Education Week - June 9, 2016 - Technology Counts - 8

education research for the Clayton Christensen Institute,
which studies blended learning. "They want to make sure
they're spending their scarce dollars wisely."
The Education Department's Stevens said her office is currently trying to improve rapid-cycle evaluations for ed-tech
products by working to create an online pilot "wizard," akin
to a TurboTax for school-product-testing projects, she said.
The digital toolkit would give districts a guide on the
front end on how to do a needs assessment, the technicalities of rolling out a pilot, what questions to ask the
product developer, and how to collect and analyze data
to determine if a product should be used on a wider basis.
Currently, the department is creating a prototype of the

There's a real need to have a more
structured process to talk about what
is needed, how to bring teachers in
early so they buy in, how to work with
the developer, implement properly,
and measure success."
Aubrey Francisco
Research Director, Digital Promise

pilot tool and will test it out in districts in the fall, she said.
"We want to walk a school or district leader through
setting up a pilot and evaluating the tools being used in
their system," Stevens said.
Other efforts to streamline the pilot-testing process are
more regional. LEAP Innovations, a Chicago-based nonprofit that is also part of the Learning Assembly project, is
working with schools to bridge the "gap between innovation and education," said CEO Phyllis Lockett.
LEAP partners with Chicago-area K-8 schools to match
them with ed-tech companies seeking to pilot their products. "Many of our schools get calls from vendors constantly, and they don't know where to start," she said.
LEAP has a panel of experts, including learning scientists, educators, and ed-tech investment experts, to
evaluate and vet ed-tech products. Those that are approved are matched with individual Chicago-area schools
for one-year pilots. Educators involved receive semester-long professional development before their project
launches to hone their role in the process, Lockett said.
LEAP then works with researchers to crunch the data.
"We can tell schools if the solution moved the dial on
achievement," Lockett said.
Digital Promise is working on pilots with several other
districts in addition to Avonworth. It also plans to use the

Education Week / June 9, 2016

information it has gleaned to create a product-testing template, which can then be tailored to each district's unique
characteristics, said Aubrey Francisco, the organization's
research director. Digital Promise is also hoping to share
the results of district pilot projects to provide information
to other educators.
"A district might look at a study and say, 'I feel comfortable using this product,' based on the research done
elsewhere," she said
Along those lines, Jefferson Education, a commercial entity
advised by the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, hopes to build a system to share robust pilot-project
information with valid data on a wider scale, so that every
district doesn't have to do its own test of a product, said CEO
Bart Epstein. The project is in the beginning stages, he said.
"Very few schools have the bandwidth to be able to do pilots properly," he said. "Right now there are probably 1,000
school districts all reviewing the same 15 math products."

IN A 2015 DIGITAL PROMISE STUDY, RESEARCHERS FOUND THAT
districts' prevailing processes for testing technology
products are largely informal and often lack a clear approach and consistency. The study also found a disconnect between the aims of companies looking to test their
products and schools.
"There's a real need to have a more structured process
to talk about what is needed, how to bring teachers in
early so they buy in, how to work with the developer, implement properly, and measure success," Francisco said.
Some of these new pilot efforts may also help districts that have already purchased ed-tech software and
digital tools in an ad hoc way. That's the situation in the
1,200-student West Ada district in Meridian, Idaho, where
50 different math programs are being used across schools,
said Eian Harm, the district's research and data coordinator.
West Ada is, in effect, trying to do pilot projects in reverse on the most popular five math programs to determine which ones are most effective, Harm said.
To that end, a tool like the new EduStar platform
might be of help, said Benjamin F. Jones, a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at Northwestern
University's Kellogg School of Management, who is a
co-creator.
EduStar, developed in collaboration with the nonprofit
digital-learning provider PowerMyLearning, aims to provide rigorous and rapid trials of digital-learning tools and
more granular content, like a lesson, video, or a game. Those
trials can take just a few minutes-to test an app, for example-and are done through an automated system, he said.
Currently the system is being tested with 40 schools already
using the PowerMyLearning platform, but Jones said he
hopes to add many more that want to test out digital content.
The goal is to provide feedback to the developer about
how a product works in a real classroom and to communicate deeper research about why or how certain games
or techniques work or don't, Jones said.
"In the long run," he said, "we hope the system can
scale so it could test large numbers of digital-learning
activities and provide a Consumer Reports function in
the marketplace." n

Education Week - June 9, 2016 - Technology Counts

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