Digital Curriculum

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to participate in the Learning Counsel's (http://thelearningcounsel.com/) Digital Curriculum Tactics Discussion held at the Hawthorne Center in Cobb County, Georgia. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the future of digital curriculum and how school districts should integrate it into their collection of resources. Several Georgia school districts were represented along with a handful of vendors that provided digital curriculum of some sort.

Much of the conversation centered around the need for educational resources and digital content from the wide variety of sources to be formatted so that it could be easily integrated into the many different learning management systems that are available today. The recognized format for this to happen is known as common cartridge. Common cartridge outlines the specifics of  formatting and meta-data that should be included along with any educational resource so that it can easily be imported into other systems.

Near the end of the day a panel discussion was held in which I had been asked to be a part of. Along with several other educational leaders, each of them in much more loftier positions than me, were ask several questions related to the current and future trends in digital curriculum.

While there were several takeaways for me from the day, the issue that stood out most was the need for teachers to become much more critical of valuators of digital curriculum. There were several mentions of not giving into trends or nifty ideas without the effective evaluation that is necessary to ensure that digital resources are cost-effective and educationally sound.

Additionally, the Learning Counsel is forming a committee that will look to evaluate current instructional design models to adapt them to digital curriculum design or, more likely, develop a new instructional design model that fits the digital framework.  I have spoken with the chairperson and hope to be a part of this committee moving forward. This will be an interesting area of both research and practical application. I'll keep everyone abreast of the developments.