Hello, NROC community members.
Many of you know me already – no surprise, since I’ve been on staff at The NROC Project (NROC) since 2010(!). For those of you whom I’ve not yet met, my name is Ahrash Bissell, and I am President of The NROC Project. I assumed this position last year and am still managing my transition. In fact, we are refining the roles and responsibilities of our entire staff, in the face of new strategic directions and the desire to continue improving our existing work. It’s an exciting time for NROC and our active community of secondary, postsecondary, and adult education leaders and diverse organizational partners. Week over week, we continue to accumulate evidence that we are making a positive impact on students, and that we are on track to deepen and broaden that impact in myriad ways. This President’s Note is intended to be the first of a series of long-form communications that will convey what we do – daily, monthly, annually, and over the long term – in service to our mission and in context with broader trends and topics in educational innovation, technology, and reform.
Last month, we hosted our annual NROC Member Meeting. It was, as usual, a whirlwind of catching up with many of our longtime members, meeting various people who are new to our collaborative community, and trying to soak up as many of the insights, ideas, and suggestions as we could manage in the few days we had. It was, in short, exhilarating—and exhausting.
Having had time to reflect on the Member Meeting, I want to use this inaugural note to share some further thoughts, particularly pertaining to the different ways that NROC prioritizes its activities in pursuit of our mission. As a reminder, our stated mission is ‘To help meet society’s need for access to effective, high-quality educational opportunities in an era of rapid economic, social, and personal change.’
Over its fifteen-year history, NROC has dedicated itself to a number of strategies in pursuit of this mission.
And, even as we have committed to these different activities for the long term, refining and improving our capacity to support institutional partners who have embraced these strategic efforts, we have also found ways to extend our reach, broaden our interests, and stay on the edge of what’s possible.
Taking stock of our many activities, and where we feel we have been able to have the most impact, some things became clear. NROC is, at heart, an innovation shop. As I often say when explaining our work, ‘we are an advocacy and problem-solving organization with a well-stocked toolbox.’
We believe that we do our best work when we are able to engage with our institutional members as partners in imagining possible solutions to an issue and then supporting the execution of that shared plan toward the ultimate goal. Our courses and tools—comprising learning content, technology platforms, and digital-age protocols—have all been built to serve those mission-based goals.
NROC is also a community of people, practitioners, and supportive institutions. NROC staff are not the ones who engage directly with students. Instead, we rely on member institutions to be the agents who convert aspiration to action. On occasion, however, we receive direct feedback from teachers and students, and those personal communications provide substantial motivation for us to continue in this work.
Putting these organizational functions together, I feel that NROC serves a critical role to educators and educational institutions by being a trusted partner and guide in the never-ending pursuit of more effective and equitable student outcomes. Especially in the context of the massive technological and social changes we are enduring, some sort of stabilizing influence seems critical. Importantly, we see our role as enabling change, not resisting it. We cannot work effectively with institutions who do not want to change practice, and we can help institutions in the throes of change stay calm and pursue measured, effective strategies that improve student outcomes. This year’s Member Meeting theme—‘A Thriving Hive’—did a good job of capturing this balanced approach; to wit, ‘Comprised of secondary, postsecondary, and adult education innovators, the NROC member hive is unafraid of experimentation and iteration. Our collective output is improving access and equity.’
So what does this mean for our day-to-day work? In some of my Member Meeting remarks, I referenced a graphic that is intended to distill the many activities that consume NROC staff time. I think that graphic is a useful organizer for my comments here. Depending on your point of view, you might see the graphic as a setting sun, or perhaps a steering wheel, or some sort of hub-and-spoke structure. All of those interpretations are suitable to our purposes, so stick with whatever works for you.
For any given problem (or opportunity) NROC is asked to tackle, we have tended to pursue a similar line of logic. First, we consider whether the problem at hand is amenable to improvement with existing products or technologies. Our analysis in this regard is holistic; for example, there are many great products out there for many different purposes, but we are especially concerned with access, equity, and effectiveness, and typical business transactions in educational technology tend to limit access, exacerbate inequity, and resist community engagement in demonstrating effectiveness and supporting continuous improvement. This perspective is grounded by our roots in OER production and advocacy. On the flip side, there are many free products or OER that are not sufficiently polished or designed for effective implementation in the institutional contexts in which most of our students need help. It’s not enough to build stuff and give it away . . . the whole point is to improve student outcomes, so we have to commit to product distribution all the way through to student utilization and impact.
We have had cause to take a hard look at a number of issues over the years, as referenced earlier. The results of our efforts remain the primary solutions we support every day. They include the NROC Algebra 1 course, the NROC Developmental Math and English programs, HippoCampus, and EdReady. Building these products takes a lot of time, expertise, and money. As part of NROC’s commitment to access and equity, we took great pains to seek out grant dollars to pay for nearly all of these development costs, thereby alleviating the burden of recouping those investments via membership fees or costs passed to students. Supporting and improving these solutions requires ongoing investment and effort, so much of our staff time and resources goes to these maintenance tasks.
But high-quality content and platforms are only useful insomuch as they actually improve students’ lives. Because most students pursue educational credentials from respected and accredited institutions, it is essential that our solutions get adopted by interested educational establishments. As such, another substantive activity for NROC staff is raising awareness of our work, recruiting interested institutions, and sustaining our institutional member community. There are numerous challenges to this work, and we have found that there is no way to standardize the process. Fortunately, we have many champions among our members who help us to spread the word, so we’re not entirely on our own in this endeavor.
Our work doesn’t stop at adoption. Indeed, we have found that it is absolutely critical for us to provide substantial start-up support and some amount of professional development to our member community, in order to have some assurance that our content and tools—notably EdReady—will actually get used. As we point out all the time, EdReady can only be effective if students actually use it. Over the past few years, we have expanded the number of staff focused on implementation and ongoing support, including attention to student outcomes and documentation of efficacy. In considering our plans for the future, one of our aspirations is to dedicate even more time and effort to these types of activities, especially for members who are seeking to build on early successes and really embrace the opportunity for experimentation and continuous improvement.
Finally, we have long recognized that the full impact of our work cannot be realized on our own, even considering the size and diversity of our active membership. If we want to have a truly systemic impact on improving student learning and educational success, we need partners in that effort. Our partners run the gamut of our activities, from content and platform production to accessibility and research to distribution and awareness building. I will write more about our various partnerships, separately and as a group, in a future note.
So what do we make of all this? Are we doing the right things? Are we using the best approaches? Is there some sort of emergent coherence that we can describe?
I believe the answer in each case is yes. That’s not to say that we have completely figured this out, but I think we see many indications that we are on the right track, and that we have largely been on the right track for some time. The news is filled with stories of students being bewildered or misled as they matriculate to postsecondary studies. Consequently, they drop out, often saddled with debt. We have also been tracking admissions scandals, culture wars, and questions on all sides about the connection between degree attainment and job prospects. In many ways, our institutions of higher education have lost control of the narrative, even as demand for further education continues to rise. Hard-working college professors, high school teachers, after-school program coordinators, and many others are having to manage multiple responsibilities and conflicting expectations, all with diminishing support.
We believe that we can play a meaningful supporting role in transforming this narrative. People everywhere are passionate about education because just about everyone agrees that education is the single best solution for taking control of one’s own destiny. Since perceived destinies vary depending on cultural and family history, everyone has some idea of how education might be helping or hindering our students. Educational institutions have to navigate these conflicting opinions and shifting expectations, and in many cases, the institutional response has been to hold steady and to resist change. But our student populations are changing, the connections between education and employment are changing, and the options available for learning are changing. Stubborn refusal to examine and update legacy practices will not weather this storm.
In our work, we strive to find reasonable pathways to and through transformation, and we collaborate with willing educators and administrators to put plans into action.
In this, our fifteenth year, we feel a renewed sense of commitment to our membership, our mission, and our capacity to drive positive change. We will be updating some of our ongoing development processes to involve our members even more closely. We are finding new ways to expand our distribution capacity and reach more people. And we are always exploring how to strengthen and expand our existing solutions, even as we look for opportunities to build new tools and impact new areas of concern.
Most importantly, we are excited about current and future collaborative efforts which are bringing recognition for the accomplishments of our members.
Our colleagues in Montana were recently awarded the WCET WOW Award for their incredible work scaling EdReady Montana across that vast state. Congratulations to Dr. Ryan Schrenk, Dr. Bob Curry, and everyone at EdReady Montana and the Montana Digital Academy. Download the student success ebook to learn more.
Dr. Jan Case, who has been so instrumental to the groundbreaking EdReady implementation at Jacksonville State University, shared this note with us recently:
“I just got the official word this week that my promotion to Distinguished Professor was awarded. I got the portfolio back today, and several of the reviewers emphasized my work with JSU and EdReady as being a factor in their recommendation that I receive the promotion. Thanks for your support and for this and for the many other ways that you are helping others help students.”
We have had the pleasure of bestowing recognition for outstanding leadership and contributions from among our membership at our annual meeting, and it’s gratifying to see other people and organizations recognizing the same things.
I hope that readers feel that same sense of purpose, that same sense of possibility. As always, we welcome input and engagement at any time – we want to hear your voices. Look for specific calls to action over the course of the coming year, and please let us know if you will be at a conference with the potential to meet one or more of us in person. 😉
Do you want to raise your voice or hand? Contact me.
