Need Much Much More “D” in Education R & D

I already blogged about this matter 3 years ago in a post entitled “The State of Educational Research & Development.” But a few recent things made me think of it again:

• @newsweek tweeted for us to tell them our thoughts on the American education system in 6 words or less. My first thought was that “education needs more r&d”, because as my previous post mentioned – medicine and engineering and related areas spend 5-10% on research, whereas in education that percentage is closer to 0.01%. And most of that miniscule amount is spent on basic research, not development. NSF doesn’t even fund much K-12 or higher education curriculum or software development anymore.
• The U.S. department of education recently released its National Educational Technology Plan for 2010, authored by many researchers with whom I am familiar. I’ve only scanned it so far, but I haven’t seen much emphasis on development, just research. The only development ideas I’ve seen so far are very top-driven solutions, the “Grand Challenges” described in the end section on R&D: for example a huge tutoring system, a system for delivering assessments, a school data sharing and mining system, etc. I’m not seeing any bottom-driven or domain-specific ideas or more specific solutions. I posted a comment on that page similar to this post.
• Tony Bates blogged about “the state of e-learning in 2009” and noted:
  

  My biggest disappointment this year…has been with open educational resources…what are we getting? Digitally recorded 50 minute classroom lectures and digital textbooks. What we are not getting are materials designed from scratch for multiple use…And there is still so little of it. What I would like to see are many thousands of short modules

• Also as I wrote in another earlier post on “50 examples of the need to improve college teaching,” software is key. The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) has helped people redesign their college courses to be much more effective and efficient and cost less. The key to that is the use of interactive software: “successful course redesign that improves student learning while reducing instructional costs is heavily dependent upon high-quality, interactive learning materials” (ref). That may work well for common, large enrollment courses for which there is already a bunch of software available, but what about the rest of the courses? What about all of K-12, too?
• I recently wrote a chapter titled “Toward a Nation of Educoders” about how if we could make it easier for students and teachers to develop interactive software (such as animations and games and interactive websites), perhaps this would help alleviate this problem, make it less formidable and daunting, financially and timewise. This is related to the “computational thinking” (pdf) and “computational literacy” push seen in computer science. We should look at programming as the new 4th “R”, a new literacy that students and teachers need in today’s world. A couple years ago I blogged about this and an article by Marc Prensky: “Programming: The New Literacy.”

About Doug Holton

Faculty developer. Interests: developing educational technology; faculty & student development; learning sciences & psychology.