Alabama State Department of Education (ITB): 06-DLC 2016
Jonathan Schmalzbach - ation
866-705-5575 x 701
General Information
Letter of Intent
Alabama State Department of Education
Dear Evaluation Committee,
Accelerate Education is pleased to respond to Alabama’s IFP for ACCESS Virtual Learning Online Courses and/or Course Modules.
Expressly, we are a company that has a full catalogue of K-12, courses, we’re designed to allow our partners in to modify our courses, work well in the Desire2Learn platform, have core and honors courses aligned to Alabama standards, and offer adaptive credit recovery courses.
We hope our presentation will demonstrate to you that we qualify to be one of your partners; we hope even more that when we partner there will be great benefit to Alabama students and teachers.
Accelerate Education is a corporation. The company’s address is:
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Accelerate Education
3655 W Anthem Way
Suite A-109237
Anthem, AZ 85086
The name and title of the person who will
Be authorized to make legal representations is:
Michael Axtman
CEO and Owner
3655 W Anthem Way
Suite A-109237
Anthem, AZ 85086
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The person acting as the contact for matters concerning the proposal is:
Jonathan Schmalzbach
8221 Manor Road
Elkins Park, PA 19027
Email: ation
Phone: 215.284.3859
Accelerate Education meets and exceeds the minimum requirements of the RFP and will comply with all terms and conditions of this RFP which will be shown in our answers to the qualification and proposal sections of the RFP.
Signed,
Jonathan Schmalzbach
Legally authorized agent for Accelerate Education
TABLE OF CONTENTS
General Information…………………………………………. . Page 2
Part I: Company Qualifications/Experience Pages 4-31
Part II: Technical & Other Requirements; References Pages 32-39
Part III: Modifying Courses…………… Page 40-42
Part IV: Cost………………………………….. Page 43-45
Part VI: Catalog and Demo Access……………. Page 46-52
Part VII – K-8 Model School Offering & Proposal ……….Page 53-59
Company Qualifications
And Answers to Specific IFP Questions
Accelerate Education has over six years’ experience in providing virtual and blended learning solutions for states, districts, intermediate units, and virtual schools of all sizes as well as individual schools. We have students in every state as well as an international presence.
Accelerate Education provides a full catalog of K-12 courses, a credit recovery catalog, blended learning solutions and the Ideal Learning Library. The Library is a collection of assets that can be assigned to individuals or groups to support personalized or accelerated learning.
The company is a producer of comprehensive digital courses and curriculum used for the K-12 audience. We work with large districts, intermediate units, virtual schools, districts of all sizes as well as individual schools. Accelerate Education courses are widely used for original credit, credit recovery, remediation, intervention, acceleration, and exam preparation.
The company is a national organization serving 70,000 students in nearly every state. The company also has a large cohort of students in Africa.
The principals of the organization have been working in digital curriculum since the late 1990s and between them have run four online education companies.
The company is going into its 7th year of operation and employs between 50 to 75 veteran workers in the education space.
Accelerate’s mission is to provide flexible solutions to help close the achievement gap, reduce the dropout rate, improve student outcomes, and most importantly serve schools, teachers, and students.
Nationally Recognized Standards
Accelerate Education is accredited by the AdvancED Accreditation and certified by Quality Matters. We have been accredited since June 30, 2009 with AdvancED. Our accreditation runs through June 30, 2018.
We also have many of our courses approved by Quality Matters.
Accelerate also aligns to iNACOL standards for course design and our courses are recognized by that organization.
Furthermore, we are aligned to Common Core State Standards. We also consulted key national organization guidelines (NCSS, NGSS, NCTE and ACTFL) as well as best practices as recommended by online organizations (ISTE) in our course design.
Additionally, this proposal includes alignments to Alabama state standards. All of our alignment is done by a third party to ensure objectivity.
As our company is newer than many in the digital curriculum space, we were able to design our courses to iNACOL and Common Core standards directly instead of fitting existing courses to meet these requirements.
Part I of the bid will address IFP questions that center on Design Philosophy, Exemplars, and Team
Part II will address other IFP and technical questions
Part III will address Modification
Part IV will address price
Items highlighted in orange are Alabama specific requests which are followed by our answers.
Instructional Design Philosophy
And Answers to Specific IFP Questions
· The bid should describe the procedures and processes used in content development and review to ensure that the content included in all courses and/or modules contains a clear and explicit alignment between objectives, activities, assessments, instructional strategies, and technology.
Program Development Steps
• Creation of scope and sequence based on standards and objectives and informed by best instructional design practices (Addie, Gagne’s 9 events, Cognitive Learning Theory)
• Formation of development team that will consist of instructional designers, classroom teachers, our experienced development staff, graphic designers and assessment experts.
• Course assembly with multiple review iterations built in by internal and external reviewers (Review occurs bi-annually after a course is published.)
• Technical and content QA
Creation of our scope and sequences is based on standards and objectives and informed by best instructional design practices including Addie, Gagne’s Nine Events, and steeped in Cognitive Learning Theory.
Gagne is particularly important with digital curriculum as the “events” grab a learner’s attention, are clear about signposting objectives, build on prior learning and allow for significant amounts of practice, feedback, and opportunities to assess performance.
Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction
1. Gain attention
2. Inform learners of objectives
3. Stimulate recall of prior learning
4. Present the content
5. Provide “learning guidance”
6. Elicit performance (practice)
7. Provide feedback
8. Assess performance
9. Enhance retention and transfer to the job
How Does It Look?
Take this example from a lesson – Evaluating Algebraic Expressions Containing Exponents -- in Algebra 1. In order to gain attention, we use a video example of this with two students exchanging rumors, which is an authentic model and example of algebraic expressions with exponents.
A screen grab from the video – peers are exchanging rumors.
Once the video is complete, which includes presenting the math around rumor-spreading we ask the student to solve a problem. This is the same guidance a teacher would provide in the classroom and includes a visual element.
This is followed by more video instruction, done by a state certified math teacher on our staff and more guided instruction that allows students to see if they have grasped the concept.
This is followed by more instruction and practice.
There are two opportunities with modeling to practice the concept.
An offline activity gives student a chance to further practice the concept (while getting students away from the screen for a time, which has been shown to be effective in learning.)
Overall, this single, lesson contains 3 more videos (five in total) and multiple practice opportunities.
Students also have to complete a worksheet that is assessed.
Section of the worksheet
Students take a quiz in the lesson as well. Before taking an online quiz, the student has a chance at self-assessment with remediation. This allows students to understand their readiness for taking the quiz.
Sample question
Personalized feedback based on incorrect answers. This is new information.
To summarize, in one lesson, the student has been shown five videos been given multiple times and multiple ways to practice and get feedback. This leads us to Cognitive Learning Theory.
Cognitive Learning Theory
Cognitive Learning Theory gives learners efficient ways of processing information – repetition, graphic organizers, summaries, mnemonic devices, and opportunities to discover and practice. These all lead to reinforcement for better transfer to long-term memory.
Cognitive theory believes that before transfer occurs, multiple exposures to a concept must happen. This may take up to 14 exposures to the concept.
As can be seen from above, students are exposed to a concept many times and in many ways.
Importantly, students are also participating in hand’s-on interactives – they are doing as part of their learning.
· The bid should describe initiatives in typical course and/or module design that support and enhance student engagement and student motivation.
Motivation refers to the desire, reason, or predisposition to become involved in a task or activity, engagement refers to the degree to which a student processes text deeply through the use of active strategies and thought processes and prior knowledge. (Improving Adolescent Literacy, 26)
Engagement refers to a deep disposition toward learning. Engagement is best served by giving students active learning – giving students the opportunity to meaningfully learn through doing. Each lesson provides multiple opportunities for students to observe, inquire, practice, confirm, and self-assess. In our lessons, there is also direct instruction, formative practice on every page of instruction, review, video, confirmation through diagramming, and then self-assessment. Formative feedback – much like a teacher would provide in a classroom – appears at the end of most pages to confirm learning.
Other factors that promote motivation include the flexible nature of the courses so students can work anytime and anywhere. The courses are self-paced – students will not feel deadline pressure.
Moreover, students are presented with copious amounts of video and multimedia. Students enjoy and are motivated and by doing. There are many interactive opportunities for hand’s-on interaction.
· The bid should describe how higher levels of understanding, thinking, problem-solving, and meta-cognition are incorporated into the courses and/or modules.
Metacognition reductively means thinking about one’s thinking. In Accelerate English courses for example, the student has an opportunity to “see” a successful thinking process modeled, be it in essay writing or text handling. The student is then led through a guided practice of that thinking process. The modeling and guided-practice is followed by a chance to try the process alone and then self-assess with a rubric.
All Accelerate courses are rich in opportunities for the student to learn to think about his or her thinking, and to become adept at making confident and competent decisions that will extend far beyond the academic skill of reading. This design decision was made to lead each student to the point of becoming an independent learner who will be successful in a wide variety of situations, both academic and otherwise, and whose independence will produce a curiosity about the printed word and life in general.
Motivation can be stimulated by difficult but achievable tasks that engage individuals to use their higher-order thinking skills and exert effort over an extended period of time (Brandt, 1998).
Problem-based learning and inquiry-based instruction are two practices designed to engage students in challenging activities (Bransford et al., 2000).
Motivation to learn can also be stimulated by personally relevant goals, which can be developed when individuals have personal choice and control (Brandt, 1998). Adolescent learners benefit from activities they perceive as relevant to their lives and from those that build confidence.
As students take increasing responsibility for their own learning, the possibility of transferring their new learning to future situations will increase. Instruction that integrates metacognitive skills—self-assessment, reflection, sense-making, and self-regulation—into the curriculum across multiple subject areas can help students take increasing control of their own learning (Bransford et al., 2000)
The importance of coherence in the design of curriculum for developing student understanding was advocated by Jerome Bruner in his 1960 classic The Process of Education:
The teaching and learning of structure, rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer. . . . If earlier learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible. (p. 12)
Students develop understanding of a discipline by engaging in challenging activities that allow them to see how, where, and when the important ideas and facts are relevant (Bransford et al., 2000). Students can acquire more factual knowledge when it is connected to meaningful problem-solving activities.
Conversely, problem solving cannot be taught without a base of factual knowledge making students’ thinking visible is to help students develop metacognition, or active monitoring of their own learning (Bransford et al., 2000). Metacognition includes making sense of new content, assessing one understanding and reflecting on one’s learning—practices that increase students’ responsibility for their own learning and increase their ability to apply new knowledge to different situations. Online curriculum increases opportunities for students to engage in learning that integrates
One of many examples of this can be found in our Biology course. Here a student is asked to analyze risk factors in cardio-vascular disease. This poses an authentic situation which has the student reflecting on a relevant topic, solving a problem, making recommendations, and using higher order thinking skills such as application of concepts, synthesis, drawing conclusions and citing evidence.
The bid should list examples of videos, animations, audios, simulations, and graphics typically used in course and/or module design and describe how these directly support and enhance student learning in the courses and/or modules offered in response to this ITB
As can be discerned form the above examples, Accelerate courses have dozens of certified-teacher made videos as well as Discovery Education videos in every course.
Our teacher-made videos are particularly powerful because 1) they have been created by certified classroom teachers 2) are not taking head videos. Instead they show what the student needs to learn without a droning teacher being filmed in front of a camera. This focuses student attention where it belongs – on the material being taught. Then, like a good teacher does, giving the student an opportunity to see if he/she has understood the material.
Meaningful interactives allow students to test their understanding of concepts as this one from the biology course in which student create a food web.
Sharp graphics and image figure frequently throughout all our courses. In the example below, from biology a food chain graphic is followed by an interative that allows students to test their understanding.
Most importantly, our multimedia and interactives focus on how to prepare students for high-stakes testing. In this interactive from English Language Arts 10, a student reads informational text and answers a series of questions with formative feedback. These items are modeled on ACT and PARC tests.