I was recently asked to comment on curriculum, specifically for community college students. Here is my response:
Creating and implementing authentic curriculum is a complex and often unpredictable endeavor, especially when compared to relying solely on textbooks or highly prescriptive sources. Authentic curriculum is designed locally, tailored to specific populations, goals, and community resources, yet it remains grounded in discoveries from cognitive and learning science. This inherent complexity makes curriculum development and updating a task perfectly suited for collaboration.
In today’s rapidly evolving world, the “old ways of learning are unable to keep up”. Douglas Thomas and John Seeley Brown observe that a new culture of learning is emerging, based on three key principles:
- The traditional methods of learning are insufficient for our fast-changing environment.
- New media are making peer-to-peer learning more accessible and natural.
- Emerging technologies amplify peer-to-peer learning by shaping the collective nature of participation with new media.
To embrace this new culture, many schools and technology leaders are leveraging these technologies to organize online curriculum repositories. These repositories become invaluable resources, serving as the focal point for professional learning communities committed to technology-rich, deep, active, and authentic learning. Teachers can utilize these online spaces to find and share a wealth of resources, including links to appropriate online videos, locally created worked examples, templates for planning and assessment, and ideas for prompts.
While traditional classrooms involved extensive time preparing materials like notes, copied papers, and physical books, much of this work is now digitized. Teachers today spend less effort on material preparation, instead focusing on vetting and editing existing digital resources. They investigate resources to ensure alignment with curricular goals and age-appropriateness, and create outlines or other scaffolds to place materials within students’ zone of proximal development.
Building a curriculum repository increasingly involves vetting resources as much as creating them. This task is easily shared among educators. Many communities establish a course on their Learning Management System (LMS) to serve as a curriculum repository. Here, teachers contribute and revise materials, building a rich collection and adding tags and metadata to organize it effectively. When local communities control the repository and users have a relationship with the contributors, confidence in the resources tends to be much greater.