Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

9.20.11 | The Obama administration last week announced the creation of a national research center that will focus on developing new technologies for teaching and learning.

Digital Promise, which received bipartisan Congressional support, is set up as an independent nonprofit organization with public and private support. It plans to work closely with researchers, entrepreneurs and schools on three key challenges:

• Identifying breakthrough technologies.
• Learning faster what’s working and what’s not (i.e. rapid prototyping and testing of new products).
• Transforming the market for learning technologies. Digital Promise plans to work with school districts to create “smart demand” to reduce barriers for entrepreneurs and drive private-sector investment in new technologies.

The organization will be overseen by a board of leaders in education and technology appointed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The announcement comes on the heels of Duncan’s participation in the launch of the fourth annual Digital Media and Learning Competition. A number of other educational initiatives announced along with Digital Promise include new National Science Foundation funding for cyber-learning; an effort at the University of Chicago Urban Education Lab to research how to improve school outcomes for urban youth and provide recommendations to policymakers; and the upcoming launch of the 2012 National STEM Video Game Challenge, which we’ve written about before on Spotlight.

The development of Digital Promise received support from the Carnegie, Century, Knight, MacArthur, and Open Society foundations. Initial start-up funding was provided by the Department of Education as well as the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Duncan and Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix and a former president of the California Board of Education, said U.S. students are falling behind students in countries that are economic competitors. 

Imagine, though, an online high-school physics course that uses videogame graphics power to teach atomic interactions, or a second-grade online math curriculum that automatically adapts to individual students’ levels of knowledge. All of this will happen. The only question is: Will the U.S. lead the effort or will we follow other countries?

By supporting new research and development, Duncan and Hastings hope to boost learning and make Americans more competitive in the global marketplace: “We are optimistic that with the right ideas the U.S. can become a leader in leveraging the power of technology to promote learning.”