Academics, Govt. Leaders Call for More Education Tech Funding
America will fall behind the developed world in educational productivity without a new federal commitment to e-learning, said academics and govt. leaders at a panel discussion Mon. on Capitol Hill. The New America Foundation and Digital Promise, a nonprofit project to prepare public institutions for the “digital age,” sponsored the event.
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The event sought to build support for the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT) legislation, which would create a non-govt. agency similar in structure to the NSF and NIH that would: (1) Finance innovation in educational methods and technologies. (2) Fund the mass digitization of print and broadcast sources. (3) Encourage partnerships among researchers, public service institutions and the corporate sector. Sens. Dodd (D- Conn.), Snowe (R-Me.) and Durbin (D-Il.) are sponsoring the legislation, which will be introduced in late Feb. or early March, Dodd’s staff said. House sponsors weren’t announced.
Dodd said the “brain race” would define the 21st century, just as the arms race and space race were the hallmarks of the last century. He said it’s almost too late for America to catch up to other countries in educational productivity, worrying for his 3-year-old daughter’s eventual job competition from Beijing, Sydney and other foreign educational centers. America’s “alarming and unsustainable reliance on foreign scientists” makes it more pressing to fund e-learning initiatives, former NSF Chmn. Eamon Kelly said.
Former FCC Chmn. Newton Minow compared the efforts to expand e-learning to the funding of public schools in America’s early years, creation of land grant colleges in the 1860s and the GI Bill that sent veterans to college after World War 2. Digital Promise, which he co-chairs, seeks to finance the DO IT provisions through a portion of proceeds from telecom spectrum auctions.
American educational performance has been flat or declining for 30 years, said Thomas Stratmann, George Mason U. economics prof. and author of a book on education R&D investment. He said American schools among the least productive by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores, and SAT scores have fallen below mid-1960s levels.
The private sector has largely avoided education R&D because the returns are low and innovation is easy to imitate, with innovators realizing only 2.2% of the social value of their creations, Stratmann said, citing Yale economist William Nordhaus’ 2004 study. The success of intelligent tutoring systems, which have raised student achievement from the 50th to 85th percentile where used, is good reason for govt. to provide the funding, Stratmann said: “The 1970s knowledge we have in our schools is not enough to prepare our children for the high-tech world.”
One major benefit of e-learning is its low reproduction costs, Kelly said. He mentioned an online library he helped compile to distribute in Latin America, which cost $1 million to create and $1 for each CD reproduction. Minow said the Library of Congress has saved substantial sums by digitizing one of its American history collections.
In response to questions about examples of e- learning, Kelly described a classroom where each student has a computer that gives them simple, graphical step-by- step lessons and responds to their questions. Teachers can then monitor students’ computer activity to pinpoint which students are falling behind. Kelly said future e- learning applications will be abundant because of advancements in nanotechnology, expanding bandwidth and declining hardware costs.