may share basic “directory” information, such 

as student names and phone numbers, if they give 

parents the opportunity to opt out. However, advance 

written permission is required to release all other 

student-level information, such as student coursework, 

class discussions, recorded comments, and grades, 

if they are linked to any information that would enable 

a member of the school community to identify the 

student. Several exceptions in the law allow individuals 

such as teachers and administrators with a legitimate 

educational interest in the student’s record to access 

personally identifiable student data without prior parent 

consent.

In 2008, FERPA was updated to provide better access 

to education data for research and accountability. 

These changes permit the release of student-level 

data that has been stripped of personally identifying 

information and allow states to share student 

information in consolidated education data systems 

designed to improve student achievement.

Clear guidance on how schools can collect and 

share data without compromising student safety and 

anonymity would empower educators and learners to 

take full advantage of emerging technologies and tools 

without fear of violating FERPA.

Source: http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 37

Reaching our Goal

Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure what 

matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

2.1 Recommendation: Design, develop, and adopt assessments that give students, 

educators, and other stakeholders timely and actionable feedback about student learning to 

improve achievement and instructional practices.

Assessments can be used formatively to improve students’ learning in addition to measuring 

what they have learned. The Department of Education should urge states and districts to 

use technology-based assessments in this way and promote partnerships between states 

and private and public sector organizations to design, develop, validate, and scale up such 

assessment resources. States and districts should partner in the assessment design and 

validation process and adopt valid and reliable technology-supported assessment tools 

as they become available. Districts, schools, and colleges of education should provide 

educators with professional learning opportunities that teach them to use assessments 

formatively to improve instructional practices.

2.2 Recommendation: Build the capacity of educators and educational institutions to 

use technology to improve assessment materials and processes for both formative and 

summative uses.

States and districts should seek objective advice about the quality of available assessment 

instruments, mechanisms for assessment delivery and scoring, and the timely use of 

assessment information in monitoring outcomes and continuously improving the processes 

of teaching and learning. Building the capacity to use technology to measure what matters 

will not be accomplished overnight, and to accelerate progress the Department of Education 

should connect assessment and technology experts with education policymakers and 

practitioners to support the transition. This should include creating forums and resources 

that enable experts to advise states and districts about using technology to substantially 

improve the quality of their assessment materials and processes on an ongoing basis.

2.3 Recommendation: Conduct research and development that explore how gaming 

technology, simulations, collaboration environments, and virtual worlds can be used 

in assessments to engage and motivate learners and to assess complex skills and 

performances embedded in standards.

Interactive technologies can support measuring complex performances that cannot be 

assessed with conventional testing formats. Such technologies, especially games, also 

have the advantage of being highly engaging because they provide immediate performance 

feedback so that players always know how they are doing. The Department of Education 

should provide a clearinghouse of information for states, districts, and schools about current 

research and evaluation on new forms of technology-based learning and assessment. 
38 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Assessment and interactive technology experts should collaborate to explore assessment 

systems embedded in games and other interactive technologies. States and districts should 

consider adopting these systems as they become validated and available.

2.4 Recommendation: Revise practices, policies, and regulations to ensure privacy and 

information protection while enabling a model of assessment that includes ongoing student 

learning data gathering and sharing for continuous improvement.

Every parent of a student under 18 and every student over 18 should have the right to 

access the student’s assessment data in the form of an electronic learning record that 

follows the student throughout his or her educational career. At the same time, appropriate 

safeguards, including stripping records of identifying information and aggregating data 

across students, classrooms, and schools, can make it possible to supply education data 

derived from student records to other legitimate users without compromising student privacy. 

The Department of Education should encourage K-12 and higher education institutions 

and districts and states to partner with each other to invest in pilot projects that explore 

new policies and strategies for achieving this. At the national level, the Department should 

support the development and dissemination of “best practices” that ensure privacy protection 

while providing access to data that can be used in decision-making, evaluation, and research 

at the district, state, and national levels.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 39

Teaching: 

Improving Learning Through Connected Teaching

Goal: Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that 

connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that can 

empower and inspire them to provide more effective teaching for all learners. 

Teaching today is practiced mostly in isolation. Many educators work alone, with little 

interaction with professional colleagues or experts in the outside world. Professional 

development typically is provided in short, fragmented, and episodic workshops that offer 

little opportunity to integrate learning into practice. A classroom educator’s primary job is 

understood to be covering the assigned content and ensuring that students test well. Many 

educators do not have the information, the time, or the incentives to continuously improve 

their professional practice from year to year.

In contrast, effective teaching in the 21st century requires innovation, problem solving, 

creativity, continuous improvement, research, diagnostic use of data, and flexible and 

personalized approaches to meeting students’ diverse needs and strengths. As a result, 

the most effective educators are professionals with complex knowledge, expertise, and 

competencies, not merely deliverers of content and managers of well-behaved classrooms.

Unfortunately, our education system often fails to give educators the tools to do their job 

well. We hold educators responsible for student achievement, but we do not support them 

with the latest technology the way we do professionals in other fields. The technology of 

everyday life has moved well beyond what educators regularly use to support student learning

Not surprisingly, half of freshly minted teachers leave the profession within the first five 

years (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003), and policymakers and education leaders point to a lack 

of effective teaching and the need for greater accountability among teachers as the key to 

fixing education in America.

Although the expectation of effective teaching and accountability for professional 

educators is a critical component of transforming our education system, equally important 

is recognizing that we need to strengthen and elevate the teaching profession. This is 

necessary if we are to attract and retain the most effective educators and achieve the 

learning outcomes we seek. Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and 

assessment, technology can help us build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a 

model of connected teaching.
40 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Principles of Connected Teaching

In a connected teaching model, connection replaces isolation. Classroom educators are fully 

instrumented, with 24/7 access to data about student learning and analytic tools that help 

them act on the insights the data provide. Educators are connected to their students and to 

professional content, resources, and systems that empower them to create, manage, and 

assess engaging and relevant learning experiences for students both in and outside school. 

They also are connected to resources and expertise that improve their own instructional 

practices and that guide them in becoming facilitators and collaborators in their students’

increasingly self-directed learning.

In connected teaching, teaching is a team activity. Individual educators build online learning 

communities consisting of their students and their students’ peers; fellow educators in their 

schools, libraries, and afterschool programs; professional experts in various disciplines 

around the world; members of community organizations that serve students in the hours they 

are not in school; and parents who desire greater participation in their children’s education.

Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that 

is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses 

and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by 

online learning. For their part, the colleges of education and other institutions that prepare 

teachers play an ongoing role in the professional growth of their graduates by partnering 

with schools and organizations that provide engaging and relevant learning experiences 

throughout the entire course of their careers.

Connected teaching also enables our education system to provide access to effective 

teaching and learning resources where they are not otherwise available and provide more 

options for all learners at all levels. This is accomplished by augmenting the expertise and 

competencies of specialized and exceptional educators with online learning systems and 

through on-demand courses and other self-directed learning opportunities.

The technology that enables connected teaching is available now, but not all the 

conditions necessary to leverage it are. Many of our existing educators do not have the 

same understanding of and ease with using technology that is part of the daily lives of 

professionals in other sectors and with this generation of students. The same can be said of 

many of the education leaders and policymakers in schools, districts, and states, and of the 

higher education institutions that prepare new educators for the field.

This gap in technology understanding influences program and curriculum development, 

funding and purchase decisions about educational and information technology in schools, 

and pre-service and in-service professional learning. Too often, this gap prevents technology 

from being used in ways that would improve instructional practices and learning outcomes.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 41

Still, we must introduce connected teaching into our education system rapidly, and for that 

we must rely on the organizations that support educators in their profession – schools 

and districts, colleges of education, professional learning providers, and professional 

organizations. We should also call on education leaders and policymakers to remove 

barriers to connected teaching and provide incentives and recognition for educators who 

demonstrate effective teaching in a connected model.

21st Century Resources and Tools 

for Professional Educators

A cornerstone of connected teaching is the instrumented classroom, which is described 

in the Assessment section of this plan. A highly instrumented classroom is a place where 

technology-based systems provide educators with real-time insight into how every student 

is thinking that, when combined with analytic tools, helps educators make better decisions 

about how to adapt instruction to students’ needs. Also included in the Assessment section 

are examples of the kinds of tools 21st century educators should have at their fingertips.

In addition, as learning environments become more complex, educators need support in 

managing the multiple dimensions of curricular instruction. Commercially available and open 

source learning management systems are already used widely in university settings, and 

their use is expanding in K-12 settings. Such tools allow educators to coordinate course 

materials, syllabi, assignments, discussions, and more in a central location for students. 

For example, teachers at George J. Ryan Junior High School in Queens, New York, 

saw improved literacy outcomes in their first year of using an online writing workshop 

environment. The environment creates virtual classrooms in which educators and students 

can interact in new ways with course content and with one another. It features a room where 

students can post writing samples, hold discussions, and find animated content objects 

linked to quiz data, feedback, and grading. Face-to-face training provided to educators 

ensured that they could use the environment effectively.

Other online environments also allow broader participation in a student’s learning. School 

administrators can join virtual classrooms for a window on the progress of a given class. 

Parents or members of other partner institutions can log in for a virtual tour through a class 

project or contribute materials to the environment.
42 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Connecting with students to personalize and motivate learning

Connected teaching offers a vast array of opportunities to personalize learning. Many 

simulations and models for use in science, history, and other subject areas are now available 

online, including immersive virtual and augmented reality environments that encourage 

students to explore and make meaning in complex simulated situations (Dede, 2009). To 

deeply engage their students, educators need to know about their students’ goals and 

interests and have knowledge of learning resources and systems that can help students plan 

sets of learning experiences that are personally meaningful. For a more extensive discussion 

of personalized learning, see the Learning section of this plan.

Although using technology to personalize learning is a boost to effective teaching, teaching 

is fundamentally a social and emotional enterprise. The most effective educators connect 

to young people’s developing social and emotional core (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Villegas & 

Lucas, 2002) by offering opportunities for creativity and self-expression. Technology provides 

an assist here as well.

Digital authoring tools for creating multimedia projects and online communities for sharing 

them with the world offer students outlets for social and emotion connections with educators, 

peers, communities, and the world at large. Educators can encourage students to do this 

within the context of learning activities, gaining further insights into what motivates and 

engages students – information they can use to encourage students to stay in school.

Connecting to content, expertise, and activities through online communities

Many of the technology-based learning resources available today prompt learners to 

engage with advanced content and authentic activities, which are facilitated when educators 

orchestrate access to content, experts, and activities of many kinds through online 

learning communities.

Online learning communities break through educators’ traditional isolation, enabling them to 

collaborate with their peers and leverage world-class experts to improve student learning. 

Online learning communities also permit the coordination of teams of educators within a 

school, between a school and homes, and among schools, museums, community centers, and 

other settings that can support a student’s learning. Educators are no longer limited by where 

they teach or where they lead, nor are they required to deliver teaching as solo practitioners.

For example, through an online learning community, an educator can bring guest speakers 

located anywhere in the world into student learning. The class can watch the speaker and 

interact live while the speaker delivers a lecture, demonstrates a scientific experiment or a 

musical technique, or leads a guided virtual tour of a museum exhibit. A recording of the event 

can be archived for later viewing or uploaded to a website that hosts free educational content. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 43

For an example of an online learning community built around deep content expertise, see 

the sidebar Connected Teaching in K-12 Mathematics.

Connected Teaching in K-12 Mathematics

Math Forum (http://mathforum.org) is an online community that supports a connected teaching 

approach to improving K-12 mathematics education. Math Forum began at Swarthmore College 

in 1992, and Drexel University School of Education took over the project in 1996 and continues 

to manage it today. Steve Weimer, director of the project, reports that the site supports between 

2 and 3 million visits (extended sessions with participants) per month.

The Math Forum website features portals and interactive content for diverse members of the 

education community. For educators, it provides valuable instructional resources, including “Math 

Tools,” a searchable community library of interactive lessons, activities, and support materials. 

Educators can also consult a library of articles on current issues in mathematics education 

and discuss challenges in online forums (Teacher2Teacher). Educators pose questions, which 

are answered by program associates, who then post the thread for public comment. Some 

conversations continue this way for years, as is the case with a still-active thread begun in 1999 

when an educator requested suggestions for interesting ways to use Math Forum as a virtual 

community (Herrick, 2009).

The activity level on the Teacher2Teacher portion of the Math Forum site speaks to its strength. 

Between 200 and 300 trained experts are behind the collective identity of Dr. Math, with about 

30 very active in a given week. Parents can find information about math summer camps and get 

help explaining concepts, and students can send letters to Dr. Math. The responses from Dr. 

Math experts have been collected and published as books.

Problem of the Week, a particularly popular feature on the site, is a subscription-based service. 

Students around the world submit answers online to the Problem of the Week, annotating their 

answers with step-by-step explanations. Expert mentors then reply to the submissions, guiding 

students if necessary to find the right answer. By guiding students to think further about a 

problem rather than supplying the correct answer, Problem of the Week helps student develop 

problem-solving skills and promotes inquiry-based learning

Math Forum also has been used to support pre-service teacher education. In 2004, for example, 

pre-service teachers in two education programs in Oregon used Math Forum’s Problem of the 

Week to practice responding productively to assignments submitted by middle school students. 

As pre-service teachers practiced giving constructive feedback to students, mentors provided 

guidance and support to improve the feedback. Through this hands-on experience, the preservice teachers learned what kinds of feedback most effectively guided students to the 

correct answers.

Growth of such online learning communities that foster deep expertise has been limited 

because they exist outside the formal structure of funding and certifying educator learning. So 

even though participating in Math Forum may be better for educators than most of the other 

professional learning experiences they are offered, time spent using online resources like Math 

Forum does not relieve them of their obligations to attend other programs to meet district and 

state requirements. 

Moreover, online communities like Math Forum must compete for resources with institutions such 

as schools of education that have much more stable sources of funding because it is outside 

the formal institutional structure of educator preparation. The principle that learning outcomes 

are more important than where and when the learning takes place should be applied to educator 

learning just as it should to student learning.
44 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Preparing New Educators and 

Ongoing Professional Learning

Technology is a powerful enabler of 21st century learning, but educators still must teach. 

They must support their students’ engagement with technology resources for learning, 

highlighting the important subject matter content, pressing students for explanations and 

higher-order thinking, tracking their students’ progress, and encouraging their students 

to take more responsibility for learning. This requires deep transformations of teaching 

practices. These transformations must begin in the places where our education system is 

preparing new professionals: colleges of education and other teacher preparation institutions 

and organizations.

Young teachers are similar to their students in that they have grown up in a world where 

laptop computers, cell phones, and handheld gaming devices are commonplace, and homes 

are filled with computers, TVs, digital video recorders, and game consoles. They are as 

comfortable interacting with digital devices and accessing the Internet as their students are. 

Still, this does not mean they understand how to use the technology of their daily lives to 

improve their teaching practices. Helping them develop this understanding is the job of preservice teacher preparation programs.

Today, however, there is tremendous variation in how new teachers are prepared and what 

they are being prepared to do with technology (Pellegrino, Goldman, Bertenthal, & Lawless, 

2007). Although some pre-service programs are using technology in innovative ways 

(Gomez, Sherin, Griesdorn, & Finn, 2008), widespread agreement exists that teachers are 

by and large not well prepared to use technology in their practice (Kay, 2006).

The best way to prepare teachers for connected teaching is to have them experience 

it. All institutions involved in preparing educators should provide technology-supported 

learning experiences that promote and enable the use of technology to improve learning, 

assessment, and instructional practices. This will require teacher educators to draw from 

advances in learning science and technology to change what and how they teach, keeping in 

mind that everything we now know about how people learn applies to new teachers as well.

The same imperatives for teacher preparation apply to ongoing professional learning. 

Professional learning should support and develop educators’ identities as fluent users of 

advanced technology, creative and collaborative problem solvers, and adaptive, socially 

aware experts throughout their careers.

Research shows that U.S. teachers have less time in their work week for professional 

learning than do their counterparts in countries where students have the best performance 

on international examinations (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Increasing the time for our 

educators to engage in professional learning will require processes that cross time and 

space boundaries. 

Educators can be engaged in professional learning not only when attending formal 

workshops or other activities outside the classroom, but also in the very act of teaching, 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 45

which can offer a rich source of information to inform 

professional growth (Ancess, 2000; Borko, Mayfield, Marion, 

Flexer, & Cumbo, 1997; Kubitskey, 2006). When interwoven 

with daily activities, professional learning allows learning 

about techniques and materials for teaching that can be 

directly applied with students. In this process, providing 

continuous supports for examining, revising, and reflecting 

on instruction is essential to improving educator practices 

that affect student outcomes. Technology can help to provide 

continuous supports through models of educator learning that 

blend face-to-face and online experiences.

Connecting with exemplary practices

Technology can support professional learning by making 

the practices of exemplary educators accessible to other 

educators (Fishman 2007; Richardson & Kile, 1999). With 

today’s video-sharing tools, for example, outstanding 

demonstrations of teaching practice can be captured and 

annotated. Educators can view and analyze their practice and 

then innovate and customize new ways to refine their craft in 

light of new insights. Resources such as Teachers.tv can be 

used to make the act of teaching visible, helping the entire 

community better understand effective teaching practices. 

Connecting with other professionals

More than two decades of teacher research demonstrate the 

importance of collaboration among teachers. When teachers 

make their work public and examine each others’ work, 

the quality of their practice and student outcomes improve 

(Lieberman & Pointer Mace, 2010). Social networking 

technology provides a platform for making teachers’ 

work public, with opportunities for both local and global 

communities of practice. 

Communities of practice provide a strong mechanism for 

promoting ongoing growth from novice pre-service educators 

through expert master educators and offer opportunities for 

the engagement of a broad range of participants from outside 

formal education (Wenger, 2009). Successful learning circles 

also can bring together educators and students to deepen 

learning (Riel, 1992). PBS TeacherLine is an example of an 

online system that engages teachers in collaboration and 

builds professional community.

Teachers.tv

Teachers.tv is a collection of multimedia resources 

developed and disseminated in the United Kingdom with 

the mission of spreading best practices in education 

as broadly as possible among the entire community 

involved in student learning – not only those who work 

in schools, but also parents and district leaders.

The station’s programming is available through a 

variety of media platforms. It is broadcast via Internet 

all day every day and via traditional television for a few 

hours per day on several stations. Once a program 

has been broadcast, the content is archived on the 

site in a searchable library of downloadable videos. 

Links to the videos can be found on a number of other 

frequently used websites, including that of the Guardian 

newspaper and both YouTube and iTunes.

Programs ranging in length from 15 minutes to 1 hour 

target different members of the educational community. 

Of the programs for teachers, about half present 

techniques for teaching subject-specific concepts 

and half address general topics such as career 

development and classroom management. Some 

programs are special features, whereas others are 

regularly scheduled. For example, broadcast content 

in the first week of December 2009 included programs 

on teaching math, English, and science concepts at the 

primary or secondary level, a program on effective uses 

of assessment, a program for district leaders on special 

needs students, and general-audience programs on 

Asperger’s Disorder, healthy eating, and youth and crime.

Teachers.tv seeks to show, not just tell, how and why 

best practices work. The regularly scheduled programs 

Classroom Observation and Great Lesson Ideas allow 

K-12 teachers to see best practice modeled by first-rate 

teachers in the context of actual classroom instruction. 

Similarly, a program on special needs students takes 

viewers inside schools that have been serving that 

population exceptionally well.

Teachers.tv identifies some of the schools and teachers 

to feature on the site; in addition, schools and teachers 

can submit suggestions for vetting by the station. 

Teachers can also become “associates” of the station, 

serving as liaisons between schools and parents and 

the station. The associates offer suggestions for topics 

and give first feedback on content.

On the Teachers.tv web site, users can log in to a 

community portal where they can find and store the 

content most relevant for them and discuss their 

practices with other educators. 

Source: Submitted to the NETP web-site, edtechfuture.org.
46 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

PBS TeacherLine, long a provider of online courses for teachers, is now focusing on making 

online courses more interactive to help educators build their own communities of practice. 

Online courses of 15 or 30 hours are designed as interactive environments in which an 

expert facilitator communicates best-practice approaches and helps educators share ideas. 

Educators in a course share resources by creating digital portfolios and participating in 

facilitated discussions.

Career-long personal learning networks

A transformative idea in the preparation and professional learning of educators and 

education leaders is to leverage technology to create career-long personal learning networks 

within and across schools, pre-service preparation and in-service educational institutions, 

and professional organizations. The goal of these career-long personal learning networks 

would be to make professional learning timely and relevant as well as an ongoing activity 

that continually improves practices. These networks and other resources would enable 

educators to take online courses, tap into experts and best practices for just-in-time learning 

and problem solving, and provide platforms and tools for educators to design and develop 

resources and share them with their colleagues.

As we move into an era when colleges of education will be held accountable for the 

effectiveness of their graduates, colleges of education can use personal learning networks to 

provide ongoing support once their graduates enter the workforce.

An example of this is TFA.net, a website provided by Teach for America for all its new 

educators. TFA.net offers valuable resources for educators and opportunities for TFA 

teachers to connect and share ideas. This resource exchange also allows TFA teachers and 

alumni to share, rate, and download successful lesson and unit plans, data tracking tools, 

and classroom management strategies.

One barrier to using technology in these ways for ongoing professional learning for 

educators is the use of time-based measures of attainment rather than competencybased measures. Strictly time-based measures do not allow professional educators to 

take advantage of the many new opportunities that online learning offers by being able to 

transcend time and space.

The Role of Connected Teaching 

in Reaching All Learners

The model of 21st century learning described in this plan depends on effective teaching to 

provide all learners with equitable access to inspiring and engaging learning experiences. 

Research shows that consistent access to effective teaching dramatically increases learning, 

closes achievement gaps, and increases chances for success later in life (Sanders & Rivers, 

1996; Wright, Horn, & Sanders, 1997).
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 47

Unfortunately, we do not have enough effective educators in many places, including those 

where we need them most. The shortage of effective educators is especially evident in 

the STEM areas that are vital to our economic prosperity. A prime example is high school 

physics: More than 1 million high school students take a physics course each year. Of the 

educators hired to instruct them, only a third hold a degree in physics or physics education. 

Many of the other educators who are asked to teach physics (usually in addition to other 

subjects) have not been trained in how to teach physics concepts and might have limited 

understanding of those concepts themselves (Hodapp, Hehn, & Hein, 2009).

Moreover, the least effective educators are most likely to be 

teaching in schools serving students from homes that are 

economically and educationally disadvantaged. Limited access to 

excellent teaching is a source of inequity in our education system 

(Darling-Hammond, 2010). A recent study found that students in 

urban and suburban high schools can choose from between three 

and four times as many advanced mathematics courses (which 

typically earn “extra credit” in the college admission process) than 

students in rural schools (Graham, 2009).

Technology can make it possible to extend the reach of specialized 

and exceptional educators through online learning activities made 

available to students in every zip code. When a school is unable to 

attract educators qualified to teach courses that its students need 

or want, students should be given the option of taking the course 

online. Many schools have found that K-12 students taking online 

courses benefit from having an educator who keeps track of their 

progress and provides encouragement, but that staff member 

does not need the depth of content expertise of a person solely 

responsible for teaching a class.

Support for a learning society

Not surprisingly, connected teaching quickly moves beyond the 

walls of the school, immersing all learners in a learning society. The 

concept of a learning society is not a vision for the future: Examples 

already exist.

Starting in 2000, a research team in Taiwan developed a network of 

websites called EduCity that breaks downs the walls of the school 

to involve broader communities in supporting learning (Chan et al., 

2001). As the lead innovator, Tak Wai Chan, describes it, EduCity 

comprises a hierarchy of communities that have reached more than 

1.5 million students and over 1,700 schools. 

Support for a Learning Society

Taiwan’s online EduCity represents an entire 

community, consisting of school websites called 

EduTowns. An EduTown represents a school and 

consists of the websites of that school’s classes, 

called EduVillages. An EduVillage represents a 

class and is composed of the personal websites 

of the students and the educator in that class, 

called EduCitizens. EduCity provides students 

with online resources and activities. For example, 

using Web 2.0 technologies, EduTowns (schools) 

can adopt online application programs called 

service items, which are provided by the EduCity. 

An EduTown can also develop its own service 

items and share them with other EduTowns. The 

system also supports teacher collaboration for 

developing learning materials and lesson plans as 

open content. Furthermore, every EduCitizen can 

open an online course in EduCity (Chan, 2009, 

personal communication).

In one striking story, a 13-year old student 

named Ah-Chung won the online teacher of the 

year contest in EduCity in 2000 (Young, Chan, 

& Lin, 2002) by teaching Visual Basic to other 

students. The other students did not know that 

their online educator was a boy younger than all 

of them. Since that time, EduCity has developed 

a facility for EduClasses – a system in which any 

EduCitizen can offer a course on any topic to 

other students and educators. EduClasses now 

has more than 1,000 courses in operation and 

use is spreading from K-12 education to corporate 

training.

As successful as EduCity is, many participants’ 

experience with the site is more superficial than 

the original researchers would like. Ultimately, 

educators should learn how to structure 

networked learning societies so that they 

continuously improve and deepen the experiences 

they provide to participants.
48 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Growing demand for skilled online instruction

As online learning becomes an increasingly important part of our education system at all 

levels, this creates both the need and opportunity for educators who are skilled in online 

instruction and the demand for greater knowledge of the most effective practices. As 

we implement online learning, we should make sure that students’ learning experiences 

address the full range of expertise and competencies as reflected in standards and use 

meaningful assessments of the target competencies. To facilitate this, teacher accreditation 

organizations, colleges of education, and organizations representing online learning 

providers should work together to develop a set of voluntary national standards for online 

courses and for online teaching. Leadership organizations and accrediting bodies should 

collaborate to develop national standards for online teacher certification that would 

encourage acceptance of online certification across state lines.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 49

Reaching Our Goal

Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that 

connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that enable 

and inspire more effective teaching for all learners.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

3.1 Recommendation: Design, develop, and adopt technology-based content, resources, 

and online learning communities that create opportunities for educators to collaborate for 

more effective teaching, inspire and attract new people into the profession, and encourage 

our best educators to continue teaching. 

Today’s technology enables educators to tap into resources and orchestrate expertise 

across a school district or university, a state, the nation, and even around the world. 

Educators can discuss solutions to problems and exchange information about best practices 

in minutes, not weeks or months. Educators should have access to technology-based 

resources that inspire them to provide more engaging and effective learning opportunities 

and to do so more efficiently. The Department of Education should provide a clearinghouse 

of information for states, districts, and schools about available resources. States, districts, 

universities and other R&D organizations, and the commercial sector should form 

partnerships to develop commercial and open resources with new capabilities now possible 

with technology.

3.2 Recommendation: Provide pre-service and in-service educators with preparation and 

professional learning experiences powered by technology that close the gap between 

students’ and educators’ fluencies with technology and promote and enable technology use 

in ways that improve learning, assessment, and instructional practices.

All institutions involved in the preparation and ongoing learning of educators should 

combine advances in learning sciences and technology to change what and how they 

teach. To facilitate adoption of known best approaches across institutions, states, colleges 

of education, alternative educator and teacher programs, and international organizations 

should work together to synthesize core principles from best practices for the use of 

technology in preparing educators, including the rethinking of certification standards. 

States and national accrediting bodies should require educator preparation programs 

to leverage technology in preparing teachers, education leaders, and administrators, 

including incorporation of online courses and resources, embedded and technologyenabled assessments, and data analysis tools and visualizations supporting differentiated 

instruction. These experiences should be included in all teaching methods courses and 

field experiences rather than be treated as a discrete set of skills distinct from pedagogical 

application.

3.3 Recommendation: Transform the preparation and professional learning of educators and 

education leaders by leveraging technology to create career-long personal learning networks 

within and across schools, pre-service preparation and in-service educational institutions, 

and professional organizations.
50 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

States, districts, universities and other R&D organizations should work together and with 

the commercial sector to develop and provide educators with career-long personal learning 

networks, tools, and resources that make professional learning timely and relevant as well as 

an ongoing activity that continually improves practices. These networks and other resources 

should enable educators to take online courses, tap into experts and best practices for justin-time learning and problem solving, and provide platforms and tools for educators to design 

and develop resources and share them with their colleagues. The Department should also 

encourage colleges of education to use these networks to connect pre-service preparation 

with in-service professional learning so that as we move into an era in which colleges of 

education are held accountable for the effectiveness of their graduates, they can participate 

in providing ongoing support once their graduates enter the workforce.

3.4 Recommendation: Use technology to provide access to the most effective teaching and 

learning resources, especially where they are not otherwise available, and to provide more 

options for all learners at all levels.

Many education institutions, particularly those serving the most vulnerable students in the 

population and those in rural areas, lack educators with competencies in reaching students 

with special needs and educators with content knowledge and expertise in specialized areas, 

including STEM. Similarly, students often lack options for courses in particular disciplines. 

Online learning options enable leveraging the best teaching. National organizations should 

support use of online approaches to leverage the best teaching through collaborative efforts 

to tag and review online learning offerings. High-quality online options are particularly 

important in cases where qualified teachers are not available. Districts, state institutions, 

and agencies should have detailed knowledge of where they lack educators with appropriate 

content knowledge and pedagogical skill and thus where establishing online learning options 

is a high priority. 

3.5 Recommendation: Develop a teaching force skilled in online instruction.

Online learning is becoming an increasingly important part of our education system at 

all levels, from secondary and postsecondary education to other types of adult learning, 

including corporate training. This creates both the need and opportunity for educators 

who are skilled in online instruction and the demand for increased knowledge of the most 

effective practices. States, teacher accreditation organizations, colleges of education, and 

organizations representing online learning providers should work together to develop a set 

of voluntary national standards for online courses and for online teaching. Accrediting bodies 

and leadership organizations should collaborate to develop national standards for online 

teacher certification and states should work on reciprocity agreements for certifying online 

teachers.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 51

Infrastructure: 

People, Processes, and Technologies for Learning

Goal: All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for 

learning when and where they need it.

Although we have adopted technology in many aspects of education today, a comprehensive 

infrastructure for learning is necessary to move us beyond the traditional model of educators 

and students in classrooms to a learning model that brings together teaching teams and 

students in classrooms, labs, libraries, museums, workplaces, and homes – anywhere in 

the world where people have access devices and an adequate Internet connection. An 

infrastructure for learning is necessary to support a learning society in which learning is lifelong and life-wide.

Our infrastructure for learning is modeled on the cyberinfrastructure envisioned and 

deployed by the National Science Foundation to encourage collaboration among scientists 

and researchers, which was subsequently broadened to apply to learning in all domains 

(National Science Foundation, 2008). The term “cyber” tells us that the time and distance 

barriers of the physical world are reduced by virtual connections between people and 

between people and technology resources and tools. “Infrastructure” reminds us that even in 

virtual worlds, physical and organizational structures are needed to run a system.

The essential underlying principle is that the infrastructure includes people, processes, 

learning resources, and policies and sustainable models for continuous improvement 

in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and 

administrative tools.

Building an infrastructure for learning is a far-reaching project that will require the 

participation and collaboration of individuals from all disciplines and types of institutions 

across the entire spectrum of education. It also will require education, business, and 

government as partners. And it will take leadership and a commitment to a shared 

understanding of its importance to transforming U.S. education.
52 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Revolutionary Opportunity for Change

Over the past 40 years, we have seen unprecedented advances in computing and 

communications that have led to powerful technology resources and tools for learning. 

Today, low-cost Internet access devices, easy-to-use digital authoring tools, and the web 

facilitate access to information and multimedia learning content, communication, and 

collaboration. They also provide the ability to participate in online learning communities that 

cross disciplines, organizations, international boundaries, and cultures.

Many of these technology resources and tools already are being used within our 

public education system. We are now, however, at an inflection point for a much bolder 

transformation of education powered by technology. This revolutionary opportunity for 

change is driven by the continuing push of emerging technology and the pull of the 

critical national need for new strategies to turn around a K-12 system that is failing to 

adequately prepare young Americans for postsecondary education and the workforce and a 

postsecondary system that is failing to prepare its graduates for success in life and work in a 

changing world.

Our model of an infrastructure for learning is always on, available to students, educators, and 

administrators regardless of their location, the time of day, and the type of access devices. 

It supports not just access to information, but also access to people and participation in 

online learning communities. It offers a platform on which developers can build and tailor 

applications.

An infrastructure for learning unleashes new ways of capturing and sharing knowledge based 

on multimedia that integrate text, still and moving images, audio, and applications that run on 

a variety of devices. It enables seamless integration of in and out of school learning. It frees 

learning from a rigid information transfer model (from book or educator to students) and enables 

a much more motivating intertwine of learning about, learning to do, and learning to be.

On a more operational level, an infrastructure for learning brings together and enables 

access to data from multiple sources while ensuring appropriate levels of security and 

privacy. While it integrates computer hardware, data and networks, information resources, 

interoperable software, middleware services and tools, and devices, it also connects 

and supports interdisciplinary teams of professionals responsible for its development, 

maintenance, and management and its use in transformative approaches to teaching 

and learning.

Unpacking the Challenge

Because of the enormity of the challenge of building an infrastructure for learning, we should 

approach it step by step, designing and implementing individual elements so we can take 

advantage of their incremental benefits along the way.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 53

Broadband everywhere

A crucial element of an infrastructure for learning is a broadband 

network of adequate performance and reach, including abundant 

wireless coverage in and out of school buildings. Adequate means 

enough bandwidth to support simultaneous use by all students and 

educators anywhere in the building and the surrounding campus 

to routinely use the web, multimedia, and collaboration software. 

The activities of the Federal Communication Commission (www.

fcc.gov/broadband/) and the Department of Commerce NTIA 

Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (www.ntia.doc.gov/

broadbandgrants/) to bolster the nation’s broadband provisioning 

are essential to learning life-long and life-wide.

Access devices for every student and educator 

Because an infrastructure for learning should support learning in 

and outside the classroom, students and educators need Internet 

access devices for around-the-clock use from any location. Internet 

access devices are continually evolving and today include desktop 

computers, laptops, netbooks, public-access kiosks, mobile 

phones, portable digital players, and wireless readers.

Many districts say they face major challenges in providing access 

devices for every student and educator. Even with the rise of 

relatively low cost mobile devices and netbooks, most devices 

cost at least several hundred dollars and need to be replaced 

every few years. In 2002, however, Maine became the first state in 

the country to give every seventh- and eighth-grade student and 

educator a laptop for use both at school and at home. Research 

on the effectiveness of the program shows that student learning 

has improved (Berry & Wintle, 2009; Silvernail & Bluffington, 2009; 

Silvernail & Gritter, 2007), and the program is now being expanded 

to high schools. 

Many K-12 students already carry mobile devices for personal 

use with greater computing power than the supercomputers of 

a generation ago. K-12 educators routinely own access devices 

for use in their daily lives. Students at our nation’s colleges and 

universities increasingly are arriving on campus with powerful 

laptops and mobile devices of their own. The presence of so many 

access devices and the precedent that has been established at 

colleges and universities is prompting some K-12 school districts to 

explore having their students and educators use their own personal 

access devices as an alternative to purchasing them.

Building a Statewide Infrastructure for Learning

In 2001, Maine kicked off the Maine Learning 

Technology Initiative (MLTI), the first statewide 

effort to provide students and educators across 

multiple grades with 24/7 access to personal 

learning devices. A joint task force convened by 

the governor and the state legislature assessed 

Maine’s education needs and the infrastructure 

that would be required for implementation of oneto-one computing, including hardware, software, 

internal and external school networks and servers, 

technical support, and educator professional 

development.

To be able to provide all aspects of the 

infrastructure to support worthwhile uses of 

technology for learning while staying within 

Maine’s budget parameters, the decision was 

made to focus the first phase of MLTI on middle 

school students. 

After pilot-testing and training at “exploration sites” 

in each of the state’s nine regions, Maine’s one-toone program was extended to seventh-graders in 

all state middle schools in 2002 and to all eighthgraders in 2003. MLTI now equips each of Maine’s 

243 middle schools with wireless Internet access 

and provides each school with enough laptops 

for every seventh- and eighth-grade student 

and educator to use both in and outside school. 

Since MLTI’s inception, more than 37,000 laptops 

provided by the program have been used by over 

100,000 educators and learners throughout the 

state. MLTI also provides intensive professional 

development, implementation assistance, and 

technical support to educators to ensure that the 

technology is fully leveraged to support student 

learning.

Maine believes that its investment in technology 

for its middle school students has paid off: the 

state’s eighth-grade writing proficiency jumped 

12% after statewide one-to-one implementation 

(Silvernail & Gritter, 2007). Laptop use has also 

been linked to gains on statewide mathematics 

tests and improved retention of science course 

material (Berry & Wintle, 2009; Silvernail & 

Bluffington, 2009).

Inspired by this success, Maine has expanded 

its laptop initiative to all students in grades 9–12. 

The state is committed to funding wireless Internet 

access in all Maine secondary schools and has 

negotiated discounts for districts to provide their 

students with laptops.
54 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

In the past, districts were reluctant to allow students to use their 

own devices in school because of concerns about the unfair 

advantage of affluent students who are more likely to have the 

latest devices and the risk of students accessing inappropriate 

Internet content or using their connectivity to cheat on tests. 

However, districts are finding that a combination of acceptable use 

policies and staff training makes student use of personal digital 

devices both feasible and safe.

Middletown Public Schools in New Jersey, for example, brought 

together elementary, middle, and high school educators to 

forge an acceptable-use policy that would allow students to use 

personal cell phones and other computing devices in school. 

Students then created videos to illustrate acceptable and 

unacceptable uses for their peers. At Passage Middle School in 

Newport News, Virginia, a host of student and educator uses of 

cell phones to support learning was unleashed when the principal 

decided to allow the use of cell phones for instructional purposes 

during class. 

Schools can also solve the equity issue – concern that affluent 

students will have devices and others will not – by purchasing 

devices just for the students who need such financial support. This 

is more cost-effective than purchasing devices for every student. 

Districts can think about providing an access device and Internet 

access at home for those students who need them in the same 

way they provide a free or reduced-price hot lunch for students 

who could not otherwise afford it.

Allowing students to bring their own access devices to school has 

been limited, however, by provisions within the E-Rate, a federal 

program that supports connectivity in elementary and secondary 

schools and libraries by providing discounts on Internet access, 

telecommunications services, internal network connections, and 

basic maintenance to support them. Schools’ eligibility for E-Rate 

money is contingent on compliance with several federal laws 

designed to ensure student privacy and safety on the Internet. 

These include the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which 

requires the use of electronic filtering on school networks. In 

some cases this requirement creates barriers to the rich learning 

experiences that in-school Internet access should afford students.

Using Cell Phones to Support Teaching 

and Learning

After letting two students use the calculator 

functions on their cell phones to solve the crisis of 

being two calculators short for a school-wide math 

exam, the principal at Passage Middle School, 

Virginia, decided that he might be on to something. 

Hoping to capitalize on the excitement expressed 

by students allowed to use their cell phones, 

he instituted Phone Fridays in math class and 

challenged students to come up with ways to use 

their phones to enhance learning. Students started 

using the phones’ calendar function to keep track 

of homework schedules and the camera function 

to take pictures of the notes on the classroom’s 

whiteboards. They created blogs and podcasts 

related to their homework and supported their math 

work both with the phone’s calculator and by using 

the stopwatch function to time their speed at doing 

calculations. 

Positive student reactions led the principal to invite 

other interested educators to join in the cell phone 

experiment. Before allowing cell phone usage on a 

broader scale, each educator had a discussion with 

his or her students to set ground rules for usage. All 

the classes came up with similar rules, and a school 

policy was developed: Cell phones could be used in 

class only for working on assignments. Text or video 

could be sent only with the educator’s permission. 

No photographing or video- or audiorecording of 

people was allowed without their permission, no 

posting to websites was allowed without permission, 

and online safety precautions were to be taken 

when publishing from a mobile phone.

Educators began using cell phone applications 

for polling and to set up an online text messaging 

board to discuss homework. One educator used 

the cell phones while teaching, asking students to 

answer questions via text messaging rather than out 

loud. As student answers came in to the educator, 

they were displayed on a screen at the front of the 

class, identified by the student’s cell phone screen 

name. Students also used their phones to look 

up definitions and information. English educators, 

in particular, found the cell phones useful as they 

started using blogs to engage their students in 

writing. Students started using their phones to take 

photographs outside class for posting to their blogs 

and then composed blog entries about the photos. 

One class used Twitter to generate stories in class.

Source: Submitted to the NETP web-site, edtechfuture.org.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 55

E-Rate provisions and CIPA requirements should be clarified and barriers to student-owned 

devices in schools removed. (See the sidebar on Balancing Connectivity and Student Safety 

on the Internet for more information.)

Balancing Connectivity and Student Safety on the Internet 

E-Rate is a federal program that supports connectivity in elementary and secondary schools 

and libraries by providing discounts on Internet access, telecommunications services, internal 

network connections, and basic maintenance. To apply, schools, school districts, and consortia 

complete an annual application process that includes a technology needs assessment and a 

plan for how the connections supported by E-Rate will help the applicant achieve its educational 

mission. A competitive bidding process is conducted to select a provider to supply the desired 

infrastructure. Applicants can receive discounts on these services ranging from 20 to 90% 

depending on their level of poverty and geographic location. Hardware, software, professional 

development, and other inputs required to take advantage of this connectivity must be 

purchased by schools and cannot be paid for with E-Rate money.

Under the direction of the FCC, E-Rate has made up to $2.25 billion available each year since 

its inception in 1998, providing crucial support for the expansion of Internet access in schools. 

Demand for funding now significantly exceeds the E-Rate cap, particularly as schools seek to 

provide classrooms with enough bandwidth to support the use of multimedia and interactive 

applications by many students at the same time (Funds for Learning, 2009). A recent national 

survey of E-Rate applicants found that the majority of schools could not sustain their current 

levels of Internet connectivity to classrooms without E-Rate funds. 

Schools’ eligibility for E-Rate money is contingent on compliance with several federal laws 

designed to ensure student privacy and safety on the Internet. The Children’s Internet 

Protection Act (CIPA) requires any school that funds Internet or internal network access with 

E-Rate money to implement filters that block access to content that may be harmful to minors, 

including obscenity and pornography. CIPA also requires schools receiving E-Rate discounts 

to teach online safety to students and to monitor their online activities. Schools that do not 

implement these protections and policies may lose their E-Rate funding and thus their ability to 

provide online services for their students.

Ensuring student safety on the Internet is a critical concern, but many filters designed to protect 

students also block access to legitimate learning content and tools such as blogs, wikis, and 

social networks that have the potential to support student learning and engagement. CIPA 

prohibits educators from disabling filters on the spot when minors are using computers, even to 

allow students to access erroneously blocked web-sites with legitimate instructional value. On 

the other end of the spectrum, some schools and districts filter students’ online activities with 

proxy servers that meet CIPA requirements but are easy to get around, minimizing their utility 

for managing and monitoring students’ online activity.

CIPA has also posed challenges to the in-class use of students’ own cell phones, laptop 

computers, and other Internet access devices to support learning activities when schools 

cannot afford to purchase devices for each student. Applying CIPA-required network filters 

to a variety of student-owned devices is a technical challenge that may take schools months 

or years to implement. However, districts such as Florida’s Escambia County Schools have 

created technical solutions and accompanying acceptable use policies (AUPs) that comply 

with CIPA regulations, allowing web-based learning on student devices to run on networks 

supported by federal E-Rate funding.

Sources: E-Rate Overview: http://www.universalservice.org/sl/about/overview-program.aspx

FCC Order on Community Access: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-10-33A1.pdf
56 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are an important element of 

an infrastructure for learning. OER come in forms ranging from 

podcasts to digital libraries to textbooks, games, and courses. 

They are freely available to anyone over the web.

Educational organizations started making selected educational 

materials freely available shortly after the appearance of 

the web in the mid-1900s. But MIT’s decision to launch the 

OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative to make the core content from 

all its courses available online in 2000 gave the OER movement 

a credible start (Smith, 2009). Other universities joined the OCW 

Consortium, and today there are more than 200 members, each of 

which has agreed to make at least 10 courses available in open form.

Many of these materials are available not just to individuals 

enrolled in courses, but to anyone who wants to use them. The 

power of OER is demonstrated by the fact that nearly half the 

downloads of MIT’s OpenCourseWare are by individual selfdirected learners, not students taking courses for credit (Maxwell, 

online presentation for the NETP Technical Working Group, 2009).

Equally important to the OER movement was the emergence of 

the Creative Commons, an organization that developed a set of 

easy-to-use licenses whereby individuals or institutions could 

maintain ownership of their creative products while giving others 

selected rights. These rights range from allowing use of a work 

in its existing form for noncommercial purposes to the right to 

repurpose, remix, and redistribute for any purpose. 

Additional advances in our understanding of how to design good 

OER are coming out of the work of the Open Learning Initiative 

(OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University. OLI has been developing 

state-of-the-art, high-quality online learning environments that 

are implemented as part of courses taught not only at Carnegie 

Mellon, but also at other universities and at community colleges. 

The OLI learning systems are submitted to rigorous ongoing 

evaluation and refinement as part of each implementation. (For 

more information on OLI, see the Assessment section of this plan.)

The Department of Education has a role in stimulating the 

development and use of OER in ways that address pressing 

education issues. The federal government has proposed to invest 

$50 million per year for the next 10 years in creating an Online 

Skills Lab to develop exemplary next-generation instructional 

Open Textbooks In California

Looking for cost saving measures during a time of 

severe budgetary pressure, California Governor 

Schwarzenegger announced in May 2009 that free 

open-source digital textbooks for high school math 

and science would be available by fall 2009. In the 

first-ever statewide initiative to bring open textbooks 

into classrooms, textbook developers were invited 

to submit their products for state review. Sixteen 

submissions in the areas of algebra II, biology/life 

science, calculus, chemistry, earth science, physics, 

and trigonometry were scrutinized for coverage 

of the relevant California content standards. Ten 

submissions were approved: Four met all relevant 

content standards and another six met 90% or more. 

The governor estimated that the average high 

school textbook costs $100 and that the state could 

save $400 million by going to open source for all 

math and science textbooks for its 2 million high 

school students. Although the governor’s action 

was stimulated by the need to find innovative ways 

to save costs, it reflected a conviction that digital 

materials are of high quality and have important 

advantages. The governor characterized print 

textbooks as outdated, heavy, and expensive. “This 

[digital textbook initiative] represents an important 

step toward embracing a more interactive learning 

environment that leverages technology to meet the 

changing academic needs of California’s students,” 

said Schwarzenegger.

Because they are available in digital format, the 

approved textbooks can be downloaded and used in 

a variety of ways. Students can view the textbooks 

on a computer, but the contents can also be 

projected on a screen, printed chapter by chapter, 

or bound in their entirety. Several of the approved 

texts are offered by a nonprofit foundation, whose 

website gives educators the option to remix or edit 

textbook components to meet the needs of their 

class (creating their own “Flexbook”). California’s 

textbook reviews and links to the texts themselves 

can be found at http://www.clrn.org/fdti/.

Skeptics point to the fact that not all students 

have computers to view digital text on and that 

the governor’s initiative did not include training for 

educators in how to use the digital books effectively. 

But California is pleased enough with its digital 

textbook initiative that it plans to extend it to other 

subject areas. Other states, including Virginia, 

Florida, and Indiana, are launching digital textbook 

initiatives of their own.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 57

tools and resources for community colleges and workforce development programs. These 

materials will be available for use or adaptation with the least restrictive Creative Commons 

license. This work is expected to give further impetus to calls for open standards, system 

utilities, and competency-based assessments. (For more information on the Online Skills 

Lab, see the Learning section of this plan.)

The OER movement begun in higher education should be more 

fully adopted throughout our K-16 public education system. For 

example, high-quality digital textbooks for standard courses such 

as algebra can be created by experts and funded by consortia 

arrangements and then made freely available as a public good. 

Open textbooks could significantly reduce the cost of education 

in primary and secondary as well as higher education. Textbooks 

constitute a significant portion of the government’s K-12 budget as 

well as the student-borne cost of higher education. 

Next-generation computing 

To help build out an infrastructure for learning, districts and 

schools should begin a transition to the next generation of 

computing system architectures. As a first step, districts should 

consider options for reducing the number of servers they run 

through consolidation using virtualization. Virtualization allows a 

single server to run multiple applications safely and reliably, so 

that districts can reduce the number of servers on their networks 

dramatically. Reducing the number of servers cuts costs and makes 

school networks less complex and easier to manage, which leads 

to greater reliability as measured by uptime and availability.

Beyond server consolidation, some school districts are moving to 

cloud computing, which involves shifting from the procurement and 

maintenance of servers in local datacenters to purchasing software 

as a service (SaaS) and web applications from datacenters running 

in the cloud. 

Cloud computing is a catchy new name, but its principal outcome 

– utility computing – has been sought after for a long time. Utility 

computing is the packaging of computing resources as a metered 

service similar to how public utilities package and sell electricity 

through our nation’s power grid. What makes cloud computing more 

desirable and possible is that we are nearing an inflection point 

driven by technology advances and the need for more powerful and 

collaborative platforms at lower cost and with a lower environmental 

impact than our current datacenter computing model.

North Carolina State University Cloud 

Computing Services

The Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) at North 

Carolina State University has been a pioneer in 

delivering secure on-demand computing services 

for education institutions. VCL was using cloud 

computing before the term came into popular use: 

It has been doing research on virtual computing 

since 2003 and began offering cloud services 

in 2004.

The VCL academic cloud is based on opensource technology and offers infrastructure-as-aservice, platform-as-a-service, and software-asa-service, including support of high-performance 

computing services. The advantages of VCL’s 

cloud computing approach include consolidation 

of computing resources and technical support 

services, delivery of applications that would be 

difficult to install on student computers, and the 

extension of computing services to education 

institutions that otherwise would have only limited 

technology infrastructures.

As of 2009 VCL was serving more than 30,000 

faculty and staff. A typical user accesses VCL 

through a web interface, going through a set 

of authentication and authorization steps and 

then choosing the desired kind of computing 

environment and time period from a set of pulldown menus.

VCL can dynamically move resources from one 

application to another, producing increased 

efficiency and lower costs. During semester 

breaks, for example, when most students are not 

using computing resources, the system assigns 

those resources to researchers with heavy 

computing requirements for activities such as 

running complex models and simulations.

VCL now offers services on a pilot basis to seven 

other North Carolina public universities, the North 

Carolina Community College System, and several 

out-of-state universities including three in India. 

Possible extension of these academic cloud 

services to K-12 schools are being planned.
58 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

At the same time that datacenter computing is moving into the cloud, client computing 

and content have become more multimedia, more intuitive, and more human centered. 

Applications now span an enormous range of activities in commerce, entertainment, 

defense, research, and learning. 

Cloud computing can serve education in the face of these trends as well. It can support both 

the academic and administrative services required for learning and education. It can enable 

students and educators to access the same learning resources using different Internet 

devices, so that they can learn anytime and anywhere. Thus, it supports our assertion that it 

is now time for our education system to become part of a learning environment that includes 

in-school and out-of-school resources. This will not happen automatically; school systems 

and other youth-serving organizations – public libraries, public broadcasting, afterschool 

clubs, and so on – will need to engage each other and seek common platforms or at least 

technical interoperability. Still, cloud computing makes the seamless involvement of multiple 

organizations in a student’s learning more feasible technically and from a cost perspective.

Cloud computing is still in a nascent stage with obstacles to overcome to fully realize its 

potential. For education, its shortfall in auditability is probably its most serious but by no 

means irresolvable deficiency. Still, now is the time to move forward with investments in 

crucial elements of an infrastructure for learning, including platforms for learning, teaching, 

and assessment that focus on taking advantage of and contribute to the emerging shift to 

cloud computing.

Software and services that can be delivered from the cloud

Figure 3 illustrates the comprehensive nature of integrated software services needed for 21st 

century learning experiences and that can be delivered from the cloud.

Figure 3: Framework for software services in a technology-empowered 

learning environment

Users of Services: Students, Teachers Administrators, Parents

Internet Access Devices

Resources and Applications

Education resources 

& services

 (open & proprietary)

digital textbooks • digital libraries 

• tutoring systems 

• simulations • augmented 

reality • interactive visualization 

• educational games • online labs

Authoring, editing, 

disseminating & content 

management

text processing • audio/video 

capture/edit • programming 

platforms • blogs• wikis 

• instructional/course 

management

Administrative

scheduling • personnel/HR • plant/facilities 

management • procurement • attendance 

• student records

Assessment and Reporting 

Social Networking and Collaboration 

Public and Private Network-Connected Clouds – software services, data libraries & repositories
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 59

At the top are the users of the services – students, educators, administrators, and parents 

– with a variety of Internet access devices. With these devices, users can find a large and 

diverse set of digital educational resources from both proprietary and open providers.

Education resources and applications could be used directly in a variety of educator- or 

learner-directed ways. They could also be used as ingredients for derivative products that 

are authored, built, edited, disseminated, and managed as student projects or educatorauthor curriculum modules through services indicated in the adjacent cluster. In this model, 

students and educators are both consumers and producers of educational content, with 

the role of student and educator sometimes interchanged. The framework of services also 

includes the administrative services for operating the school and school systems.

Below the three types of services are cross-cutting integrated 

capabilities to support data-driven assessment of individual 

students, individual educators, and the resources (content) 

and processes serving teaching and learning. We include here 

assessments for formative and summative uses at time scales 

from real-time to decades. We also include rating, ranking, and 

recommender services for educational resources.

The resources, authoring, and administrative services all can be 

used by individuals for solo work and also by teams of people 

working in various configurations of same and different place 

and time, perhaps internationally, through social networking and 

collaboration services. All of the above rest critically on networking 

and middleware, with public and private cloud computing as 

the underlying platform for computation, data, and digital object 

management.

Human talent and scaling expertise

Building and nurturing an infrastructure for learning require 

providers and users who have knowledge and expertise in 

emerging technologies and a shared commitment to standards. We 

need people capable of developing and nurturing an infrastructure 

and specialists with experience integrating technology into 

curriculum development and assessment in meaningful ways. The 

right people in such positions would give education policymakers, 

leaders, and educators the courage and confidence to be more 

innovative – and take more risk – with technology.

The challenge of providing this level of expertise on the scale our 

education system requires should not be underestimated. Already, 

for example, the number of computers per computer technician in 

K-12 education is estimated at 612 compared with 150 computers 

per technician in private industry (CoSN, 2009). To an increasing 

Using Students as Technical Resources 

Generation YES

Generation YES started in 1995 as one of the 

first 100 federally funded Technology Innovation 

Challenge Grants. Its founder, Dennis Harper, 

believed that there was a better way than trying 

to train teachers in using technology with the 

expectation that they would then pass these skills 

to students. His insight was to use students as the 

technology experts, with each student assigned 

to a teacher as the technology consultant 

responsible for helping him or her develop and 

implement technology-based classroom activities. 

The learning goals for the student center on such 

real-world skills as project planning, collaboration, 

and communication. Since its inception, 1,200 

schools and 75,000 students have participated in 

Generation YES.

MOUSE

Since its start in New York City in 1997, MOUSE 

has had the dual purpose of providing technical 

support to help teachers integrate technology into 

instruction and helping students (Mouse Squad 

volunteers) acquire the skills and attitudes they 

need for college. Now operating in more than 200 

locations, MOUSE provides student-run technical 

help desks. MOUSE Corps is a career readiness 

program that offers professional internships, 

mentoring, and skill-building workshops to high 

school students. Citigroup has estimated that 

MOUSE volunteer labor saves the average school 

$19,000 a year in technical support costs.

Source: Submitted to the NETP web-site, edtechfuture.org.
60 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

extent, students and educators are handling routine maintenance and troubleshooting of 

computer equipment themselves. Programs have been developed to make the technical 

support and troubleshooting a learning experience for students as well as a cost-saving 

measure. Students can also develop both technical and leadership skills through this 

experience. 

Another level of support required is a professional educator who can engage with educators 

on leveraging technology for improving their professional practice. Studies have found that 

educators are more likely to incorporate technology into their instruction when they have 

access to this kind of coaching and mentoring. (Strudler & Hearrington, 2009). Innovative 

approaches to staffing in schools that take advantage of online learning resources may free 

resources that can be applied to fund onsite mentors and coaches who can help educators 

make good use of technology resources.

When districts first began adopting computer systems, the IT department was usually 

Information Technology. The department’s concerns were with the boxes, wires, and 

software needed to run basic financial, personnel, and reporting systems. As time went 

on, districts instituted Instructional Technology departments concerned with the use of 

technology in teaching and learning. Some districts have both kinds of IT departments (under 

any variety of names), and some have combined the two functions under a single leadership.

Even in the latter case, those in charge of information technology for a district or state may 

find they are left out of deliberations on key decisions in areas such as instruction, personnel 

assignment, or assessment. Those responsible for instruction, personnel, and assessment, 

on the other hand, are often frustrated by technology that does not meet their needs. 

Effective process redesign within school systems will require close coordination among all 

these functions.

The Role of the Federal Government

The federal government has an important leadership role to play in building a national 

infrastructure for learning. For example, the Office of Educational Technology should help 

states and districts build their capacity by providing a clearinghouse that matches expert 

advice and services with those who need it. This could include consolidating, leveraging, 

and sharing knowledge, research, and best practices and promoting and enhancing the 

interactions of partners in alliances focused on solving key challenges.

Another appropriate role is promoting equity in the infrastructure for learning through 

continuation of the E-Rate.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 61

Reaching Our Goal

All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning 

when and where they need it.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

4.1 Recommendation: Ensure that students and educators have adequate broadband 

access to the Internet and adequate wireless connectivity both inside and outside school.

Students and educators need adequate performance in accessing the Internet and 

technology-based learning resources. Adequate means enough bandwidth to support 

simultaneous use of the web, multimedia, communication and collaboration environments, 

and communities from anywhere in school buildings, on the surrounding campus, and from 

locations throughout the community and at home. Critical to providing universal access 

for learning are the broadband initiatives being individually and jointly managed by the 

Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Department of Commerce’s National 

Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and the Department of 

Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS). Schools and districts should have up-to-date tools 

for network analysis to ensure adequate access as usage increases.

4.2 Recommendation: Ensure that every student and educator has at least one Internet 

access device and software and resources for research, communication, multimedia content 

creation, and collaboration for use in and out of school.

Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices, including mobile devices, and technologybased software and resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered 

learning, and assessments that can improve teaching that this plan proposes. The form of 

these devices, software, and resources may or may not be standardized and will evolve 

over time. In addition, states and districts should adopt technologies and develop policies 

to enable leveraging the technology that students already have. This will require improved 

security systems, more intelligent filtering systems that allow blocking and enabling access 

at a more granular level, and personnel capable of providing around-the-clock support for 

student- and educator-owned devices used for learning in addition to complete support 

for devices owned by the school. The Department of Education should work with districts, 

states, and the private sector to articulate effective technology support models.

4.3 Recommendation: Leverage open educational resources to promote innovative and 

creative opportunities for all learners and accelerate the development and adoption of new 

open technology-based learning tools and courses. 

The value of open educational resources is now recognized around the world, leading to the 

availability of a vast array of learning, teaching, and research resources that our education 

system can tap into at all levels and in all content areas, especially STEM. States should 

reframe and revise policies concerning the evaluation and selection of instructional materials 

so that digital resources are considered. States should help keep open educational resource 
62 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

content up to date, appropriate, and tagged according to identified content interoperability 

standards. States should pool resources for identifying, evaluating, designing, and further 

developing open educational resources. When the Department of Education funds 

technology-based learning tools and resources, they should give priority to bids that will 

produce open resources, and the Department should identify and promote new business 

models that provide for sustaining and maintaining these resources.

4.4 Recommendation: Build state and local education agency capacity for evolving an 

infrastructure for learning.

Building an infrastructure for learning is a far-reaching project that will demand concerted 

and coordinated effort. To start, districts and schools should begin a transition to the next 

generation of computing system architectures. They also should consider moving their 

technology systems and services from in-house datacenters to professionally managed 

datacenters in the cloud for greater efficiency and flexibility. To help states and districts make 

these transitions cost effectively and to leverage the scarce human talent and expertise that 

will be required, the Office of Educational Technology should support a clearinghouse that 

matches expert advice and services with those who need them.

4.5 Recommendation: Support “meaningful use” of educational and information technology 

in states and districts by establishing definitions, goals, and metrics.

The Department of Education should convene education and technology experts to define 

meaningful use of technology in support of teaching and learning and improved operations. 

Building on the development of a framework and definitions for meaningful use, the 

Department should establish and publish goals and metrics for meaningful use. States 

and districts should use these goals to guide technology purchases. States and districts 

should consider a percent set-aside of education funds to support the cyberinfrastructure 

for learning. As state and local educational agencies move to a more integrated use of 

technology, they should connect planning for educational and information technology with the 

core functions of curriculum and instruction, assessment, and professional learning. States 

should assign responsibility for educational technology to cabinet-level individuals who will 

provide leadership in ensuring that the most efficient and effective purchases are made. The 

federal government should sustain support for technology use through E-Rate and other 

means to insure that under-served populations have access to technology for learning.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 63

Productivity: 

Improving Learning Outcomes While Managing Costs

Goal: Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take 

advantage of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more 

efficient use of time, money, and staff.

To reach the President’s goal of regaining global leadership in college graduation rates by 

2020, the United States must increase the percentage of citizens holding college degrees 

from the current level of just under 40% to 60%. That is a sizable increase and, considering 

that college graduation rates in our country have held steady for more than three decades 

(OECD, 2009a), a sizable challenge.

Add to this challenge the projections of most states and the federal government of reduced 

revenues for the foreseeable future, and it is clear that we will not reach this goal simply by 

spending more money on education.

In fact, over the last 30 years, the United States has increased its real dollar K-12 education 

spending per student by more than 70% without a commensurate improvement in outcomes 

(National Center for Education Statistics, 2005; 2008). In higher education, tuition costs are 

on the rise, yet just 21% of the increased revenue goes to instruction (Vedder, 2004) and 

spending changes have not resulted in higher degree completion rates (Bound, Lovenheim, 

& Turner, 2009).

More money for education is important, but we must spend education dollars more wisely, 

starting with being clear about the learning outcomes we expect from the investments we 

make. We also must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending 

so that we can provide decision-makers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the 

financial performance of our education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to 

improving productivity and accountability.

At the same time, we must make a commitment to continuous improvement by continually 

measuring and improving the productivity of our education system to meet our goals for 

educational attainment within the budgets we can afford.
64 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

The Productivity Paradox

Improving productivity is a daily focus of most American organizations in all sectors – both for 

profit and nonprofit – and especially so in tight economic times. Education has not, however, 

incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use to improve productivity and 

manage costs, nor has it leveraged technology to enable or enhance them. We can learn 

much from the experience in other sectors.

During the 1970s and 1980s, economists puzzled over what they called the “productivity 

paradox.” Businesses were rapidly deploying technology in the belief that it would help 

them perform better and more efficiently. But when economists looked for hard data to 

demonstrate that U.S. economic output per unit of investment was increasing, they turned up 

empty handed.

In the 1990s, economists were finally able to find evidence of substantial improvements in 

productivity related to technology (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 1998). They discovered that when 

businesses first introduced technology, they tended to use it to automate existing processes 

and procedures, without regard to whether they might be flawed or inefficient. Such uses 

may have had some benefit in terms of accuracy or speed, but the cost and complexity of 

acquiring technology, implementing it, and training staff in its use far outweighed 

its contributions.

Later still, in the 2000s, economists concluded that dramatic improvements in productivity 

were the result of structural innovations and a thorough redesign of business processes 

made possible by technology (Black & Lynch, 2003).

What education can learn from the experience of business is that we need to make 

the fundamental structural changes that technology enables if we are to see dramatic 

improvements in productivity. As we do so, we should recognize that although the 

fundamental purpose of our public education system is the same, the roles and processes 

of schools, educators, and the system itself should change to reflect the times we live in 

and our goals as a world leader. Such rethinking applies not just to learning, assessment, 

and teaching processes, but also to the infrastructure and operational and financial sides of 

running schools and school systems.

Redesigning education in America for improved productivity is a complex challenge that will 

require all 50 states, the thousands of districts and schools across the country, the federal 

government, and other education stakeholders in the public and private sector coming 

together to design and implement solutions. It is a challenge for educators – leaders, 

teachers, and policymakers committed to learning – as well as technologists, and ideally 

education leaders and technology experts will come together to lead the effort.

An appropriate role for the Department of Education is to identify strategies for improving 

productivity in education and to work with states and districts to increase their capacity 

to implement them. This should include encouraging changes to practices, policies, and 

regulations that prevent or inhibit education from using technology to improve productivity. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 65

Embracing Continuous Improvement

The underlying principle of continuous improvement is that we are unlikely to improve 

learning outcomes and productivity until we define and start measuring them. This starts with 

identifying what we seek in learning outcomes. It also requires getting a handle on the costs 

associated with components of our education system and with individual resources and 

activities, so that the ratio of outcomes to costs can be tracked over time.

This plan devotes considerable space to the learning outcomes we seek and measuring 

what matters. We also must consider pragmatic outcomes such as successful high school 

graduation, readiness for postsecondary education, and college degree completion.

As we establish new and more complete measures of learning and pragmatic outcomes, 

however, quality matters. A student who successfully completes algebra in one high 

school may learn more, be better prepared for college-level mathematics, and be more 

inspired to pursue a career in mathematics than a student who successfully completes 

algebra at another high school. Even if we cannot accurately measure or easily remedy 

these qualitative differences, we must consider them as we determine what to measure for 

continuous improvement.

Measuring and managing costs

The United States spends an average of about $10,000 per student per year on K-12 

education. But for too many education leaders and decision-makers, visibility into the 

costs of specific services our education system delivers to students is nonexistent. This is 

because education accounting and reporting typically are done across large programs and 

broad categories such as instruction or instructional support. These accounting practices 

are insufficient for tracking, benchmarking, and analyzing the costs of various services 

individually or compared with one another – all of which are essential to making decisions 

that lead to better outcomes and productivity.

A better approach to accounting for these purposes is cost accounting, which focuses on 

recording, tracking, and reporting costs associated with specific functions or services. Cost 

accounting can provide a complete picture of actual costs today and also serve as the 

basis for projecting costs in the future. As part of a commitment to continuous improvement, 

states and districts should adopt common cost accounting standards for benchmarking and 

analyzing costs. 

Using data in decision-making

An essential component of continuous improvement is making decisions based on data, 

which will require fundamental changes in how we collect and use data and in the processes 

we currently use for decision-making.
66 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

For many years, school districts have been developing and using multiple data systems for 

different purposes. As a result, many districts today have separate systems for finance data, 

personnel data, required accountability information for special education students, school 

lunch data, enrollment and attendance, and assessment data. Historically, linking together 

data from these different systems was cumbersome or impossible. Just one example of a 

nearly impossible task in most districts today is calculating the average seniority of educators 

teaching students who are in free or reduced-price lunch programs versus the average 

seniority of educators of other students – an important measure when trying to provide 

equitable access to effective teaching.

Advances in technology and a recent policy emphasis on using data in decision-making 

have resulted in much improved data in many districts. Still, while almost all districts have 

electronic access to data such as student demographics, attendance, grades and test 

scores, less than half have the ability to combine data from different types of systems to 

be able to link student outcome data to data about specific instructional programs, teacher 

characteristics, or school finances (Gray & Lewis, 2009; U.S. Department of Education, 

2010). Combining data from these different types of systems will require at a minimum 

the development and use of content, student learning, and financial data interoperability 

standards. Over time, it will require designing, developing, and adopting integrated systems 

for collecting the complex forms of data we need and for deriving meaningful interpretations 

relative to what we want to measure.

In addition to fragmented data systems, the silos created by funding programs, tradition, and 

interest groups present a major barrier to improving the productivity of our education system. 

When those responsible for a given function are isolated from others within the same 

organization, they tend to develop practices and procedures that are optimal only from their 

own perspective. In addition, decisions made in one portion of an organization may create 

tension with decisions made in another.

To ensure better alignment in decision-making, states and districts should develop processredesign teams that cut across functions and follow the process rather than looking at work 

flow only within a given office (CoSN, 2009). To make progress toward this goal, technology 

support and decision-making in the areas of curriculum, instruction, and assessment should 

be more tightly integrated than they are at present.

In addition, federal and state policies and regulations should be reviewed to identify and remove 

barriers to more efficient use of resources within schools and districts. Policies also should be 

reviewed to remove practices that keep technology functions isolated from the functions of 

teaching, learning, and assessment. These include separate funding streams and restrictions on 

the use of funds that reinforce the isolation of the educational technology function. 

Moreover, states can help their districts increase productivity by promoting process redesign 

and consolidation of technology and services, evaluating innovative models used by districts 

or regional education service units within their state, and providing technical assistance 

around successful models that improve outcomes and achieve efficiencies.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 67

Employing iterative design and development

As we take action to improve productivity in education, we must respect the complexity 

of our system and invest the effort needed to evaluate educational practices in different 

contexts over time. Rather than expecting to find an ideal turnkey approach, states and 

districts should define, test, and refine new ideas on a trial basis and measure both how they 

are implemented and their results. New educational practices should be adopted with the 

expectation that there will be multiple cycles of implementation and refinement. States and 

districts should also partner with each other on pilots and programs to leverage resources 

and scale up the best ideas.

Reorganizing teaching and learning

We have long known that whatever it is we are trying to teach, whether drawing or quantum 

mechanics, individual students will vary in how much they know already, how they like to 

learn, and the speed at which they can learn more. In a time when we have the capability of 

supporting learning 24/7 and personalizing the way a student interacts with digital content, 

it no longer makes sense to give every 13-year-old the same set of 45-minute American 

history lessons.

How much could we save if students who were ready and interested in moving ahead in 

their studies were allowed to do so instead of marking time until their classmates catch up? 

How much more efficient would our system be if students who need extra support in reading 

comprehension strategies had that support at their fingertips whenever they were reading 

in the content areas? How many more students would pass their courses and not have to 

repeat them? These are essential questions we must ask as we redesign education, and it 

will require rethinking basic assumptions about how our education system meets our goals.

One of the most basic assumptions in our education system is time-based or “seat-time” 

measures of educational attainment. These measures were created in the late 1800s and 

early 1900s to smooth transitions from K-12 into higher education by translating high school 

work to college admissions offices (Shedd, 2003) and made their way into higher education 

when institutions began moving away from standardized curricula.

Time-based measures were appropriate in their day, but they are not now when we 

know more about how people learn and we have access to technology that can help us 

accommodate different styles and paces of learning. As we move to online learning and 

learning that combines classroom and online learning, time-based measures will increasingly 

frustrate our attempts to provide learning experiences that lead to achievement and the 

pursuit of postsecondary education that our modern world requires.

Another basic assumption is the inflexible way we organize students into age-determined 

groups, structure separate academic disciplines, organize learning into classes of roughly 

equal size with all the students in a particular class receiving the same content at the same 

pace, and keep these groups in place all year.
68 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

The last decade has seen the emergence of some radically 

redesigned schools, demonstrating the range of possibilities 

for structuring education. For example, organizing education 

around the demonstration of competence rather than seat time 

opens up a wide range of possibilities. The first school district 

to win the Baldrige Quality Award, Chugach School District 

in Alaska, achieved remarkable gains in student outcomes 

after mobilizing its community to identify the competencies 

it wanted to see in high school graduates and shifting to a 

performance-based system in which diplomas were awarded 

on the basis of performance on the district’s assessment of 

those competencies (NIST, Baldrige, 2001). Since that time, 

15 districts and 200 schools have signed up to replicate this 

systemic reform (reinventingschools.org).

New Hampshire is now moving to a competency-based 

approach to secondary education across the entire state. 

The state’s governor asked his school board to come up with 

the education reforms needed to meet the goal of having 

zero dropouts by 2012. The board homed in on the issue of 

unproductive requirements that impede student progress: 

Why, for example, can a student earn a high school credit 

by attending gym class but not for the hours spent practicing 

and performing as part of a gymnastics team? Subsequently, 

the board changed state regulations to give students the 

option of earning credit for graduation by demonstrating their 

competence with respect to the standards stipulated by their 

school districts. New Hampshire districts are still determining 

how to implement this system, including its implications for 

funding, teacher training, and assessment practices. But a 

new high school position – the extended learning opportunity 

coordinator – is emerging in schools across the state.

Technology can facilitate implementation of such a competencybased approach to education. At the Young Women’s 

Leadership Charter School in Chicago, teachers use a specially 

designed database to keep track of the proficiency ratings each 

student has earned. Proficiency ratings are updated daily so that 

everyone – the student, the parent, teachers, and the school 

leader – knows exactly where each student stands relative to the 

competencies required for graduation. Another way technology 

can support the reorganization of teaching and learning is by 

enabling more flexible, student-centered scheduling. At the 

Huyton Arts and Sports Centre for Learning, a secondary school 

in the U.K., for example, learning activities are selected and 

scheduled to fit individual students’ needs rather than traditional 

academic periods and lockstep curriculum pacing. 

Competency-based Assessment at Young Women’s 

Leadership Charter School

In 2002, the Young Women’s Leadership Charter 

School (YWLCS) in Chicago instituted a radically new 

system for awarding course credit that is helping its 

students master course material, graduate from high 

school, and enroll in higher education at rates far 

exceeding those of demographically similar schools. 

A nonselective public school that serves primarily lowincome minority students, YWLCS graduated 79% of its 

students in 2005, a figure 1.5 times higher than Chicago 

Public Schools’ overall 52% graduation rate that year.

School leaders have implemented a system for student 

assessment that moves away from tying credit to seat 

time. Instead, the school recognizes the continuous 

nature of student learning by awarding credit for specific 

competencies demonstrated at any point in a student’s 

high school career.

With a commercial partner, the school developed a data 

system designed specifically for use in a competencybased program. Throughout the year, YWLCS teachers 

evaluate student work and go to the system to assign 

each student a proficiency rating of High Performance, 

Proficient, or Not Yet Proficient for each key learning 

objective associated with the class. Students earn credit 

for classes in which they demonstrate proficiency on at 

least 70% of academic course outcomes.

The data system uses the proficiency data that teachers 

enter to create a dynamic record of each student’s 

progress that is updated daily and is accessible to 

teachers, parents, and students. Teachers can use the 

data system to target their instruction and remediation 

strategies for current students. In addition, students can 

use their own data to identify the courses in which they 

are not yet proficient and work with their teachers to 

develop a plan for mastering unmet standards. 

If students demonstrate a competency after the end 

of the year has passed, future teachers can update 

students’ proficiency ratings in the data system to 

reflect what they have learned since the conclusion of 

a course. 

YWLCS compiles information from the data system 

into formal reports of student achievement, converting 

proficiency ratings into grade point average equivalents, 

to ensure that its graduates’ competencies are 

recognized by colleges, sources of financial aid, 

and other external parties. This competency-based 

approach is producing results: 90% of YWLCS students 

who graduated in 2009 were accepted to college or 

another postsecondary option. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 69

Extending learning time

Another strategy for rethinking how teaching and learning are organized involves extending 

the learning day, week, or year. American students spend significantly less time in the 

classroom than do students in many other countries, and students – especially low-income 

students – show a marked drop in their mathematics and reading proficiencies over the 

summer break. President Obama and other policymakers have questioned the logic of 

maintaining a three-month summer hiatus originally instituted so that students could provide 

needed farm labor during the critical summer months.

Since 2006 Massachusetts has had an Expanded Learning Time Initiative under which 

schools in lower-income districts are adding 300 or more instructional hours to the school 

year. A number of charter school networks share the belief that extending learning time is 

key to preparing students from low-income communities for college, and they are instituting 

longer school days and weeks. Yes Prep schools, for example, run from 7:30 in the morning 

until 4:30 each day with additional sessions every other Saturday. Yes Prep educators also 

support extending learning time by giving students their cell phone numbers so that students 

can call them during the evening to ask questions about homework.

As we seek ways to extend learning time, in addition to considering the amount of time 

students spend in school, we should also look at whether we can provide engaging and 

powerful learning experiences through other means. For example, we know that students’

lives outside school are filled with technology that gives them 24/7 mobile access to 

information and resources and allows them to participate in online social networks and 

communities where people from all over the world share ideas, collaborate, and learn new 

things. Our education system should leverage students’ interest in technology and the time 

they currently spend learning informally outside the regular school hours to extend learning 

time in a way that motivates them even more.

One way to do that is through online learning, which allows schools to extend learning 

time by providing students with learning on demand anytime and anywhere, dramatically 

expanding educational opportunities without increasing time spent in school. With online 

learning, learners can gain access to resources regardless of time of day, geography, or 

ability; receive personalized instruction from educators and experts anywhere in the world; 

and learn at their own pace and in ways tailored to their own styles and interests. Moreover, 

it enables our education system to leverage the talents and expertise of our best educators 

by making their knowledge and skills available to many more learners.

In addition, all these benefits can be realized through online learning at considerably less 

cost than providing students with additional in-person, classroom-based instruction by 

extending the school day or year.

As schools implement online learning, they should ensure that students’ learning 

experiences address the full range of expertise and competencies as reflected in standards 

and use meaningful assessments of the target competencies. For example, online 

collaborative environments or virtual worlds can facilitate the participatory nature of learning 
70 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

in addition to providing opportunities for content knowledge. State education agencies can 

provide leadership and technical assistance in this area, and educators also should look to 

their peers for best practices.

Reducing Barriers to Postsecondary Education

The United States has a long way to go if we are to see every student complete at least a 

year of higher education or postsecondary career training. There is no way to achieve this 

target unless we can dramatically reduce the number of students who leave high school 

without getting a diploma and/or who are unprepared for postsecondary education. A 

complex set of personal and academic factors underlie students’ decision to leave school 

or to disengage from learning, and no one strategy will prevent every separation from the 

education system. But there are practices supported with technology that can help address 

the problem.

First, there is the issue of identifying students’ difficulties early and providing extra support 

where needed. Support should start as early as possible, before children enter school, and 

should become intensified for those students who need it as they move through school. From 

the point of high school entry, every student could have a learning dashboard indicating 

whether or not his or her course enrollments and performance are on track for high school 

graduation and qualification for college entry. Such a system could make “smart” suggestions 

about options for fulfilling requirements, including the possibility of earning credits for courses 

taken during the summer, in alternative programs, at community colleges, or online.

When prevention fails and students quit attending school for a period of time, we must have 

multiple options for reconnecting them with the education system. Such students often 

become discouraged about their prospects for being able to earn the credits needed for 

graduation or have an aversion to returning to a school where they will be in classes with 

younger students rather than their original cohort.

Increasingly, secondary students are taking courses online to earn credit for courses they 

initially failed or missed because they were not attending school. Such courses can be 

taken under any number of arrangements – independently in the evening, during summer 

sessions, in a night school, or during the school day with a member of the teaching staff who 

provides encouragement and support as the student works with the online material.

In Walled Lake Consolidated School District in Michigan, for example, students can recover 

course credits through online summer school courses. The summer credit recovery program 

has worked so well that the district is developing a plan that will allow students to stay in high 

school while working by attending class in their brick-and-mortar school for four hours a day 

and taking their other two courses online at their convenience. 

Another example is provided by Tarrant High School in Alabama. Tarrant students are 

taking advantage of ACCESS, the state’s online learning program, to take courses before 

or after school or in the summer in order to recover credits for courses they have failed or to 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 71

graduate earlier. The school’s principal believes that ACCESS 

has been a significant factor in raising her school’s graduation 

rate from 66% in 2006 to 80% in 2008. Research conducted 

in the state of Washington has concluded similarly that online 

credit recovery can help increase graduation rates (Baker et 

al., 2006).

Moving to Meaningful Use

Current data on the use of educational and information 

technology in our system consists of records of purchases 

and numbers of computers and Internet connections. Very 

little information on how technology is actually used to 

support teaching, learning, and assessment is collected and 

communicated systematically. Only by shifting our focus to 

collecting data on how and when technology is used will we be 

able determine the difference it makes and use that knowledge 

to improve learning outcomes and the productivity of our 

education system.

To accelerate the transition to collecting and using this type 

of data, the Department of Education should initiate work 

on developing a conceptual framework and definitions for 

meaningful use of technology in education. Clarity about 

what constitutes meaningful use is a necessary precursor 

for establishing goals and progress metrics for the use of 

technology in education. 

Expanding Opportunities Through Blended Learning

Walled Lake Consolidated School District in Oakland 

County, Michigan, is turning to online learning to offer 

students a wider range of educational opportunities very 

cost-effectively.

In 2008, Walled Lake began offering its summer school 

credit recovery classes online. The district enlisted 

the help of its teachers to review various offerings and 

selected an online learning provider whose curriculum 

was comparable to that of district courses. Walled Lake 

enrolled 300 students in these online courses and also 

provided face-to-face meetings with district teachers 

twice a week to help students with course material and 

track their progress. This blended strategy lowered the 

district’s costs of providing each summer school course 

by nearly 50%, reducing the cost per student from $194 

to about $102.

Inspired by this success and students’ positive 

experiences with online learning, Walled Lake plans 

to begin allowing high school students to take both 

online and classroom-based courses during the school 

year. Students will continue to attend school at least 

four hours per day, but they may elect to enroll in up to 

two online courses each semester. As with its summer 

school courses, Walled Lake students’ online learning 

experiences will be supported by biweekly interactions 

with local teachers. This blended learning arrangement 

will accommodate students’ diverse learning styles and 

desire to work before or after school in ways that were 

not possible with full-time conventional instruction.

Walled Lake is also partnering with a local community 

college to make postsecondary education a reality 

for more of its high school students. Under the 

experimental agreement, 11th- and 12th-grade students 

may choose to enroll concurrently in high school and 

college, completing some college coursework online 

and some on the college campus, facilitated by the 

flexible scheduling system described above. The district 

will continue to claim full-time-equivalent funding for 

each student and will pay students’ tuition for courses 

taken at the community college during their high school 

years. This arrangement will enable Walled Lake 

students to complete an associate degree just one year 

after high school graduation.

Source: Submitted to the NETP web-site, edtechfuture.org.

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 73

Reaching Our Goal

Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take advantage 

of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of 

time, money, and staff.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

5.1 Recommendation: Develop and adopt a common definition of productivity in education, 

and more relevant and meaningful measures of learning outcomes and costs.

The Department of Education should lead a national initiative to identify strategies for 

increasing productivity in education and work with states, districts, and schools to build their 

capacity for implementing them. The cornerstone of this national initiative should be the 

formation of a commission and the development of an ongoing research agenda dedicated 

to improving productivity in the education sector.

5.2 Recommendation: Improve policies and use technology to manage costs including those 

for procurement. 

The education sector has not incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use 

to manage costs and improve productivity, a number of which are enabled or enhanced by 

technology. The Department of Education should encourage states to adopt common cost 

accounting standards to allow benchmarking and analysis of costs. In the short term, the 

Department should provide a platform for sharing strategies for cost saving and productivity 

improvement and highlight policies at the federal, state and local level that may inhibit 

progress, for example, in procurement.

5.3 Recommendation: Fund the development and use of interoperability standards for 

content, student learning data, and financial data to enable collecting, sharing, and analyzing 

data to improve decision-making at all levels of our education system.

Fragmented student learning and financial data siloed in different systems and a lack of 

common standards for collecting and sharing data are formidable barriers to using data 

for continuous improvement and cost reduction. A barrier to finding and using content and 

assessment resources is the lack of common content interoperability standards and the 

absence of tools to enable usage of standards. The lack of common standards affects 

the quality of tools because developers must limit their R&D investments in such narrow 

markets. The Department of Education with the Office of Science and Technology Policy 

should convene a cross-agency effort to create, publish, and maintain open standards for 

content, student learning, and financial data interoperability. State and district requests for 

proposals (RFPs) for assessment and data systems should require appropriate use of these 

standards.

5.4 Recommendation: Rethink basic assumptions in our education system that inhibit 

leveraging technology to improve learning, starting with our current practice of organizing 

student and educator learning around seat time instead of the demonstration of 

competencies.
74 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

To realize the full potential of technology for improving performance at all levels of our 

education system while increasing productivity, we must remove the process and structural 

barriers to its broad adoption. States and education leadership organizations should 

work together to identify and rethink basic assumptions in our education system, starting 

with but not limited to the measurement of educational attainment through seat time. 

Other assumptions that should be reexamined are the organization of students into agedetermined groups, the structure of separate academic disciplines, and the organization of 

learning into classes of roughly equal size. Educational institutions should explore the use 

of online learning and combining offline and online learning to provide options for flexibility 

in restructuring and providing additional learning time. When new processes and structures 

require policy, legislative, and funding changes, the Department of Education should lead or 

support the efforts to make those changes.

5.5 Recommendation: Design, implement, and evaluate technology-powered programs 

and interventions to ensure that students progress through our K-16 education system and 

emerge prepared for the workplace and citizenship.

Current high school and college dropout rates hinder the ability of the United States to be 

competitive in a global economy. The Department of Education should promote partnerships 

between two- and four-year postsecondary education institutions, K-12 schools, and 

educational technology developers in the private and public sectors to design programs and 

resources to engage students and motivate them to graduate from high school ready for 

postsecondary education. Support should start as soon as possible in students’ educational 

careers and intensify for students who need it. States, districts, and schools should 

experiment with such resources as online learning and online tutoring and mentoring, as 

well as with participatory communities and social networks both within and across education 

institutions to give students guidance and information about their own learning progress 

and their opportunities for the future. Postsecondary education institutions should also 

experiment with these technologies to devise new approaches to ensure access, quality, 

and completion. Education institutions should try alternative programs that take advantage 

of technology to reconnect with students who have dropped out and help them complete 

learning programs.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 75

R&D: Solving Grand Challenge Problems

The model for 21st century learning presented in this plan assumes that we will develop, 

adopt, and ensure equitable access to a technology-based education system that 

provides effective learning experiences, assessments, and teaching and a comprehensive 

infrastructure for learning to support both formal education and all other aspects of learning. 

It also assumes we will incorporate many of the practices other sectors regularly use to 

improve productivity and manage costs and will leverage technology to enable or enhance 

them. We now have considerable knowledge about the essential components of such a 

system, but that is not the same as developing and deploying them.

In the past, we have relied on public education entities and private companies to develop 

technology resources and tools for learning. In both these sectors, however, incentives are 

provided for developing discrete products and services without regard for how they work 

as parts of a system or for research on their effectiveness. Public education entities can 

mandate use of their products and services. Commercial enterprises gain market share 

through compelling value propositions, effective marketing, and broad distribution channels. 

But research on the effectiveness of learning technology typically comes after products and 

services have been deployed – when it is too late to result in major improvements – if it 

comes at all.

If we are to achieve our goal of leading the world in education, we must be leaders in the 

design and implementation of a more effective education system. To accomplish this, we 

require an organization with the mission of serving the public good through research and 

development at the intersection of learning sciences, technology, and education (Pea 

& Lazowska, 2003). The Higher Education Act (P.L. 110-315) passed in August 2008 

authorizes establishment of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information 

and Digital Technologies (also called the Digital Promise). Housed in the Department of 

Education, the center is authorized as a 501(c)3 that would bring together contributions 

from the public and private sectors to support the R&D needed to transform learning in 

America. Federal funding of the center at a level commensurate with its mission should be 

provided. The Digital Promise’s intent of involving private sector technology companies in 

precompetitive R&D with the center can be realized only if the government provides the 

funding that would demonstrate its own commitment to a major program of R&D addressing 

the complex problems associated with redesigning our education system.
76 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

A New Kind of R&D for Education

The National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies would 

support research at scale, facilitating the participation of educators, schools, and districts 

as partners in design and research. It would also promote transparency and collaboration, 

encouraging multiple researchers to work with the same data and interoperable software 

components and services. Its unique charter is to identify the key research and development 

challenges in the education field and coordinate the best combination of expertise 

for addressing them. These characteristics, along with an emphasis on public-private 

collaboration, distinguish the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and 

Digital Technologies from existing centers that currently help state and local education 

entities identify and implement established best practices in learning technology. The 

center’s work would also be distinct from field-initiated research on the effectiveness of 

technology-based interventions. 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offers an example of how 

such a research agency can promote work that builds basic understanding and addresses 

practical problems. DARPA sponsors high-risk/high-gain research on behalf of Department 

of Defense agencies, but it is independently managed and staffed by individuals from both 

industry and academia who are experts in the relevant research areas. DARPA program 

officers are given considerable discretion, both in defining the research agenda and making 

decisions about the funding and structuring of research (Cooke-Deegan, 2007). 

In a similar manner, the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital 

Technologies should identify key emerging trends and priorities and recruit and bring 

together the best minds and organizations to collaborate on high-risk/high-gain R&D 

projects. It should aim for radical, orders-of-magnitude improvements by envisioning the 

impact of innovations and then working backward to identify the fundamental breakthroughs 

required to make them possible.

Through rapid and iterative cycles of design and trial implementation in educational settings, 

the national center can demonstrate the feasibility and early-stage potential of innovative 

tools, content, and pedagogies that leverage knowledge, information, and technology 

advances at the cutting edge of what is possible and deploy them incrementally to realize 

their benefits.

The center should also ensure that teams working on each individual project share 

developments, progress, best practices, and outcomes with each other to take advantage 

of key findings and economies of scale and to ensure integration and interoperability 

between projects when desirable. The national center will need to work with closely with 

representatives of private industry to develop clear memoranda of understanding concerning 

the terms for precompetitive fundamental research. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 77

Focus on Grand Challenge Problems

We urge the national research center to focus on grand challenge problems in education 

research and development. “Grand challenge problems” are important problems that require 

bringing together a community of scientists and researchers to work toward their solution. 

American computer science was advanced by a grand challenge problems strategy when 

its research community articulated a set of science and social problems whose solutions 

required a thousand-fold increase in the power and speed of supercomputers and their 

supporting networks, storage systems, and software. Since that time, grand challenge 

problems have been used to catalyze advances in genetics (the Human Genome Project), 

environmental science, and world health.

To qualify as grand challenge problems suitable for this organization, research problems 

should be

 • Understandable and significant, with a clearly stated compelling case for contributing to 

long-term benefits for society

 • Challenging, timely, and achievable with concerted, coordinated efforts

 • Clearly useful in terms of impact and scale, if solved, with long-term benefits for many 

people and international in scope

 • Measurable and incremental, with interim milestones that produce useful benefits as they 

are reached.

This kind of grand challenge problem strategy has driven innovation and knowledge building 

in science, engineering, and mathematics, The time is right to undertake it to improve our 

education system (Pea, 2007).

The following grand challenge problems illustrate the kinds of ambitious R&D efforts this 

organization could lead. Notably, although each of these problems is a grand challenge in 

its own right, they all combine to form the ultimate grand challenge problem in education: 

establishing an integrated, end-to-end real-time system for managing learning outcomes and 

costs across our entire education system at all levels.

1.0: Design and validate an integrated system that provides real-time access to learning 

experiences tuned to the levels of difficulty and assistance that optimizes learning for all 

learners, and that incorporates self-improving features that enable it to become increasingly 

effective through interaction with learners.

Today, we have examples of systems that can recommend learning resources a person 

might like, learning materials with embedded tutoring functions, software that can provide 

UDL supports for any technology-based learning materials, and learning management 

systems that move individuals through sets of learning materials and keep track of their 

progress and activity. What we do not have is an integrated system that can perform all 

these functions dynamically while optimizing engagement and learning for all learners. Such 
78 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

an integrated system is essential for implementing the individualized, differentiated, and 

personalized learning called for in this plan. Specifically, the integrated system should be 

able to

 • Discover appropriate learning resources

 • Configure the resources with forms of representation and expression that are appropriate 

for the learner’s age, language, reading ability, and prior knowledge

 • Select appropriate paths and scaffolds for moving the learner through the learning 

resources with the ideal level of challenge and support.

As part of the validation of this system, we need to examine how much leverage is gained 

by giving learners control over the pace of their learning and whether certain knowledge 

domains or competencies require educators to retain that control. We also need to better 

understand where and when we can substitute learner judgment, online peer interactivity and 

coaching, and technological advances such as smart tutors and avatars for the educator-led 

classroom model.

2.0: Design and validate an integrated system for designing and implementing valid, 

reliable, and cost-effective assessments of complex aspects of 21st century expertise and 

competencies across academic disciplines.

The multiple-choice tests used in nearly all large-scale assessment programs fail to meet 

the challenge of capturing some of the most important aspects of 21st century expertise and 

competencies. Past attempts to measure these areas have been expensive and of limited 

reliability. Technology offers new options for addressing the multiple components of this 

challenge. For example, technology can support

 • Systematic analysis of the claims about student competence (including competence with 

respect to complex aspects of inquiry, reasoning, design, and communication) intended 

by academic standards and the kinds of evidence needed to judge whether or not a 

student has each of those aspects of competence

 • Specifying assessment tasks and situations that would provide the desired evidence 

 • Administering complex assessment tasks capable of capturing complex aspects of 21st 

century expertise through the use of technology

 • Developing and applying rules and statistical models for generating reliable inferences 

about the learner’s competencies based on performance on the assessment tasks.

Promising R&D applying technology to each of these components of the grand challenge 

is ongoing, but the pieces have yet to be integrated into a single system that is applicable 

across content domains and that is cost-effective to implement. In addition to system 

development, solving this grand challenge problem will require studies to demonstrate the 

validity of the new assessments and their usefulness for both making formative instructional 

decisions to improve learning and summative evaluative decisions for purposes of 

establishing competency and accountability. 

3.0: Design and validate an integrated approach for capturing, aggregating, mining, and 

sharing content, student learning, and financial data cost-effectively for multiple purposes 

across many learning platforms and data systems in near real time.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 79

To meet the education and productivity goals articulated in this plan, learners and their 

parents, educators, school and district leaders, and state and federal policymakers must 

use timely information about student learning and financial data to inform their decisions. 

Today, these data are maintained in a variety of digital formats in multiple systems at local 

and state levels. As the processes of learning, assessment, and financial management and 

accounting move into the digital realm, educational data systems and educational research 

have become exceedingly complex in terms of scale, heterogeneity, and requirements for 

privacy. Still, we must create systems that capture, curate, maintain, and analyze educational 

and financial data in all scales and shapes, in near real time, from all areas where learning 

occurs: school, home, and community. This must be done fully consistent with privacy 

regulations.

Although underlying technologies for exchanging data sets exist, education does not yet 

have the kind of integrated web-enabled data sharing system that has been developed for 

the healthcare, telecommunications, and financial sectors. Such a system must be capable 

of dealing with both fine-grained data derived from specific interactions with a learning 

system and global measures built up from that data, and it must be able to collect, back up, 

archive, and secure data coming from many different systems throughout a state. It must 

also be capable of integrating the financial data essential for managing costs. Addressing 

this challenge will require

 • A data format to represent learning and financial data

 • A service to discover and exchange data

 • A data security standard for the service

 • A specification, test suite, and reference implementation of the service to ensure vendor compliance

 • Best practices to guide the deployment of such services.

4.0: Identify and validate design principles for efficient and effective online learning systems 

and combined online and offline learning systems that produce content expertise and 

competencies equal to or better than those produced by the best conventional instruction in 

half the time at half the cost.

Research labs and commercial entities are hard at work developing online learning systems 

and combined online and offline learning systems that support the development of expertise 

within and across academic disciplines. Although we have isolated examples of systems 

producing improved learning outcomes in half the time, we have yet to see this kind of 

outcome achieved within the K-12 system, and particularly in those schools where students 

need help the most. In addition, in both K-12 and higher education, we have yet to see highly 

effective systems that can be brought to scale.

We have evidence that learning can be accelerated through online tutoring, restructuring 

curricula, and by providing guiding feedback for improvement throughout the learning 

process. Further, we know that the current “packages” of learning that define semester and 

year-long courses are generally arbitrary and a result of long-standing tradition rather than 

of careful studies. Achieving twice the content expertise and competencies in half the time at 

half the cost through online learning systems seems very possible, but it will require careful 

design, development, and testing.

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 81

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Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology A-1

Appendix A—How This Plan Was Developed

The U.S. Department of Education initiated the development of Transforming American 

Education in spring 2009 to capitalize on the opportunities created by technological 

advancements and new research on learning that have emerged since the publication of the 

last national educational technology plan in 2004. The Department’s goal was to create a 

vision for the strategic application of technology throughout the education system in support 

of student learning and achievement and consistent with the Administration’s broader 

educational and economic priorities.

In accordance with the White House’s Open Government Directive, public participation, 

transparency, and collaboration were key considerations in developing this plan. Web 

2.0 technology greatly accelerated the plan development process and enabled tens of 

thousands of individuals to learn about and contribute to it through webinars, online forums, 

and an interactive public website through which all interested parties could contribute 

resources, statements, and comments.

Plan development began with interviews with a dozen leaders across the Department of 

Education and at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy to build a deep 

understanding of policymakers’ priorities, goals, and insights into how to make the next 

national educational technology plan most effective.

Outreach began with an extensive series of events built around the National Educational 

Computing Conference (NECC) in June 2009. The National Educational Technology Plan 

development team led by SRI International conducted five focus groups with teachers, 

school administrators, and members of the Consortium on School Networking (CoSN) and 

the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA). Fifty chief technology officers and chief 

information officers from school districts across the country participated in a forum on the 

new plan.

In addition, more than 300 leading educators and educational technology experts 

participated in the ISTE Leadership Symposium. Leadership Symposium participants drafted 

vision statements and action steps that became the basis for the initial web-based outreach 

event that generated 263 public comments over a two-week period from June 29 to July 12, 

2009, on the National Educational Technology Plan website (edtechfuture.org).
A-2 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

The input gathered was presented to a Technical Working Group of educators, researchers, 

and state and local policymakers who contributed an extraordinary range of expertise 

to the vision, research, and writing of Transforming American Education. The Technical 

Working Group convened in person at three 2-day meetings to craft the plan’s vision 

and recommendations. In addition, Technical Working Group members participated in 

discussions with guest experts during five 2-hour webinars to incorporate additional expertise 

in critical issue areas for inclusion in the plan. 

A second version of the National Educational Technology Plan website was launched on 

August 29, 2009, to give the public a sense of the themes being considered by the Technical 

Working Group and to allow a wide range of stakeholders to contribute their own resources 

for consideration. During the three-month input period, 22,876 individuals visited the site 

and contributed 572 reports, technology tool examples, case studies, and personal or group 

statements on the plan. The site’s 2,582 registered users included classroom teachers (235), 

students (48), school administrators (48), other school staff (117), district administrators (13), 

professors and other higher education staff (123), educational technology organization and 

nonprofit professionals (118), researchers (52), educational consultants (116), technology 

tool and service providers (153), and state and national policymakers (2).

Hundreds of other stakeholders provided valuable input to the national educational 

technology plan team throughout the summer and fall. The plan development team held 

webinar discussions with the members of educational technology organizations SETDA, 

CoSN, and NCTET, as well as with education philanthropy leaders. The plan development 

team presented at several education forums and conferences including iNACOL’s Virtual 

School Symposium, NCTET’s Policy Forum, the National Center for Technology Innovation 

Conference, and the Summit on Redefining Teacher Education for Digital Age Learners. 

In addition, two Technical Working Group members led a face-to-face open forum at the 

University of Michigan and a virtual public forum in Second Life.

Finally, to gather perspectives and insights from industry into ways to promote 

unprecedented innovation in education research and development, Jim Shelton and the 

plan development team convened top thinkers from 24 leading technology and educational 

content providers in a day-long summit in Menlo Park, California, on September 21, 2009.

The Department extends its thanks to the thousands of individuals who shared their 

expertise in developing this vision for transforming the future of American education 

with technology.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology B-1

Appendix B—Contributors

We extend our deepest thanks to the members of the National Educational Technology Plan 

Technical Working Group for their extensive contributions to the plan’s vision for the future of 

education:

Daniel E. Atkins, University of Michigan

John Bennett, Akron Public Schools

John Seely Brown, Deloitte Center for the Edge 

Aneesh Chopra, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Chris Dede, Harvard University

Barry Fishman, University of Michigan

Louis Gomez, University of Pittsburgh

Margaret Honey, New York Hall of Science

Yasmin Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

Maribeth Luftglass, Fairfax County Public Schools

Roy Pea, Stanford University

Jim Pellegrino, University of Illinois, Chicago

David Rose, Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)

Candace Thille, Carnegie Mellon University

Brenda Williams, West Virginia Department of Education

U.S. Department of Education staff members Jim Shelton, Mike Smith, Karen Cator, and 

Bernadette Adams Yates provided valuable substantive guidance throughout the design and 

development of the plan.

Plan development was directed by Barbara Means of SRI International with the support 

of Marianne Bakia, Kate Borelli, Judy Brooks, Ed Dieterle, Austin Lassiter, Hannah Lesk, 

Jeremy Roschelle, Linda Shear, Susan Thomas, and Andrew Trotter. Linda G. Roberts 

served as a senior advisor to the plan development team. 

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology C-1

Appendix C—Acknowledgments

We extend our appreciation to the thousands of individuals who participated in the numerous 

discussions, focus groups, presentations, webinars, public forums, and web-based comment 

events that were held throughout the plan development process. A summary of the activities 

through which stakeholders contributed input is provided below. We extend our special 

thanks to those who organized outreach efforts that helped gather valuable insights from 

across the field.

Policy Interviews

U.S. Department of Education

Joseph Conaty, Director, Academic Improvement and Teacher Quality Programs

Tom Corwin, Associate Deputy Under Secretary, Office of Innovation and Improvement

John Easton, Director, Institute of Education Sciences

Cheryl Garnette, Director, Technology in Education Programs, Office of Innovation and 

Improvement

Alan Ginsburg, Director, Policy and Program Studies Service

Laura Johns, Office of Educational Technology

Jenelle Leonard, Director of School Support & Technology Programs

Martha Kanter, Under Secretary

Ray Myers, Office of Educational Technology

Hugh Walkup, Office of Educational Technology

Joanne Weiss, Director, Race to the Top Fund

White House 

Aneesh Chopra, Associate Director and Chief Technology Officer, White House Office of 

Science and Technology Policy

Kumar Garg, Policy Analyst, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

National Organizations

Anne Bryant, Executive Director, National School Boards Association

Michael Cohen, President, Achieve

Dane Linn, Education Division Director, National Governors Association

Gene Wilhoit, Executive Director, Council of Chief State School Officers
C-2 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Technical Working Group Webinar Discussants

Equity Issues in Technology-Supported Learning

Mark Warschauer, University of California, Irvine

Open Educational Resources and System Redesign

Michael Horn, Innosight Institute

Elliot Maxwell, Consultant to the Committee for Economic Development

Reconceptualizing Assessment

Robert Kozma, Kozmalone Consulting

Jim Pellegrino, University of Illinois, Chicago

Enhancing Productivity

Rich Kaestner, Consortium on School Networking (CoSN)

Supporting Teachers with Technology

Barry Fishman, University of Michigan

Bill Penuel, SRI International

Ann Renninger, Swarthmore College 

Steve Weimar, Math Forum

Outreach Events

State Educational Technology Directors Grantee Meeting

May 5, 2009

142 registered participants

ISTE Leadership Symposium at the National Educational Computing Conference

June 28, 2009

207 registered participants

ISTE CIO/CTO Forum at the National Educational Computing Conference

June 29, 2009

50 participants

Focus Groups at the National Educational Computing Conference

June 29-July 1

59 participants

SETDA Member Webinar

August 24, 2009
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology C-3

Silicon Valley Industry Summit

September 21, 2009

Agile Mind, Linda Chaput

Apple, John Couch

Blackboard, Jessie Woolley-Wilson

Carnegie Learning, Steve Ritter

Cisco, Ned Hooper

Dell, Mark Horan

George Lucas Educational Foundation, Steve Arnold

Google, Maggie Johnson

IBM, James Spohrer

Hewlett-Packard, Phil McKinney

Intel, Eileen Lento

KC Distance Learning, Caprice Young

McGraw-Hill, Randall Reina

Microsoft, Stephen Coller

NeXt Advisors, Michael Moe

Teachscape, Mark Atkinson

Oracle, Clare Dolan

Pearson, Doug Kubach

Scholastic, Margery Mayer

SMART Technologies, Nancy Knowlton

Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy

Texas Instruments, Melendy Lovett

VIP Tone, Robert Iskander

Wireless Generation, Larry Berger

NCTET Policy Forum

September 25, 2009

30 participants

CoSN Member Webinar

October 6, 2009

72 registered participants

Webinar with Philanthropy Leaders

October 6, 2009

Cisco 21st Century Schools Initiative, Bill Fowler

HP Global Social Investment, Jim Vanides

Intel Foundation, Wendy Hawkins

MacArthur Foundation, Craig Wacker and Connie Yowell

Microsoft Partners in Learning, James Bernard and Mary Cullinane

National Geographic JASON Project, Caleb Schutz

New Tech Network, Monica Martinez

Oracle Education Foundation, Bernie Trilling

Pearson Foundation, Kathy Hurley and Mark Nieker
C-4 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Public Forum at the University of Michigan

October 21, 2009

75 participants

NCTET Member Webinar

October 26, 2009

Exploring New Modalities for Learning Conference

October 30, 2009

SETDA Leadership Conference

November 1, 2009

Second Life Public Forum

November 5, 2009

200 participants

ISTE100 Meeting

November 9, 2009

25 participants

iNACOL Virtual School Symposium

November 16, 2009

National Center for Technology Innovation Conference

November 17, 2009

Summit on Redefining Teacher Education for Digital Age Learners 

December 8, 2009

Technical Working Group members Daniel E. Atkins, Barry Fishman, Roy Pea, and 

Brenda Williams played an important role in reaching out to various stakeholders. We 

also extend our deep thanks to those who helped convene and gather input from the 

community, including Patricia Anderson, Karen Billings, Leslie Connery, Christine Fox, 

Tracy Gray, Jenelle Leonard, Don Knezek, Keith Krueger, Susan Patrick, Paul Resta, Mark 

Schneiderman, Irene Spero, and Mary Ann Wolf. 

www.ed.gov/technology