Edio provides teachers the ability to personalize learning for students.
CCA’s learning management system will be new and improved next year. Edio, which stands for education for individualized outcomes, is the new LMS that will be implemented in the upcoming school year.
In this episode of the WeAreCCA podcast, Joyce Good, senior director of learning, and Joanna Shelley, director of secondary curriculum and instruction, share some insight about the complex process of creating the new courses for edio.
After countless hours of writing, designing, editing and reviewing, edio is nearly ready to help students succeed.
- LISTEN NOW: CCA staff discuss benefits of new LMS
The first step for designing the new LMS was coming up with what curriculum the courses would have to cover throughout the year.
“It’s all research based and it is all standards aligned,” Good said. “Research based means that people have taken these materials and tried it out with students and that there are white papers and studies done on how effective the programs are.” “Standards come from Pennsylvania, and they are what we must teach, too.”
After collecting all the resources and conducting all the research, they had to decide which programs to select. Ultimately, CCA asked the teachers to decide which programs to use.
“We had the teachers review the materials and choose what they thought would be best for our students,” Shelley said. “Elementary teachers looked at elementary resources, middle school at middle school and we invited administrators to be part of it as well and high school staff had the high school resources.”
- WATCH NOW: Get to know edio
Once the courses were selected, then they had to be written and planned out. Similar to the selection process, CCA relied on its teachers to plan and write courses for edio.
“Who better than our teachers who know our students? They know what’s going to excite our students. They know where challenges lie in the past systems – the past courses our students have completed. They know the content the best,” Shelley said.
After that, courses had to be designed, written and produced. Working with Learning Mate, an established editing company, allows for a two-step review process in order to eliminate any errors and refine the lessons.
“They review it for a content edit, so they’re making sure that the lessons are written in an organized fashion to make sense to the learner on the other end that we’ve included the right amount of detail, that we’ve used the right level of vocabulary for the kindergartener sitting at home or the 12th-grader taking 12th-grade English,” Good said.
“During the copy edit cycle our lessons are checked for accuracy, for spelling mistakes, for grammatical things, for just visual accuracy from one lesson to the next that experience for the learner stays the same,” Good said. “By the time your student sees their coursework those lessons have gone through multiple layers of revision and feedback and we believe are really ready for our students.”
Good and Shelley highlighted new and enhanced features of edio that will benefit the experience of the student.
“There’s a hot spot where students will get to press and click buttons on pictures and have captions that come up and teach them about the picture instead of having to read paragraphs at a time,” Shelley said. As well as “ audio clips inside a lot of courses from the designers where we might ask a question and tell the student to press the audio button to make sure they were able to answer the question correctly.”
For Good, the key feature of edio is its ability to individualize.
“The blueprint for where we’re going is going to be much more individualized. Right now we are giving a good run, first start, at individualizing but we expect to go much further with it as we can start to layer on.”
To summarize the process, Good called it both “a hill to climb” but also “one of the most amazing experiences.”
“When we say all-in-one package it really is that,” she said.
