Designing a Networked Learning Environment
A Working Paper
December 1997

Prepared by Stone Wiske, James Moore, Linda Booth Sweeney, David Grogan, Rhonda Strumminger and Andy Williams. With assistance from Nathan Finch and Jon Chalmers

With funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations in September, 1997, a group of researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education began to develop an online environment to support teaching for understanding with new technologies. The primary goal of this site on the World Wide Web is to link innovative educators with one another, researchers, and other resources to support the improvement of teaching and learning, especially in middle and high schools. The site is intended to facilitate the development and distribution of educational materials and to encourage their use by promoting reflective dialogue among a networked community of educators.

The approach to education that we aim to support focuses not on the transmission of information, but on helping learners make their own sense of key ideas and modes of reasoning in various disciplines or subject matters. A group of researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in collaboration with a number of school teachers developed a framework to support this kind of pedagogy. The Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework is structured around four elements which guide decisions about organizing curriculum (around generative topics), articulating what students will learn (understanding goals), designing and supporting learning activities that develop and demonstrate students' understanding (performances of understanding), and monitoring progress while planning for further learning (ongoing assessment). The Networked Learning Project is specifically intended to support those who are interested in working with the TfU framework.

During the first three months of the project, a team of faculty and graduate students at Harvard has focused on two strands of work. One strand entails a review of current research and knowledge about using online environments to support teacher development. This analysis of what is already known has included a review of written materials, analysis of existing online sites, and interviews with colleagues involved in related endeavors. A second strand takes a more empirical approach by developing some web-based resources and recruiting appropriate teacher partners to try them out, critique them, and recommend improvements.

In this working paper, we summarize our current analysis of the field and our plans. We invite suggestions and comments.

Issues to Consider

Our review of efforts to employ online environments to support professional development of teachers indicates that four interacting issues must be addressed: audience and access, the technical design of the website, the content of the resources provided by or through the online environment, and mediation of the social interactions among those who use the environment. We must also attend to the integration of these various issues in an evolving system made up of people as well as the technical infrastructure. In this section we summarize our current thinking first about each of these issues and then about their integration.

Audience and Access

The primary audience this environment is intended to serve is school teachers who are interested in using new technologies to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms. Such teachers may range in the nature and intensity of their interest in this endeavor and in their access to and familiarity with telecommunication technologies.

Range of Concerns. Research on teachers' responses to innovations demonstrates that they typically experience a progression of concerns and interests as their familiarity with an innovation develops. Some researchers characterize these "stages of concern" as: awareness of the innovation, personal concerns about the demands the innovation may make and the rewards it may generate, management concerns about how to integrate the innovation with one's own practice, assessment concerns regarding the overall costs and benefits of the innovation, and (for teachers who have integrated an innovation successfully into their practice) reflective concerns about collaborating with others to improve and extend the approach. Different kinds of resources and communication strategies will be needed to satisfy users' whose needs and goals may range from those with immediate pragmatic needs to retrieve an example of "good practice" to those interested in sustained reflective dialogue about "good ideas" to those who wish to collaborate in creating curricular resources.

Ease of Access. Our target teachers also vary in their ease of access to telecommunication technologies. Access is affected partly by the availability of speedy, reliable hardware and software necessary to interact with the Networked Learning online environment. It also depends on the teachers' familiarity and comfort with communicating online, e.g., through private email, in online discussions with multiple participants, and in posting materials or ideas for reactions from online colleagues. Finally, access is affected by other demands on teachers' time. We know that the kinds of teachers we hope to support are extremely busy. By definition they are going beyond the demands of daily life in schools to attempt innovative practices. Time they spend connected with the online environment is likely to be expensive and precious. In summary, teachers' ease of access to our environment is affected by their access to appropriate hardware, their knowledge of telecommunications technology, and the ease of utility of our software design.

Balancing Priorities. The prior considerations point to a basic tension in designing the Networked Learning environment. The tension lies between providing an environment that provides maximum flexibility and fluency with advanced technologies versus providing a more limited environment that is easily available to teachers who have access to basic telecommunication tools and/or limited familiarity with online communications. This tension is discussed further in the next section on interface design.

Contents of the Online Environment

The substance of the online environment has to do with its contents, including the kinds and amount of resources it presents and the communication opportunities it supports. Our plans for the content of the Networked Learning environment reflect our own experience supporting teachers as they integrate either computer technologies or the Teaching for Understanding framework into their practice. They have also been shaped by our review of research and our consultation with experienced colleagues about factors affecting the success of similar projects.

We recognize that if this environment is to be effective in helping teachers change their practice it will need to serve not simply as a repository of materials, but also as a source of intellectual stimulation and as a forum for reflective dialogue. Of course, teachers do need to learn about innovative technologies that offer the potential to improve teaching and learning of their curriculum priorities. But mere access to appropriate technologies is not enough. Making major changes in one's teaching often entails substantial reconsideration of one's educational goals, the design and orchestration of learning activities, and new methods of assessing student products. The Teaching for Understanding framework provides guidance and criteria to help teachers rethink and redesign these elements of their practice. We have found, however, that as teachers work with the TfU framework they need time for cycles of learning, drafting curriculum designs, trying new approaches with students, reflecting on the results, and refining the design for another cycle of practice. The process of incorporating significantly different tools and techniques into one's teaching practice is a process of professional transformation. As one teacher put it, "You teach who you are." Significantly changing one's practice involves deep personal learning. Dialogue with colleagues engaged in similar work is valuable throughout this process.

Kinds of Resources. To support cycles of learning, enactment, reflection, and revision, we envision an online environment with several kinds of resources and opportunities for communication.

Pictures of Practice --images of teachers and students engaged in teaching and learning for understanding with new technologies. These might include narrative vignettes that highlight effective features and illustrate the elements of Teaching for Understanding. We also intend to gather still photos of classrooms with linked audio commentary from teachers and their students.

Curriculum Design Templates and Tools--materials to help teachers design curriculum reflecting the elements of the TfU framework: generative curriculum topics, explicit and public understanding goals, performances of understanding that develop and demonstrate students understanding, and ongoing assessment of student work with criteria that are clearly linked to goals. Templates displayed on the website will incorporate additional prompts and tips as roll-over or linked windows that users may access if they choose to support the design of effective educational plans and materials. These templates will be easy to download so that users can work with them off-line.

Examples--filled out templates of curriculum designs and lesson materials, including those in development from early drafts to completed versions, with annotations by reviewers and users.

Resources--recommended software packages, online papers, Websites, and references to print materials. These will be archived in a searchable database that users can employ to locate appropriate resources efficiently. The archive will include a means for those who recommend or review the resources to make comments about their utility.

Dialogue--forums for both moderated discussions and less formal conversations on various topics with threaded messages to which users can choose to subscribe, private email, and possibly synchronous chat rooms.

Events--online surveys, workshops, institutes, and courses on issues of interest to teachers. At least some of these online events will be organized in conjunction with the publication of particular materials or face-to-face meetings. Some events may occur over a short period in real time; others will take place during a longer period such as a one-week discussion on a particular topic moderated by a leader in the field or a survey to be completed within a three-week period.

Participants--we will create an initial registration form that visitors to the website may complete in order to facilitate connections with other like-minded educators. We are also considering ways of allowing participants to complete a questionnaire with information that will automatically trigger suggestions of appropriate resources accessible through the Networked Learning site.

Balancing Quality with Ownership. A Website of resources and discussion forums will be useful only if its contents are recognized to be of high quality. Although various participants may define quality with different criteria, we assume that all of them are interested primarily in products and approaches that are both consistent with research on effective educational strategies and adaptable to the practical contexts of school classrooms. The challenge of assembling materials that meet both these criteria is a significant one. Compounding this challenge is the fact that participants of the environment will be most invested if they are invited to submit their own materials and ideas. We welcome suggestions about ways to include submissions from participants while incorporating some mechanisms to assure quality.

Design of the Software

There are a number of online tools that can be used to implement one or more of the set of contents just described. The challenge arises in choosing the right tools for the job taking into consideration multiple goals, constraints, and trade-offs . We have identified the following considerations to take into account in selecting the tools to use:

Browser Support. Different network collaboration tools vary in the extent to which they are supported by World Wide Web browsers. Some allow the full functionality of the tool to be accessed via an unmodified web browser such as Netscape. Others require some additional software, either a browser plug-in that users might download from the Internet at no cost or a completely different Internet client that users may have to purchase. Tools that are fully supported with an unmodified browser are the most desirable because they will be most easily accessible. Tools that require the user to install additional software introduce a level of complexity and potential expense.

User Interface. Effective online environments provide a coherent look and feel, not just a motley collection of tools and facilities. The World Wide Web has a notoriously bad interface for such purposes as searchable database functionality, ease of navigation, and on-line editing and text processing. Various tools have been designed to overcome these deficiencies, such as extensions to HTML, programming languages, and plug-in applets. Most of the better user interfaces that employ such tools require the user to download extra software or purchase a different client software.

We hope to combine existing tools or develop our own interface so as to produce a coherent environment that exemplifies principles of the Teaching for Understanding Framework and other principles of effective learning. So, for example, the environment will engage users in a generative topic (e.g. designing curriculum that develops deep understanding), identify clear learning goals, involve users in performances of understanding, and provide means for users to assess their progress. The interface will be based on a central metaphor that is easily understood and generative for users. We are considering a metaphor based on climbing a mountain or navigating through a territory using alternative pathways. The paths might be laid out according to alternative subject matters or teaching approaches. Tools, resources, and opportunities for assistance would be provided along the way.

A central design element will be the use of electronic guides to help teachers move along chosen paths. For example, users will complete a brief questionnaire on their first visit. Based on their responses, a user will receive recommendations, such as a particular path to follow for designing curriculum or learning about professional development opportunities, a list of master teachers available for consultation, and discussion groups to visit. As users move through the site, they will be prompted to answer questions to help them reflect on their own thinking and use of TfU and new technologies. If users choose to follow a path that supports their design of curriculum they will be invited to post their design product to the archive of examples for commentary by other users. Mechanisms for posting ongoing assessment will also be provided.

Functionality. We are reviewing features of online databases and conferencing software to clarify the particular functions we want to include. How do we create a shared database of knowledge in which teachers can easily and readily find the information they want? Technical issues we are studying include the handling of different data types, the organization of the database, and the means by which users update the database. We are also examining existing online conference software to clarify our own criteria and to decide whether we may be able to use an available product or must develop our own. Our experience to date demonstrates that most busy people are reluctant to spend time checking multiple places on line for messages. Consequently, we are looking for a conferencing system that is accessible through the World Wide Web and that it will link fluently with common commercial email packages.

Implementation and Administration. We must develop an environment whose installation, maintenance, and ongoing administration is within the realm of the site developer's capacities in terms of hardware platform, time, and technical expertise. The site is being developed with a one-year grant, but we are aware that it must ultimately become self-sustaining through revenues generated by fees paid by users.

Customization. The tools should be customized to the exact needs of the Networked Learning site. For example, the document sharing system should permit users to create customized templates. A document sharing system might be very good at permitting multiple users to share documents, but it might be too rigid in the type of documents that could be created.

Price. The tools we have examined vary dramatically in price. Some are available at no charge; others cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to the developer and charge an additional fee for each user. Less expensive tools may provide a richness of features but require considerable time and skill to implement and administer. Price is not always an indicator of quality, however, and we are searching for reasonable alternatives.

Social Mediation

Online tools and resources must be organized, presented, linked, and mediated to attract and sustain members of a learning community. Human facilitators are needed to make online resources a means of supporting teachers' professional development. Members of the project staff will provide some of this facilitation, but our goal is to encourage the users of this website to contribute their own ideas and products and to serve as valuable resources for one another. We use the phrase "social mediation" to encompass the human facilitation of an online learning community. Our research to date has led us to conceive social mediation as encompassing several components: information management, communication structures, moderating dialogue, annotating resources.

Information Management with Push and Pull Strategies. Online resources and their users must work together efficiently in order to help the members of a community gain access to useful resources and filter out superfluous material. We use the term "push" technologies for tools and strategies that move useful information from the World Wide Web to the desktops of participants in the Networked Learning project. Examples of "push" strategies include periodic newsletters for subscribers to the Networked Learning project, email notification of registered users regarding updates to relevant parts of the website, and direct email notification of responses to a posted message. "Pull" technologies assist visitors who have made their way to the Networked Learning website. Both are needed to keep participants' informed about the website and able to use it efficiently. Pull strategies include a "What's New" section on the home page of the website and icon makers on new substance to help visitors to the website find updated or new material. A combination of push and pull technologies or strategies is needed to attract and sustain users' efficient involvement with an online learning environment.

Asynchronous and Synchronous Communication Structures. Telecommunication technologies permit users to communicate across geographic distances either synchronously or asynchronously. The latter is convenient for busy people, but it can become stale if participants never experience a sense of dialogue with quick turn-around time between messages. Synchronous communication is also possible online and can provide a stimulating supplement.

Considering the rigid and over-crowded schedules of most school teachers, we expect the Networked Learning project will mostly employ asynchronous forms of communication in which the software serves as an archive and organizer of conversation. These will include electronic discussion groups which allow threaded and archived conversations, small discussion groups or email distribution lists for teams of educators collaborating on a project, and private email. We will also experiment with synchronous communication facilities such as chat rooms and real-time online forums.

Moderating Dialogue. Unguided and unfiltered online conversations are likely to become either a soup of words without meaning or an abandoned waste land. Moderators provide scaffolding for discourse. They guide the conversation to keep it on track toward the goals of the project. They promote social interaction and offer structure and encouragement to participants who are uneasy about communicating on-line. Finally, they create structures through which participants can take an active part in the life and maintenance of the environment. Examples of how moderating the environment helps sustain community include:

Ownership/Investment--people participate in communities when they feel they belong to or have an investment in it . In order to generate useful conversation moderators should give participants the opportunity to manage their own discourse as well as tasks which deepen their commitment to the effort. Examples of such tasks include collaborative development of a product or event, responsibility for posing a provocative topic or question, allowing people to create their own space for the issues that are important to them, assigning people tasks in sustaining the conversation.

Priming the Pump--Initiating interesting on-line conversations may be difficult. Moderators may "prime the pump" with a provocative assertion to be debated, an example to be critiqued, or a question regarding a common concern.

Private and Public Conversations--When participants use private email for two-way conversations, they often sequester ideas that are of interest to others. Moderators encourage participants to bring their ideas to a more public forum. At the same time, some conversations are best kept private and moderators can suggest individual email for such messages.

Structured and Unstructured Conversations--People enter an on-line conversation with various backgrounds and experience with both the substance of the conversation (e.g., using the Teaching for Understanding framework and using new educational technologies in the classroom) and with the process of online communication and new technologies. Just as in face-to-face conversations, highly structured speech can put off those who are not fluent in the nomenclature. Our environment will include both structured discussions for those with a specific and common purpose as well as an unstructured area where people are free to post informal messages.

Annotated Resources. Allowing participants to post and annotate resources develops their investment in the environment as a forum where they can not only exchange good ideas but also help one another develop good practices. One of our main objectives in the Networked Learning on-line environment is to move beyond a surf and grab database of resources. Allowing participants to write comments about resources invites them to engage content, reflect on it, and test their ideas among colleagues. It also supports the development of collaborative products.

All of these strategies help to develop relationships among the users of the Networked Learning environment. Such relationships allow individuals to share knowledge and expertise that is not easily captured in the form of inanimate resources. It is this access to like-minded and supportive colleagues that helps people transform access to information resources into opportunities for learning.

INTEGRATING THE ISSUES

Developing the Networked Learning Environment requires attention to all of these issues in an integrated, coherent way. Furthermore, it requires the collaboration of people with varied kinds of expertise and perspectives, including learning theorists, technical specialists, communication facilitators, and school practitioners. All of these participants are attempting to create a shared resource of value to all of them in the midst of rapid technological change. Clearly we need a management approach that is different from the traditional organizational practices of centralized planning, management, and control.

We have concluded that a more valuable approach to developing and sustaining the Networked Learning Project is outlined by Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline . Senge defines a learning organization as one in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to take effective action and to produce results they really care about. He characterizes the core of learning organization work in five "learning disciplines:"

Personal Mastery:

learning to accurately describe current reality and clarify personal vision; expanding our own capacity to create the results we want and creating an organizational environment which encourages its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.

Shared Vision:

building a sense of commitment in a group by developing shared images of the future we seek to create, and the guiding principles and practices by which we hope to get there.

Mental Models:

reflecting upon, continually clarifying and improving our internal pictures and stories about how the world works and how our mental models shape our actions and decisions

Team Learning:

the ability of a team to collectively surface, test and explore mental models, to balance advocacy and inquiry, to explore their own defensive routines, and to produce generative conversations.

Systems Thinking:

a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. It is the discipline of seeing and understanding patterns, looking beyond events to deeper structures that control events, and discovering the leverage that lies hidden in these structures. (Adapted from Senge's The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook ).

We are attempting to apply these disciplines to the development of a learning team among the project staff and we hope to embody these disciplines within the online environment. Among the project staff, we are developing a shared vision through the exchange of written memos including this document which developed through a collaborative synthesis of papers prepared by individual staff members. Mental models of the software environment and collaborative structures are drafted and critiqued as a way of exemplifying our emerging consensus about desirable features of the project. We hold weekly meetings in which we exchange ideas, critique drafts of written concept paper and plans, and brainstorm next steps. Each member of the project team has specific areas of expertise and assignments related to the issues outlined in this paper. One member of the team, in addition to the project director, is responsible for maintaining a systems view of the project, e.g., maintain a long-term and wide-scope perspective on the project, examine links among multiple stakeholders, look for patterns in events and structures.

We are exploring means of applying the principles of organizational learning to the design of the Networked Learning environment itself. The Teaching for Understanding Framework is a good example of the kind of shared vision that guides members of a learning organization toward a common purpose. We intend to create structures and to foster relationships that help participants make their own sense of the TfU framework to serve their personal aspirations and the educational priorities of their organizations.

IMPLICATIONS AND NEXT STEPS

This working paper represents a collaborative synthesis of our thinking. In the coming months we will continue to elaborate, refine, and combine these ideas. Meanwhile, this conceptual work provides a foundation for moving ahead on the development of the Networked Learning environment. During the next three months, we will work on the following fronts simultaneously.

Recruit Teacher Partners

For the early stages of developing and testing the online environment, we seek teachers who are already involved in using new technologies in their classrooms and/or using the Teaching for Understanding framework. Ultimately we hope to develop an online environment that might appeal to teachers who are quite new to both these endeavors. At this stage of the project, however, we need to work with teachers who are already committed to at least one of the synergistic innovations we seek to support: TfU and integration of new educational technologies.

A further criterion for the small group of early collaborators is that the teachers have easy access to telecommunication technologies, including a graphical interface to the Internet. The reason for this stipulation is that we need to gather feedback from teachers on the substance of the online environment and to engage teachers in co-creating materials for the online environment. Eventually, we will need to develop means of supporting teachers who are newcomers to online communication and strategies for reaching teachers with limited access to these technologies. For the moment, however, we need to create valuable resources for teachers who can leap over those initial logistic burdens rather than focus on navigating the foothills of the mountain we hope to scale.

We are presently in conversation with small groups of teachers in several nearby schools with whom we have already established good collaborative relationships. One of these groups of teachers works in a Boston high school where several graduate students from the Harvard Graduate School of Education are involved in supporting the school's integration of new educational technologies. The teacher/graduate student partners make a particularly thoughtful and reflective group to participate in the early design and development of the Networked Learning Project.

Develop Resources for Curriculum Design

Our consultation with teachers who are interested in both Teaching for Understanding and the integration of new educational technologies indicates that their primary concern centers on curriculum development. They want help in designing units and lessons that exemplify TfU principles, take advantage of new technologies, and incorporate assessments of student work. We are currently developing online resources that support such curriculum designs. During the next few months we will involve our initial teacher partners in trying out these resources, critiquing them, and helping to revise them. As teachers produce curriculum materials with these resources we will begin to create an archive of exemplars, suitable for review and commentary for other teachers.

Develop Online Dialogue

While we are preparing resources to support the development of curriculum, we will also experiment with an online conferencing system. To date, members of the Networked Learning Project staff have tried a commercial conference system called First Class. This product has many strengths, but it is currently not accessible through the World Wide Web with standard browsers. Instead, users must purchase and install specific software. We consider this process too cumbersome for most teachers so we are investigating other options. During the next three months we will examine alternative existing products, consider the merits of developing our own product, and experiment with various forms of telecommunication among our initial teacher partners. We hope to have a fluent, accessible, flexible conferencing system available to the Networked Learning Project by the end of February, 1998.

Develop an Integrated Website

In addition to the two components described above--curriculum resources and dialogue facilities--we envision numerous other components of the website, as described earlier in the paper. During the next three months, we will develop an overall plan for the website including a coherent, easily navigated interface based on an accessible conceptual metaphor. In addition, we will begin to develop linked resources to support the goals of the project. These will include links to important curriculum standards such as those produced by professional organizations like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and by state or local educational organizations. We will also create links to databases of educational software and to websites that support the integration of new technologies in school practice.

In conclusion, we welcome comments and suggestions about our ideas and plans. We are also eager to hear from teachers who may be interested in participating in the project, especially those who wish to contribute as partners during the early design of the project. Please send written comments to Stone Wiske, Nichols House, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 or email to <wiskema@hugse1.harvard.edu>.