Random ideas roundup

Every so often I like to visit ideas that don’t merit a full post but are worth mentioning.

UDL, accommodations, and reaching all students
A recent post discussed reaching all students, and Universal Design for Learning.

Among the key tenets of UDL is that the design principles “improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people.” I’ve been aware of this idea but, to be honest, it was only some recent events and reading a non-education blog post that have made me fully appreciate this concept.

We can do better than special accommodations (subtitled “Solve problems and make things better for everyone”) uses train boarding in Washington DC to explore this topic. After discussing accommodations required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, Matthew Yglesias explains:

“There are worse things than making special accommodations so that people in wheelchairs can get on a train. It would be worse, for example, not to make the accommodation and deny them access. But what would be better is investing the money necessary to create level boarding. Not just because that would be a more dignified solution for people in wheelchairs, but because it would be generally better — better for people with roller bags, strollers, young kids, and people with knee pain. There’s room in life for special accommodations, but I think our society’s current obsession with identity groups reflects the triumph of a scarcity mindset and a genuinely catastrophic loss of focus on how we can find big levers to make positive changes in the world.”

This idea resonated with me because I’d recently finished a trip with my 89-year-old mother to Vancouver, where we got around on trains, busses, and ferries. She is incredibly agile for her age and walks without assistance, but I also saw first-hand how much the accommodations for people in wheelchairs and walkers made it much easier for her to get around on public transit. In large part this ease stemmed from her not having to ask for help, because the system was built to make it easy for all sorts of people to ride.

Many students are receiving accommodations, and appropriately so. But for the first time I connected in a visceral way with the concept that UDL just makes teaching and learning better for all. It would have been better if I’d gotten there sooner!

Revisiting AI in education
A post from a few months ago mentioned:

“We have yet to find, or hear about, AI being used at scale in K-12 public education, even after exploring this topic with our DLC members…. AI is tomorrow’s technology, and perhaps always will be. More likely, it’s just a long way off still.”

That post ended with:

“Are we missing some good examples of the use of these technologies in education?”

It turns out that I was missing some good examples, from post-secondary education. The most interesting is the use of AI-generated chatbots as described by Michael Feldstein here. As described by Feldstein and also in this post, chatbots are being used extensively—this is not hypothetical—and at least some chatbots are AI-driven. Chatbots aren’t new, of course, but they seem to have improved to a whole new level.

In the K-12 space, AI seems to be talked about mostly in terms of applicability to adaptive learning (which Feldstein talks about in the post-secondary context here.) When I’ve investigated the AI/adaptive learning nexus I’ve generally come away unimpressed, largely because the hype far exceeds reality in the cases I’ve seen. Perhaps the use of chatbots, as a different path to support learning, will be more successful in the near-term.

And don’t forget that you can use already use AI to create all sorts of weird images, like the one below. This may seem whimsical (ok, it is whimsical). But you can see how this is a disruptive innovation that is going to change a lot of image and design work, probably quite soon. I’m coming around to the idea that we are going to see AI-related impacts on education sooner than I had expected.

Some positive online learning stories in the news
We often mention media articles that are negative towards digital learning, so it’s worth touching on a couple that are positive.

For some, online learning is just the right fit is positive and also notable because it comes from a National Public Radio affiliate, and NPR has not always been the most online learning-friendly outlet.

The story wouldn’t seem all that newsworthy to many DLC blog readers, but it’s nice to see quotes like this in a general media outlet:

"That model was hardly perfect, but it did reveal that some kids do really well with online learning, said Chargers Principal Brandon Macrafic.

'A lot of students and families, they're searching — they're searching for that right learning environment, where they can be successful — some students who maybe were struggling in the in-person school,” he said.'”

In post-secondary education, we continue to see growth in online courses, and it seems like increasingly these stories are framed in positive ways. For example:

The Los Angeles times reports that Overwhelming demand for online classes is reshaping California’s community colleges.

“The demand for virtual classes represents a dramatic shift in how instruction is delivered in one of the nation’s largest systems of public higher education and stands as an unexpected legacy of the pandemic. <snip>

“It may never go back to what it was before the pandemic,” said Daniel Payares-Montoya, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California who has studied enrollment in online classes at community colleges. “Students are going to keep demanding more and more online education.”

The monumental shift online comes amid plummeting state enrollment — which stood at 1.2 million students in fall 2021, about a 20% drop from pre-pandemic fall 2019. Administrators pivoted to accommodate the change, rather than risk losing more students. They say it’s a matter of making community colleges accessible, a fundamental mission of the system.”

Emphasis added, because adding options to keep students enrolled is as salient in K-12 education as it is in post-secondary.

H/T to Ray Rose for sending me both of these articles!