Building and Scaling an e-Learning Platform for Constructionist CS Education in America’s School System: Lessons Learned During Research and Development of Globaloria, 2006–17

The call for expanding computer science (CS) education in today’s schools has reached a crescendo with the goal of expanding the pipeline of CS and IT majors entering the workforce and powering up young people’s thinking and essential new literacies for the 21st century. However, fewer than half of K–12 schools offer substantive CS courses which include programming (Google & Gallup, 2015). Expanding CS education raises new and unique challenges to already over-stretched schools.

This talk will highlight these challenges and present some of the ways in which the e-learning curriculum platform Globaloria was designed in collaboration with Dr. Reynolds' design-based research, to be responsive to these challenges. Research findings on Globaloria's instructional design iterations across 10 years will be discussed as productive failures and successes, leading to the organization's recent acquisition by Carnegie Learning, and substantial growth and scaling. As a Constructionist e-Learning platform, Globaloria’s path offers both technological and conceptual innovations for designers and inventors whose projects are also inspired by educational R&D perspectives.

Rebecca Reynolds’ work investigates social constructivist human learning across a range of contexts including naturalistic online participatory settings such as social media environments and MOOCs; information environments supporting inquiry activity; and more structured and designed learning settings, systems and experiences. She also researches and engages in the design and development of socio-technical systems for learning, including instructional technologies that bear specific learning goals and objectives. She applies socio-technical, learning sciences, information science and media studies perspectives to human knowledge-building, sharing and meaning-making with networked technologies, at multiple levels of analysis. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal, Information and Learning Science, published by Emerald.