Knowledge Management and the Blended Learning Approach

The Problem

Our district has had a paced curriculum for all core courses for about five years now. The online curriculum for the English department is hard to understand and offers little in the way of interactive, engaging lessons to teach the assigned objectives. There is also no support for teachers with questions or concerns. Consequently, teachers have either played by the rules and stuck to the lackluster curriculum with little success or they have chosen to ignore it completely and venture out on their own. The original goal of the paced curriculum was to help teachers be more successful in the classroom and save them much needed time and energy in the planning stages; however, this is not the reality.

The Solution

Using the blended learning approach and a knowledge management system can help the paced English curriculum be more successful. I propose formal training in the way of training sessions where the English teachers are shown the basics of paced curriculum including the overall objectives and how to access the information to be successful. Teachers will be given starter manuals, and the informal learning can then begin. Access will be through a main portal, a wiki created for the English teachers of the district. The wiki will have uploaded lesson plans, discussion boards, and links to the paced curriculum database, Eduphoria. Collaboration will be both online and face-to-face. Teachers will use the online discussion boards on the wiki to ask questions and brainstorm ideas for particular objectives. They will also be able to upload lesson plans to share with one another. The district will also set-up collaboration meetings with the district coordinator for English I, II, III, and IV teachers separately. These meetings will allow the teachers to have face-to-face discussions. The outcomes of the collaboration process will be codified into the wiki and Eduphoria database. The teachers’ experience and collective knowledge along with the curriculum objectives will all be uploaded into the database and wiki for easy access. Hopefully, with successful collaboration, teachers will be able to access several resources for teaching each objective in the curriculum in a meaningful way.