Cynthia Vaskis

SLM521 Spring 2004

Article #2 Review

3/25/04

Smith, Merna & Tumarkin, Paul (2003). The new reality of the online education community: Today, the Web represents a comprehensive, cross-functional education resource, indispensable for successful school and district strategies. InfoToday, September, 2003. Retrieved March 22, 2004, from http://infotoday.com/MMSchools/sep03/MMSWP0903.pdf

This article is a “white paper” written by two employees of the Pearson Digital Learning company to promote one of their products called Concert Instruction & Assessment or Concert IA. They begin by stating that because of the Internet’s explosion of primary source data, it is up to the teachers, librarians, and media specialists to help the students determine what information is useful and accurate. They discuss how the lines of communication between educators, parents, students and the state’s education system have never been so open through e-mail and instantaneous messaging. With the availability of instructional management systems and maintaining student information on-line, data analysis tools can manage student progress by giving them on-line learning tools and tests.

The driving force behind the new Web-based instructional packages is the rapid growth of Web-based instructional information and the government reinstating the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) Act or Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Concert IA presents material consistent with state and federal goals and requirements. It ties the increased accountability, data-driven decision making, and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) tasks directly to funding. Concert IA provides students and teachers access to the Internet through curriculum-based software, online lesson plans and online tests which are linked to state standards. It can record student grades with their teachers and report aggregate student progress to the school district to meet state requirements and enable further funding. The teacher can personalize the lesson plans to meet student’s needs and see through the reporting system what areas need improvement. The teacher can access lesson plans, modify them to fit individual students, and resubmit them to the pool of lesson plans for others to benefit. Concert IA provides links to the latest research topics in education and provides professional training links for teachers. Through on-line progress reporting, the parent can view how their child is doing and then be more effective when helping their child with their homework.

It is best summarized by Ferdi Serim, a former editor of MultiMedia Schools, who said that there are four key elements to a good learning management system: instruction, assessment, communication, and professional training for the teachers. Concert IA seems to achieve these goals in a seamless manner.

I am impressed with the well organized approach that Concert IA has taken. It appears from this paper that it has met the needs for teachers to effectively monitor their students’ progress and quickly modify their teaching methods to accommodate students’ learning problems. I would hope that a software company would develop this type of teaching tool for the special education community where so many of the students have difficulties learning and their progress needs to be closely monitored. Overall, I think this product would be significantly beneficial to the education community and hopefully, eliminate wasted time by grading papers by hand and free up the teacher to teach.

Coming from a computer programming background and developing Expert Systems, I see the next step in this technological evolution of educational products is to make the knowledge base into an Expert System tool. The Expert System would be able to answer questions on-line about the knowledge being taught instead of the teacher having to review the student’s progress and suggest additional remedial lessons for difficulties. Especially in the area of math, where each concept builds upon another, the turn around time for the teacher to evaluate the student and suggest a remedial lesson is too slow when the student is in the middle of a lesson and needs help now. Expert Systems are designed to be an on-line tutor for the student or teacher to help them through a subject and offer suggestions immediately after the student makes an error. Maybe I have found an area where I can make a contribution to the education community by developing such an Expert System for secondary mathematics.