Iowa OER’s November webinar featured the new Iowa e-Learning Central platform, a new online course repository for K-12 courses across the state of Iowa.
Our speakers this month included Christi Donald and Tina Wahlert from the Iowa Department of Education.
You can watch the recording or read the summary blog post below for additional information:
What is Iowa e-Learning Central?
Time Wahlert began the webinar by providing some background on e-Learning Central, which was supported through grant funding from the Rethink K-12 Education Models (ESF-REM Grant) made available through the CARES Act.
To describe the site, Iowa e-Learning Central is an online exchange for Iowa educators, students, and families that houses high-quality courses and units, supports content creation and collaboration, and expands statewide access to Iowa Standards-aligned courses and units across all grade levels.
How does e-Learning Central aid students, educators, and families?
The platform’s purpose is to reduce inequities for students (exacerbated and laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic) by providing more opportunities for students to get access to rigorous learning opportunities which can enhance their learning and prepare them for college, career, and life after schooling. Most importantly, the platform provides functionalities for schools across the state to collaborate and share their materials.
By providing a space for schools to share and learn from one another, Iowa e-Learning Central supports not just our students and teachers, but also Iowa families, who will have access to family-oriented resources and support through the platform.
Additional information about the platform can be found on the Iowa e-Learning Fact Sheet [PDF]
Components of Iowa e-Learning Central
Christi expanded the conversation by delving into the e-Learning Central platform directly, showcasing its three main components:
- Resource Library
- Course Repository
- Student/Course Exchange
Resources for Educators and Families
The Resources section of e-Learning Central is currently largely text-based material to help support the needs of the various users of the site. These include:
- Checklists for educators to prepare for classes
- Documents for students and families to help them organize time for schoolwork and stay motivated
- Tips for students to thrive in online and hybrid class environments
Over time, the team working on e-Learning Central hopes to supplement these text-based materials with videos and other supplemental materials.
As Christi shared, there is a clear need for these types of materials:
“My own daughter, who had her first year of college last year with mostly online classes, it was a learning curve for her. There are a lot of things [students] have to negotiate, not just the learning in the class.”
Having resources to help them navigate online learning, then, can help students who are unfamiliar with online classes and ensure that they’re able to be successful.
Course Repository
Moving on from the resources for users, the main draw of e-Learning Central is its Course repository. Tina and Christi are co-leads on the Contents team for Iowa e-learning Central, so the Course repository is their focus. The Course repository is just what it sounds like: a repository of courses available for download and reuse by educators and schools across the state to adopt into their online, hybrid, or even in-person classes.
To download a course, an educator needs to log in to their Iowa Educator portal for verification, just to ensure that assessments are available only to educators. Of interest to our users, the Creative Commons license on each course’s materials is displayed on the course information page within e-Learning Central, so users can see what the reuse rights and requirements are for each set of materials.
The courses currently covered include:
- Secondary Mathematics (6th, 7th, 8th Grade, Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2)
- Secondary ELA (9th, 10th, 11th, 12th Grade)
- Secondary Science (6th, 7th, 8th Grade, Biology)
- Computer Principles, and
- 1st Semester High School Financial Literacy
As you’ll notice, secondary school classes are the ones largely covered in the system, but Elementary classes, as well as more Social Science classes, are being planned for future updates.
Why not add everything right now? Well, the DOE team goes through a rigorous process to ensure that courses added to the platform are high quality and aligned to Iowa Academic Standards, and this review takes time. Additionally, the DOE team has been working with Iowa State University on the instructional design review for their courses, ensuring that everything is well-organized and presented for an online learning environment. As Christi noted, their team currently has 34 content developers and just over 22 content reviewers working with them right now, but they hope to reach 300 educators partnering with them next year, to ensure that the e-Learning Central platform is well used and populated, particularly for the elementary grades.
Student/Course Exchange
The final piece of e-Learning Central is the Student/Course Exchange, an exciting option that will facilitate schools to share an online course and meet the needs of students even if only 1-2 students in a school are interested in a particular course or topic. By offering a class online for students across multiple schools in the state, the Student/Course Exchange will be able to better meet the needs of Iowa’s students, even when their local school cannot offer a specific course of interest.
This functionality is currently in development since it is more logistically complicated, but it will be on the platform later down the line.
Roundup
At the end of the webinar, Tina and Christi took questions from the audience. Those questions were all exciting, but we will let you watch them in the video if you are interested in learning more.
While the Iowa e-Learning Central platform is very new and still undergoing development, it’s clear from Christi and Tina’s talk that there is a lot of care going into this work and that the needs of students, educators, and families are at the heart of this new tool. We look forward to seeing it come together, and we hope you enjoyed the talk and this summary of it!