Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

8.28.09 | What’s the difference between implementing a project at a school in your own backyard, scaling it to hundreds of schools nationally, and building partnerships so that it can scale internationally? A lot, it turns out.

During the past year, we have traveled from China to Italy, from Chicago to South Africa, and many places in between studying the opportunities and challenges of “going to scale” with the digital curriculum,  Quest Atlantis. 

The inquiry-oriented, project-based curriculum in Quest Atlantis uses videogame technologies in an immersive, multiplayer environment.

Some challenges were easy to anticipate—different languages or different cultural expectations for what is appropriate or acceptable. What we did not fully anticipate were the incredible rewards, experiences, and lessons we would learn.

We discovered that teachers worldwide are eager to find educational experiences that position their students as active agents who are capable of thinking independently to solve problems in unanticipated ways.

(Click here to read “Why Should Educators Care About Games.”)

Even in countries where teaching practices were more structured and didactic, teachers and their students leaped at the chance to participate in projects that could spark students’ imagination and creativity. Teachers in China, for example, were both shocked and pleased at the unique and unanticipated responses of their students to a diversity unit in Quest Atlantis. The unanticipated ways students engaged in the quest gave teachers insight into their students’ potential when playing the game and for engaging in complex ideas more broadly.

“I really think,” said one teacher, “that in Quest Atlantis [students] can express their ideas freely, so now I know that maybe in this class, I can have a free talk, and let them talk freely about their own ideas about the activity.”

Indeed, this example suggests that seemingly small perturbations can have significant and lasting systemic impact. Using a mission or a unit in Quest Atlantis constitutes a small chunk of instructional time—from about two to ten days. It’s clear that even these small, short interactions can reveal potential that students and their teachers might not have previously anticipated. From a scaling perspective, this is good news. Even with students the same age, the local standards and expectations are so diverse that it is impossible to create meaningful activities that can successfully replace large chunks of existing curriculum. But it turns out that, once again, the quantity of time spent having new and novel experiences is not nearly as consequential as the quality of that time.

Finally, we discovered that trying to advance disruptive technologies (those that challenge the status quo) can meet steady resistance, not always intentional, which makes it challenging for new curricula and technologies to take hold. Resistance comes in the form of ideological tensions, technological limitations, incompatible pedagogies, and even insufficient support structures.

We have found that instances of success are times when both teachers and administrators are wielding their power from different directions to push back against that resistance to make these innovations possible. This involves technological assistance, such as ensuring that bandwidth is freed up for particular times during the day to support implementations, community involvement, such as organizing meetings with parents in order to answer questions and allay concerns, and personal skill, as when teachers successfully inhabit the narrative with their students to support their immersion in this strange and novel world.

For this, we need to be careful, ensuring that we are both talking and listening, that we are supporting change at the same time that we are respecting the real-world constraints facing an already over-worked profession. It is in balancing these tensions that we are working to support change while at the same ensuring we are avoiding a type of pedagogical imperialism.

Please visit our project website to learn more about this exciting work: http://QuestAtlantis.Org.

Quest Atlantis is an immersive online world designed to help teach science to junior high school students. Development and expansion have been supported by the MacArthur Foundation.