Michael J Spark Grant

Published by J. Gregory McVerry on 20^th August 2019

Updated 20^thAugust 2019

Inreasing high school readiness for online learning

Executive Summary

The Persistence Through Agency, Activism, and Networking program seeks to improve readiness for online learning in communities that the server marginalized peoples. Specifically, this grant will improve the efficacy and agency of participants by connecting their passions to a personal website. We will use a formative design experiment to explore if providing high school students with a website and blog to reflect on their learning prepares them for higher education in a networked society.

Problem

Every year students will enroll into higher education for the first time and never step on campus. The increase in online education has been astronomical. Based on recent surveys 33% of all college students will take an online class next year (Allan & Seaman, 2015). Yet the drop out and retention rates are also high (Boston and Ice 2011) especially among students of color, first generation students, and community colleges (Hachey, Wladis & Conway 2013, 2014; Howell, Williams and Lindsay 2003). Students must adjust to the distance, flexibility, interactions and technology (Arbuagh, 2004). Most importantly students need the opportunity to learn how to learn in online environments.

Online students have to adjust to shifting roles in online learning. Grasha & Yangarber-Hicks, 2000). Traditional research has looked at this issue as one of distance (Arbuagh, 2004) between the learner and the scholar. For many students entering higher education they were not afforded the opportunity to learn in high school where the responsibility of the learner is built into the learning.

Online learners must also learn how to learn in flexible online settings. This includes increasing self-monitoring and self-management skills (Dacko, 2001; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999). Students must learn to balance this increased flexibility and this grnat seeks to provide the opportunities for asynchronous learning before college

In order for online learners to take advantage of the flexibility we must understand the time loss to learning new technology (Anderson, 2004). In fact studies in middle school settings (Leu et al, 2016) and in higher education (Arbuagh, 2004) have found significant instructional time lost to learning new technology. This grant seeks to provide students with the digital literacies skills they need to thrive as online learners. By reducing the time loss student face when entering the online classroom for the first time we hope to improve persistence and skills required in the modern workforce.

Persistence Through Agency, Activism, and Networking provides student an opportunity to increase their flexibility, quality of interactions, and remove the distancing in online education. To accomplish this we focus on building digital literacies and technology self-efficacy skills by teaching students to learn when learning online as they become bloggers in a networked of connected learners.

This grant will look to seed digital learning and networking experiences across New Haven schools and cultural organizations that work with high school aged children. Specifically, any school, classroom, or community organization can request involvement. This will include every participant being given a website, access to online trainings, and the ability to attend on the ground bimonthly events to develop personal websites.

Over the course of six months participants will undergo three curricular modules:

Module One, “Tell Your Truth”-Every participating group and member will develop a personal website, blog, and identity
Module Two, “Learn Something” Every participating group and member will document how they learn knowledge or skill within their chosen passion.
Module Three, “Teach Something” Every participating group and member will teach knowledge or skill within their chosen passion.
Module Four, “Do Something” Every participating group and member will engage in an inquiry project to better their selves or the world.

Through iterative design based methodologies we will identify pedagogical moves that best support high school readiness for online learning.

Innovative Solutions

The Persistence Through Agency, Activism, and Networking program improves access, affordability, and efficacy in post secondary education through innovation. Our pedagogy and technology will ensure students have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to excel in online learning environments. In fact we will prioritize working with graduating seniors who will need these skills before enrolling in the fall.

Innovative Pedagogy

This study is based on a theory of change that sees the injustice in online education as a need to move our instructional design through a lens of intentional equitable hospitality (Bali, Caines, A., Hogue, DeWaard, & Friedrich, 2018) rather than traditional approaches such as transactional distance theory (Moore, 1970).

Moore’s Transaction distance theory underpinned much of the instructional design of online learing. This theory broke instructional design into crossing the distance between structures and dialogue that exist between student and teacher. As this transactional distance increases learner autonomy must increase.

From a intentional equitable hospitality perspective we reject the “othering” built into transactional distance theory that sees learning as both a transaction and as an imbalance of agency.

We seek to design online pedagogy that is intentionally welcoming to students so they do not face an unknown when enrolling in their first higher education class. We also recognize equity not as a state or scale but as a task that higher education must address.

We hope to be intentionally welcoming by focusing on the agency of the learner, embedding our work into the passions of existing learning communities, using production based activities, and focusing on learning how to learn in online environments.

We will also focus on equity in education using culturally proactive methods rather than remediation or intervention. Specifically we will focus on disciplinary literacies and digital literacies as the students curate their identities through a variety of digital tools. intentional hospitality versus transactional design

Moore’s Transaction distance theory underpinned much of the instructional design of online learning. This theory broke instructional design into crossing the distance between structures and dialogue that exist between student and teacher. As this transactional distance increases learner autonomy must increase.

From a intentional equitable hospitality perspective we reject the “othering” built into transactional distance theory that sees learning as both a transaction and as an imbalance of agency.

Intentional Hospitality

Learner Agency.

We will first focus on learner agency by having participants spend the first module defining their own digital identity as they build a personal website and blog. This innovative pedagogy is rooted in empirical evidence. Agency in online learning drives engagement (cite) and allows learners to see themselves as successful. We believe this curation of identity (Potter, 2012) by building websites will help build the personal infrastructure of learners (Campbell). They will enter future online higher education spaces as members and not outsiders. We will then further welcome learner agency by connecting to exisiting passions.

Passion Based

To increase our intentional hospitality, we will allow participants to bring their own passions with them. This begins in the recruitment phase of the grant where we will seek participating youth art and high school clubs. Then after the first module where participants define themselves, they must document how they learn new knowledge or skills within their passion. In the thirds module participants must then create learning materials to teach others in our emerging networks about their passion. In the final module participants must then choose an activity to change the world and document their steps. By connecting learners to their passion, we increase their agency while creating opportunities for production based learning.

Production Based Learning.

Research into connected learning (Ito et al., 200x) has demonstrated the power of production-based learning. We will increase our intentional hospitality by encouraging the remixing and creation of artifacts of learning rather than the recorded screencast and webinars the plague online learning. Specifically, participants will have templates of websites to serve as mentor texts () to remix. They will create reflections, posts, and multimedia compositions throughout the study.

Intentional Equity

We will also focus on equity in education using culturally proactive methods rather than remediation or intervention. Specifically, we will focus on disciplinary literacies, digital literacies, and learning how to learn as the students curate their identities online.

Disciplinary Literacies.

A major element of culturally proactive pedagogy is to recognize the skills and importance of code switching while carving out a space of academic discourse that acknowledges many stories are hidden under the dominant narrative. This project seeks to intentionally welcome the voices students bring while scaffolding the language and networks of academic language and disciplines. Most importantly during the final module participants will be encouraged to evaluate texts and build networks with people concerned with similar issues. By connecting people to experts in the field we focus students on text structure and networks.

Text Structure.

As an intentionally equitable study we will provide no remediation or intervention. Students of color or marginalized people are not broken and they do not need to find a voice. Instead we need to extend opportunities to engage in lessons to improve college reading and writing embedded in their four modules.

Specifically students will have the opportunity to use screencasts and annotation tools to mark up texts during their inquiry units. The facilitators will provide interactive lessons on text structure and signal words through the use of mentor text. Participants will record screencasts as they deconstruct the text structure of academic texts in their discipline. Most importantly students will engage in these text moves as they extend professional learning networks.

Networks and Equity.

In our efforts of intentional equity, we will stress the creation of learning networks. Support and interaction with other students of color has consitently shown to be a strong tool in addressing the systemic inequity of higher education. We want our participants to build these networks before entering higher education. In fact our federated social tools will allow all the participants to connect their sites while maintaining control over how they share their posts.

We also want to encourage participants to build their networks in their passion with experts in the field. In fact we posit that the role of people in disciplinary literacies, and reading comprehension in general are under stated. Background knowledge matters but knowing folks to ask when it is missing is a close second. We hope to encourage the networking skills students need to thrive in online learning environments. By connecting

Digital Literacies. We also help to intentionally address equity by focusing on the digital literacies of online learners (Belshaw, 2011). Yet we also know a digital divide has emerged (cite). Even worse Henry (2009) noted that a tertiary divide exist where students in low SES districts receive lower quality Specifically every participant will be given a a domain and website. They will learn basic HTML and web design.

Innovative Technology

Dialogical Learning in a Social Community Space. Specifically, the funds for the grant will be used to create a federated social community environment, meaning teachers and students control how their data gets shared across different levels of loosely connected networks while also being able to read sources from across the same networks. We believe this approach to building a personal digital cyber infrastructure (Campbell, 2009) builds the disciplinary literacies and digital literacies knowledge and skills students need to thrive.

Our Persistence Through Agency, Activism, and Networking plan will raise success in online learning through the use of innovative technology. Specifically, all participants will be given a blog on the Known platform. This platform uses webmentions to create space for dialogical utterances (Bakhtin, 1970).

A webmention is a w3c standard, the board that approves web technologies, that allows two websites to communicate. If a student writes a post another student can reply to the post from their own website. They do this by publishing a post type called a reply. The webmention is then sent and this new post shows up on the original post as comment. This creates a sense of agency and community from each student’s website and is made possible because of microformats.

Microformats are a type of data that any HTML element can carry. This metadata is used in a variety of tools and existing building blocks to create different post types. Students can post bookmarks, photos, replies, read, listen, and blog posts. The funds for this grant will be used to further this interoperability.

Specifically we will use funds to first improve the micropub capabilities of the Known CMS platform. Micropub is another web format that allows different apps or websites to publish to student websites. Students could, for example, choose from any number of tools to install on their phones and publish to their site. They will be able to use open source broswer extensions for bookmarks and other post types.

We will also use funds to further develop a social reader that can federate between classrooms and schools. New social readers, similar to RSS readers, allow students to have a stream of everyone’s post. However, due to the micropub integration students can interact to what they read in their feed. Meaning I could read an article from one student, comment on that article and the reply will be published on my website as a post and on the source’s article as a comment. This all happens from a social reader. The funds from this grant will be used to build a native social reader into the Known platform.

Population

The Persistence Through Agency, Activism, and Networking will serve high school seniors in the New Haven and Hartford Area. In New Haven 33% of students graduate on grade level in English and 31% in Math. In Hartford only 24% of students graduate on grade level in English and only 19% in Mathematics. These two cities were chosen due to the high number of first generation and students of color. We need to recenter our educational opportunities on marginalized people. Overall this grant seeks to recruit 30-60 students across the two cities to be in the program.

Recruitment for this program will be done through local high school clubs and community arts organization. Driving this program through a student passion rather than through a lens of intervention or “overcoming the gap” is an essential element of this program. Using snowball methods we will first identify potential club and organization facilitators. We will then choose three organizations in each city for the program with the goal of 5-10 high school students involved with each group.

Timeline

October

October5-6th Team Meeting

Face to Face meeting of the Known Open Collective held in conjunction with the IndieWeb Camp scheduled for NYC .

Remote weekly development reasons
Recruit organizations for involvement

November

Remote weekly development meetings
Improvements of micropub endpoints
Development of annotation plug-in
Creation of Module One Curriculum

Finalize participant organizations

December

Remote weekly development meetings
Core social reader beta

Social reader integration with community service APIs
Social reader IndieAuth integration
Creation of Module Two Curriculum
Production version of IndieAuth for user authentication
Sign Memorandum of Understanding with participants

Meeting

January

Production version of microsub/micropub core
Remote weekly development meetings
Pilot Social reader web app

Content validation of modules one and two

February

Remote weekly development meetings
Finalize Social reader service infrastructure
Recruit participants

Parent meetings
Participant outreach

March

Production version of social reader web app
Create individual sites for users

Remote weekly development meetings
Collect Baseline Data

April

Begin the program

User support
Weekly user site maintenance
Data analysis

May

Begin module one and two

User support
Weekly user site maintenance

June

Complete module two
User support

Weekly user site maintenance
Data analysis
Face to Face Meeting

July

Complete module three

User support
Weekly user site maintenance
Data analysis

August

Complete module four

Final data analysis

Methods as Metrics

This grant will utilize formative experiments (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003; Reinking & Bradley, 2008) to ask what could be from a mixed-methods perspective. This project will use four to meet our goals: 1:) Collect Baseline Data, 2:) Develop Intervention. 3:) Implement Intervention, and 4:) Retrospective Analysis.

We begin our study with the pedagogical goals of improving the self-efficacy and agency around the use web technologies found in online learning.

Specifically we will ask:

How can we can encourage students to openly blog about their passions in order to ensure resiliency in future online endeavors?
Does a community space for networked learning lead to greater self-efficacy with web technologies?
Does a community space for networked learning lead to greater expression of agency and activism.

A variety of data sources will be used to answer these questions through the four phases of analysis. This includes field notes, interviews, content analysis utilizing a frequency of idea units and reflections on agency, and self-efficacy surveys.

As a formative study we will use these data points to iterate on the design as we strive to reach the goals of the program

Target Outcomes

Increase the number of individuals prepared for 21st century careers.

Increase students’ college persistence

Uses or advances education-focused digital technologies.

Total Amount

25,000

Budget Narrative

Personnel Costs 12,175.33

Dr. J Gregory McVerry will spend 5% of his time on the life time of the grant. This includes $4,926.08 of salary and $2,449.25 of fringe at a rate of 8.3% which is set by the state of Connecticut. Dr. McVerry will develop the curriculum, recruit participants, teach the modules, and conduct data analysis. Dr. McVerry will make an in-kind donation of his time to the monthly meetings of participants. Greg will also attend the weekly development meetings.

A student worker will be included in the grant to assist in network maintenance and data analysis. They will provide a 10 hours of service over the lifetime of the grant for a cost of $4,800.

Travel Out of State $4,800

There will be three face to face meetings throughout the lifetime of the grant. The first will be held in New York City October 5th and 6th, the second December 4-7th in Tamp, Fl. The final meeting will be June 22-23rd in Portland Oregon. The meetings are geographically dispersed to accommodate the remote team. The team meetings are essential for product design and curriculum validation.

Known Open Collective $8,000

The development of the learning platform will be lead by the Known Open Collective. Founded by Known inventor Ben Werdmüller and Known Open Source Developer Marcus Povey. The collective is open to volunteer membership and supported through donations. We hold monthly meetings to plan development.

$8,000 will be allocated to the Collective for development of the microsub and micropub endpoints, IndieAuth integration, the creation of a social reader app, and the ability to syndicate posts across federated networks.

This is 160 development hours at an average cost of $50 across two developers. While the Collective will decide on contributors to use Southern Connecticut State University will act as the fiduciary party and will hire all professional services.

Printing and Advertising $1,000

In order to recruit partner organizations and participants we will rely on print media. This includes flyers and forms. We will also make handouts and paoer guides for students who prefer to read paper over pixel.

Staff

J. Gregory McVerry, Associate Professor of Education, Southern Connecticut State University will spend 5% of his time on the grant and will serve as main contact.

A computer science student worker will be hired for 10 hours a week to assist in network maintenance. The student worker will also be trained in data analysis and storage and will assist Dr. McVerry.

Marcus Povey will spend a minimum of 5% of his time completing a minimum eighty hours of development across the first five months of the grant and up to 10% of his time for 160 hours of development.

A second developer maybe added by the Known Open Collective for a 5% of his time completing a minimum eighty hours of development across the first five months of the grant and up to 10% of his time for 160 hours of development.

Accelerated Turn Around

Given the constraints of an academic school year the accelerated turn around of this grant will allow us to meet the development deadlines necessary to meet the goals of the Persistence Through Agency, Activism, and Networking program. Specifically we can begin the development of both the technology and the curriculum at an October face to face meeting in New York City.

Long Term Impact

Our goals revolve around building a better web by empowering people to build a better self before they then step out and build a better community. Simply put by increasing the resiliency of marginalized students as they enroll in online learning we are helping to create an internet built on the passions of voices who are often ignored or shouted down online.

We are also building this project to scale. By utilizing open source tools and web standards such as HTML and webmentions we will create the building blocks any passion based community can use to improve the digital literacies of their community.

In fact he Known Open Collective, in a project funded by Southern Connecticut State University, is currently piloting the Known CMS as the backbone to an Open Educational Resource network in Accra, Ghana and across rural northern Ghana. All improvements made to the platform as part of this grant will be immediately felt around the world. The tools we develop will become popular learning choices for communities who seek greater privacy or simply can not afford the high cost of learning management systems.

The four module curriculum being developed in this grant will also be openly licensed and ready to share. This will include tutorials on exploring text structure and writing for activism. These lessons can also be adapted to anyone around the world.

Finally we believe the Persistence Through Agency, Activism, and Networking program will prepare high school students from marginalized communities to excel in online learning. If we can demonstrate that providing students with a domain name and a bit of web hosting can improve their agency and efficacy with technology, then this product can scale with marginal cost.

Team Qualifications

J Gregory McVerry

Dr. J Gregory McVerry is an associate professor of education at Southern Connecticut State University. He was a Neag Fellow at the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut where we earned a doctorate in educational psychology studying the internet reading habits of adolescents.

Dr. McVerry is considered on of the world’s leading experts on the literacy and technology. He has served as the e-editor of the Literacy Research Association organization, has dozen sof publications and hundreds of presentations.

Dr. McVerry is also a leader in the open source movement. In 2015 Dr. McVerry was recognized by Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox browser, as one of 50 people in the world best protecting the Open Web. He was awarded the Joann Finn Early Career Research fellowship to develop #questiontheweb, an open web class on teaching website credibility. Dr. McVerry also writes and develops much of the leadership curriculum for Mozilla.

Marcus Povey

Marcus Povey is a founder of the Known Open Collective and an award winning developer. Mr. Povey created the KQED learning management system using a Known backbone. This platform has won numerous awards and is used by 1000’s of monthly visitors.

Marcus collaborates with some of the most important centers of scientific excellence, across Europe and is involved in some of the most important and large scale EU Open Access projects developing new ways to access and reuse scientific research.

Known Open Collective

The Known Open Collective is a group of loosely organized volunteers. These people represent some of the most talented folks in technology. They volunteer their time and make financial donations to support the organization. Every month we hold remote meetings. While this grant does not rely on volunteer contributors, they will provide an asset as reviewers and beta testers.

Publicity Plan

We will disseminate our progress throughout the entire grant relying on our commitment to open source and open pedagogy. All data will be made available in the aggregate, interview data, after a member check, will be anonymous and made available.

We will also take advantage of social media and our blogging networks. Dr. McVerry is connected across many important educational channels and has over 5,000 LinkedIn connections and 3,500 Twitter followers. His blog is well followed and will provide for faster and greater reach than traditional academic journals.

Our participants, as they blog, will also become our greatest source of pride and publicity. Students will be asked to tell their story, document as they learn something, teach something, and then engage in community activism. This hyper local focus is a feature and not a bug of our publicity plan.

We are also active members of the IndieWeb community. This group of technologist seeks an alternative to the corporate web where users own their data from their own domain. This network provides us with massive global reach. Every month there are 10-12 meet ups across the globe. We will target these for outreach.

Dr. McVerry will also present traditional work. In fact the second face to face meeting aligns with the Literacy Research Association conference. He will also present results at other conferences and publish in traditional journals.

Annual Budget

The Annual budget for Connecticut State University is approximately $50 million dollars. The top revenue source is student tuition followed by a constantly shrinking contribution from the State of Connecticut.

The annual budget for the Known Open Collective is $2,982.00 annual. We currently have $1,638 dollars on hand. All revenue is raised through monthly reoccurring donations.

Previous Grants

McVerry, J. G. & Povey, M. (2018). $10,000 ReVIEW Talent Feedback System. START Preliminary Proof of Concept Fund.

A start up grant from the University of Connecticut to add single sign on through oAuth integration

McVerry, J. G. & Lockwood, H. (2018). $4,000. #FemHack

A grant to plane and run a hackathon built of feminist pedagogy

Okobi, E., Brown, M.,McVerry, J. G., & Miller, M. (2016-2018), $129,121 Implementing GIS-Based Integrative Learning into NHPS Social Studies Curriculum

Teaching inquiory in social studies through geographic information systems