Now that you've become more acquainted with the online course environment and your fellow learners and have reflected on the course purposes in relation to your own goals, we're ready to start thinking about how we can use technology to enhance students' understanding.

We'd like you to begin that process by thinking about what we mean by understanding. Think about something you understand well-it might be physics (though not if you're like us!), or history, or writing poetry, or telling stories, or painting with watercolors, or playing some musical instrument. How do you know you understand? Our guess is that you might say, "I can explain it, I can compare it with other things that are similar but not quite the same, I can do it in a range of circumstances, etc." The point we want to emphasize is that understanding goes beyond simply repeating information that others have told you. And it goes beyond routine application of skills you have rehearsed. Understanding involves being able to think creatively with what you know and use knowledge flexibly to deal with a range of practical situations.

We want to argue that this kind of flexible understanding is what we hope our students will develop. Even though many of us feel pressured to cover a broad range of required curriculum content, we also realize that our students must be prepared to think, learn, and act responsibly in a rapidly changing world. We need to prepare them to understand what they study well enough to use it creatively. We also want them know how to learn for themselves and to want to continue learning. In addition, we need to incorporate new educational technologies in ways that support this kind of understanding. Even if we believe that new technologies are worth introducing for their own sake, they can be even more valuable if students learn how to use them in the service of understanding important subject matter, methods of inquiry, forms of expression, and purposes for learning.

So how do we foster this kind of understanding and desire to understand? That question was the focus of a multi-year project that started in 1990. It involved a wide range of teachers and a number of researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The classroom practices of teachers who were good at developing this kind of understanding in their students were observed and, through many rounds of dialogue relating educational theory and practice, some answers to a set of basic questions emerged:

• What topics are worth teaching for understanding?
• What exactly do we want students to come to understand?
• How can understanding be developed and demonstrated?
• How can we assess and improve understanding?