Mass Customized Learning Comes to Central Pennsylvania

This post was originally written this past fall as a FB note, but I am posting it here now so that it can be more widely available.

“Inevitable: Mass Customized Learning” is a book and an educational program developed by education theorists Charles Schwahn and Bea McGarvey. Is is one of a number of “personalized” digital education programs popping up in schools across the country. The program, implemented in several communities in Maine, has been widely criticized and resulted in large numbers of teachers leaving those districts. Concerns included the fact that there are no traditional grade levels or letter grades, students could advance only upon “mastery” of the standards, and that instruction was highly-fragmented as teachers were meant to be “guides on the side.” Ultimately it was impossible to provide the level of differentiation required by the program.

I have known for some time that CBE or “personalized” hybrid-blended learning is being incubated in south central PA. It first popped up in the Johnstown/Bedford area and now seems to be creeping over into Lancaster, York, and Harrisburg. It is being pushed by Appalachian Intermediate Unit 8. The Intermediate Unit is working in concert with the Pennsylvania Leadership Development Center. PLDC has close ties to Dusquene University via Pat Crawford (professor of education emeritus and now Director of Professional Development for the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators) and Franny Serenka Associate Professor and Director of the School Administration & Supervision Program in the School of Education. Crawford presented at Mass Customized Learning conferences in South Dakota in 2013 and in Maine in 2014.

Besides the fact that that area is a bit out of the way and less high profile than other districts, I could not figure out why south-central PA was being targeted. Now I think I have now found the link. The push for mass digital learning came when Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13111 that created the Advanced Distributed Learning program. ADL jumpstarted technology-based education for the Department of Defense and the Federal Government, but the plan was always to scale it for general use in K12 education. One of the first tasks was to create a coding system to manage the “learning objects” and that would support the “learning management systems.” That first program was called SCORM. It took until the mid 2000s to be widely adopted. Later, they wanted to expand the types of data that could be aggregated, so they transitioned to a more sophisticated and flexible software called Tin Can or xAPI. It was created by Rustici Software out of Tennessee. This slideshare goes into detail about how educational data is tracked across learning environments. The thing that made everything “click” tonight is Aaron Silvers. Silvers now works for ADL and does a lot of training for xAPI. According to his LinkedIn Profile, before coming to ADL, he was Chief Learning Officer for Problem Solutions, which is (BINGO!) based in JOHNSTOWN, PA. Problem Solutions is a MAJOR contractor to ADL and they are very much involved with the transition to “learning eco-systems.”  This is how Problem Solutions describes what they do:

Important post script! A Mass Customized Learning Fall Summit was held at the Lancaster Resort and Conference Center on Friday, October 21, 2016. They toured Pequea Valley schools as part of that conference.