Keep Thinking’s Early Childhood Education Professional Training (ECEPT) Program: A Technological Approach to Service Learning and Experiential Education

Keep Thinking seeks a social entrepreneurship with local community resources to implement an early childhood education professional training (ECEPT) program for high schoolers and young adults.

Basic features of the American high school can be modified to target the ¼ of high school students who fail to graduate within four years of beginning. Two major reasons for high school are to prepare teenagers for civic participation and economic self-sufficiency. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. Based on empirical evidence, four strategies can be implemented to improve education for teenagers. First, education should implement a curriculum that prepares students for both postsecondary education and careers. Keep Thinking’s ECEPT program uses mastery goals in line with college admission expectations and early childhood education professional objectives to prepare students for both postsecondary education and careers. Second, program funding should not be limited to the number of students attending but also to things like content of coursework, success in participation and graduation and procurement of jobs and postsecondary education options. Keep Thinking’s ECEPT program plans to fund future projects through a variety of means, including utilizing community resources and procuring public grants, so that resources will not be limited based on the number of students. Third, more adults than traditional educators should be responsible for the education of youth. Keep Thinking’s ECEPT program will utilize service learning and experiential education, both of which will require students to go out into our community. Academic advisors, coaches, internship supervisors, and mentors will be available to help with the holistic education of program participants. Finally, programs should expand the option of geographically fixed areas. Keep Thinking’s ECEPT program will include technological approaches (like distance learning and social networking) that will allow the program to attract students from an area larger than a fixed school district (Stern, 2009).

Implementing Personalized e-Learning Environments: Just Do It

       Personalized e-Learning Environments: Considering Students' Contexts (Eyharabide, et al. 2009) was a chapter covered at the 2009 World Conference on Computers in Education in Brazil. The chapter discusses a case study whose goal was to improve e-learning by personalizing it to the user's contexts. The authors believe “an improvement in the user’s contextual information leads to a better understanding of users’ behavior in order to adapt the content, the interface, and the assistance offered to users” (Eyharabide,et al. 2009).

       Context is a description of aspects of a situation like physical location or the temperature of the room. In e-learning, there are four contexts to consider: personal, cultural, technological and pedagogical. Personal context may include a student's age, background or user profile while cultural context can include things like language, social norms, gender or ethnic aspects. Technological context can include things like device processing power, Internet availability and operating system. Finally, pedagogical context includes things like user knowledge, learning styles and personality.

      Imagine: one student logs onto his college's learning system, where his college notes are read to him in his native language and you-tube videos that support his class material are offered for watching at his convenience while another student across town watches a power-point presentation from class that was downloaded to her cell phone while waiting for a dentist appointment. Using contextualized e-learning, both of these scenarios are possible for the same student.

      Unfortunately, just as context cannot exist without an entity, contextualized e-learning cannot exist without an institution to implement it. Implementation starts with better education for the educators expected to use the program. And when deciding the best method for the educators, may we suggest a contextualized e-learning environment?

References:

Eyharabide, V., et al. (2009). Personalized e-learning environments: considering students’ contexts. Brazil: Retrieved from http://link.springer.com.dml.regis.edu/book/10.1007/978-3-642-03115-1/page/1

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Michael