The National Education Technology Plan released by the U.S. Department of Education on March 5, 2010, presents a model of 21st century learning powered by technology, with goals and recommendations in five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. The Plan also identifies far-reaching “grand challenge problems” that should be funded and coordinated at a national level. See the full report.

Add your comments to the Plan. 

This NCTI overview combines the explanations of the five areas with the overarching stated goals:

• Learning: The model of 21st century learning described in this plan calls for engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners. The model asks that we focus what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs to learn. It brings state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve. It leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all curriculum, pace of teaching, and instructional practices.
  • Goal: All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and outside of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society.
• Assessment: The model of 21st century learning requires new and better ways to measure what matters, diagnose strengths and weaknesses in the course of learning when there is still time to improve student performance, and involve multiple stakeholders in the process of designing, conducting, and using assessment. In all these activities, technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that in aggregate will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system.
  • Goal: Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure what matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.
• Teaching: Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, the model of 21st century learning calls for using technology to help build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching. In such a teaching model, teams of connected educators replace solo practitioners and classrooms are fully connected to provide educators with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools as well as to resources that help them act on the insights the data provide.
  • Goal: Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that enable
    and inspire more effective teaching for all learners.
• Infrastructure: An essential component of the 21st century learning model is a comprehensive infrastructure for learning that provides every student, educator, and level of our education system with the resources they need when and where they are needed. The underlying principle is that infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools. Building this infrastructure is a far-reaching project that will demand concerted and coordinated effort.
  • Goal: All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.
• Productivity: To achieve our goal of transforming American education, we must rethink basic assumptions and redesign our education system. We must apply technology to implement personalized learning and ensure that students are making appropriate progress through our K-16 system so they graduate. These and other initiatives require investment, but tight economic times and basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend. We must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decisionmakers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to meeting our goals for educational attainment within the budgets we can afford.
  • Goal: Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take advantage of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of time, money, and staff.

The NETP also lays out “grand challenge problems” of research and development, challenges that are to solve the “ultimate” problem in education: establishing an integrated end-to-end real-time system for managing learning outcomes and costs across our entire education system at all levels. The Plan calls on the federal government to fully fund the Digital Promise project, the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, to create a public-private partnership that would tackle these challenges.  (See Larry Grossman’s presentation on the Digital Promise project at the 2009 NCTI Technology Innovators Conference.)

Thanks to all in the NCTI community who participated in the NETP process. We were issued a call to action by Karen Cator, Director of the Office of Education Technology and Linda Rosen at the 2009 NCTI Technology Innovators Conference, and you responded, sending in stories, suggestions, references, and insights into how technology can make learning more productive for students with disabilities. The explicit inclusion throughout the document of the needs of underserved populations is a positive development for the educational and assistive technology field. See especially the chapter on Learning which starts on page 9 (print)/25 (pdf). 

Add your comments to the Plan. 

See a new call to action on the Health Information Technology rules.

How do you plan to leverage this Plan in your work? Post a comment below.