The Knowledge Economy and Postsecondary Education Report of a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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5 A Role for the Internet in American Education? Lessons from Cisco Networking Academies
5 A Role for the Internet in American Education? Lessons from Cisco Networking Academies
Pages 127-158
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From page 127... ...
The students learn from a common curriculum offered that is in nine languages and delivered over the Internet. Since the majority of Cisco Networking Academies in the United States reside in public high schools and community colleges institutions that educate the vast majority of American youth the team developing the Academy program confronted many of the same problems that beset American education.
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From page 128... ...
Among the driving forces underlying current educational reform efforts is evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) that a great many American students leave high school without mastery of these critical skills.
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We want to be clear on the limits of this case study. We do not seek to evaluate the effectiveness of the Cisco Networking Academies in providing marketable skills to students.
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From page 131... ...
First, its extraordinary rate of growth prompts questions about how the program works and why it is appealing to high schools and community colleges. Second, learning how the Academies team dealt with generic problems that hinder improvement in American education may provide ideas about how to deal with obstacles to progress.
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Frezzo and Gosine piloted 132 A ROLE FOR THE INTERNET IN AMERICAN EDUCATION?
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3. The curriculum would be updated frequently to keep it abreast of RICHARD MURNANE, NANCY SHARKEY, AND FRANK LEVY 133
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Initially Ward and Belous envisioned that the CATCs and Regional Academies, as well as the Local Academies, would all be in high schools. Soon, however, they found that community colleges were 134 A ROLE FOR THE INTERNET IN AMERICAN EDUCATION?
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From page 135... ...
By 2001, half of the Regional Academies in the United States were located in community colleges. Table 5-1 provides a summary of the types of institutions in the United States in which Local Academies and Regional Academies are located.
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From page 136... ...
Regional Academies receive one set of routers and switches from Cisco at no cost. The Cisco Learning Institute, a public charity funded and formed by Cisco, pays for CATCs to provide training to two Regional Academy instructors.
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Local Academies chose to teach the Cisco networking curriculum. Many instructors chosen by the Local Academies were high school teachers or community college instructors with considerable teaching experience but no knowledge of computer networking.
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Regional Academy instructors told us that, at the request of Local Academy instructors, they sometimes modeled the teaching of a particularly difficult chapter, or observed an instructor teaching a chapter for the first time. While instructor training focuses primarily on teaching the technical material in the curriculum, the design is for Regional Academy instructors to model best teaching practices.
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From page 139... ...
These are important contributions of technology to professional development. At the core, however, professional development in the Academies program depends on the quality of the Regional Academy instructors who provide the training.
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From page 140... ...
As a result, many schools and community colleges find that after investing in Cisco Academy training for faculty members, they lose many of these same faculty to higher paying positions in industry.3 Since the Academy program has no influence over the salaries schools and community colleges pay to Cisco Academy instructors, it has little leverage for solving this problem. Its only policy instruments are to make training available to new instructors and to insist that potential instructors complete the training before teaching the curriculum.
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From page 141... ...
Retaining a Focus on Developing Critical Skills for All Students The decade of the 1990s was a period of policy change in American education. Sparked by growing realization that a great many students leave school without mastery of basic cognitive skills and that labor market opportunities for these workers had declined markedly over the past 20 years, almost every state in the country engaged in standards-based educational reform initiatives.4 While the plans vary across states, they have in common specification of the skills all students should master in each core subject at particular grade levels and tests to measure whether students have mastered the critical skills (Murnane and Levy, 2001~.
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as well as Cisco's own CCNA certification exam. To date there are no systematic studies evaluating the long-term benefits to students from participating in the Cisco Networking Academy 142 A ROLE FOR THE INTERNET IN AMERICAN EDUCATION?
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The research groups commissioned teachers and college faculty who were familiar with both computer networking and the national standards to read the Academy curriculum and document points of alignment. The curriculum alignment document reported that Cisco Academy curriculum activities address 12 of 14 mathematics standards, either partially RICHARD MURNANE, NANCY SHARKEY, AND FRANK LEVY 143
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From page 144... ...
5As described in cisco Networking Academy Program <2000y, Educational cYsERCONNECTIONS, Inc. was the research firm that documented the alignment between the cisco Academy curriculum and national science and math standards; V-TECS was the research firm that documented the extent to which the Academy curriculum addressed skills described in the 1991 SCANS document Secretary Commission, 1991~.
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From page 146... ...
The changes in the CCNA exam drive changes in the Cisco Networking Academy curriculum. The Internet plays a key role in improving the Academy curriculum.
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From page 148... ...
Student's responses to the multiple-choice questions go directly to the Cisco Academy server in Arizona and students receive back their exam grade in a minute or two. The exam grades for each student are automatically entered into a spreadsheet that the instructor can access to check on student progress and to assign final course grades.
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From page 149... ...
Yet a great many studies over the last 30 years have documented that the quality of teaching in American schools varies enormously.8 Assuring that all students enrolled in Cisco Networking Academies receive consistently good instruction has been a goal of the program since its inception. In fact, the one uneasy response to George Ward's initial presentation of the Academy concept to a group of educators in spring 1997 dealt with accountability.
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From page 150... ...
The single number describing the average rating students gave on the 15 survey questions is sent to the Regional Academy overseeing the particular Local Academy and to the Academy Quality Assurance team. In addition, participants in instructor training complete online evaluations of the quality of their training.
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From page 151... ...
Quality assurance in the Cisco Academy program depends critically on the efforts of Regional Academies, the majority of which in the United States are in community colleges. While Cisco allows Regional Academies to recover the costs they incur in supporting Local Academies and training their instructors, and a few charge an annual support fee as high as $15,000, many charge little or nothing.
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Graduates of the four-semester Cisco Networking Academy may obtain the Cisco Certified Networking Associate (CCNA) credential by passing the same examination that graduates of commercial training institutes take.
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However, as illustrated in Box 5-1, almost all of the jobs, even those paying the lowest salaries, required RICHARD MURNANE, NANCY SHARKEY, AND FRANK LEVY 153
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While this does not guarantee that teachers know how to teach the curriculum, it does provide some assurance of subject matter mastery. The brief history of the Cisco Networking Academies demonstrates that the Internet has the potential to be a valuable resource for improving education.
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Figuring out how to bring about these cultural changes and how to use the Internet to facilitate these changes is a slow process. A final question to consider is whether the Internet is different from the many technological innovations radio, instructional films, RICHARD MURNANE, NANCY SHARKEY, AND FRANK LEVY 155
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From page 156... ...
It is too early to tell exactly how the Internet will alter the demand for particular skills or the capacity of human societies to teach the critical skills. However, the experience of the Cisco Networking Academies suggests that it is a mistake to see technology as substituting for effective teachers in helping students to learn.
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From page 158... ...
Students who have learned with understanding know the Unctions of elasticity and hence are freer to consider possibilities like a non-elastic artery that has one-way valves (Bransford and Stein, 19931. Overall, this example illustrates how memorizing versus understanding represent different reaming goals in the Jenkins framework, and how changes in these goals require different types of teaching strategies.
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