A Quick Look at Kettle Moraine’s My Learning Collaborative

In this article, Kevin Erickson provides an overview of the information system, myLC that supports the Kettle Moraine personalized, competency-based approach to learning.This article is part of a series on personalized, proficiency-based education in Wisconsin and the tenth in a ten-part series on Kettle Moraine. Please read the first post on Kettle Moraine before continuing to read this post, as it will prepare you to fully take advantage of the ideas and resources shared in this series.

The learner profile and monitoring learner pathways are core elements of all the personalized schools in Kettle Moraine School District. The learner profile isn’t simply a form that is filled out by the student as in some schools. It’s the capacity of learners to capture and reflect upon the dynamic process of their learning. The learner pathway is their unique progress in diving into and demonstrating their learning through a mix of assessments, seminars, projects, real-world experiences, and capstones.

My Learning Collaborative (myLC) from Epiphany Learning was originally designed at Kettle Moraine to meet the scheduling and planning needs for a few small Wisconsin schools building interdisciplinary, collaborative student-teacher project and seminar-based instructional models. As those schools grew, myLC evolved into a competency-based and learning continuum platform with support for scheduling, transcripting, and student reporting. myLC was built for schools that were operating as laboratories. myLC was built in a way that accepts that research, best-practices, and regional differences in the language learning will have a dramatic influence on learning.

As the director of the School for Arts and Performance in the Kettle Moraine School District, I have access to daily feedback in what is and isn’t working in our pursuit to turn the ownership of learning to the students. Norms of school, policy, frameworks, and software tools all intersect to create or inhibit student agency. Most recently, our school has shifted to emphasize skill and dispositional competencies as the most important indicator of student success. Our traditional knowledge-based competencies now serve in the background as the supporting knowledge to these more relevant applications and projects.  Naturally we want to have the tool adjust so that students see daily feedback on these competencies. This developer/practitioner relationship has been critical to to feedback loop that informs development.

The myLC platform has 4 critical components:

Goal Setting & Course Portfolios

• Within each course or subject, the competencies required can be customized for each student
• Students and teachers can set short and long term credit goals
• A dashboard shows all progress toward goals

Progress Monitoring

• A student dashboard shows current experiences, progress in school-defined benchmarks
• Calculation of credit (and optionally grades) allows schools in transition to mix carnegie-based credit with interdisciplinary competency-based credit
• Competencies from any school-defined course subject can be added to any learning experience, task, project. Total progress in any one subject or course is aggregated and reported

Design and Scheduling

• Both students and teachers can create learning activities and add any competencies
• Schools can completely customize the platform, including competencies, labels, and language, so the workflow is reflective of the school’s pedagogy
• Schools and students can see an at a glance view of a student schedule

Continuum Reporting

• Continuum-based approach to competencies, where each subject’s competencies are attached to the student, not the class section or calendar year
• Evidence-based workflow where students submit evidence toward each competency (myLC fully integrates with Google Apps)
• Progress monitoring graphs that show students a “red/green/yellow” progress bars for progression towards competency goals
• Multiple teacher views of grading and evaluation screens to quickly add notes and feedback to students

In the spring of 2017, myLC was sold to Epiphany Learning. This new relationship allows the tool to scale while I focus on school design and best-practices as Director of the Kettle Moraine School for Arts and Performance in Wales, WI. I continue to lead development of the platform as VP of Instructional Design for the Epiphany Learning.

Read the Entire Series:

• Part 1 – Buzzing Toward Personalized Learning in Wisconsin
• Part 2 – FLIGHT Academy: Magic Happens When Kids Come Together
• Part 3 – Blair Elementary School
• Part 4 – Creating a Learner-Driven System in Waukesha (Part 1)
• Part 5 – Waukesha STEM Academy: Personalizing Instruction and Learning Experiences (Part 2)
• Part 6 – Waukesha STEM Academy: Rethinking Space, Time, and Reporting (Part 3)
• Part 7 – Waukesha STEM Academy’s Journey from ABC to the Learner Continuum (Part 4)
• Part 8 – Kettle Moraine: Where the Future of Education is Being Created Student by Student
• Part 9 – Kettle Moraine: How They Got Here and Where They are Going
• Part 10 – The Five Pillars of Teaching and Learning at KM Explore
• Part 11 – The Sound of Learning at Create House at Kettle Moraine Middle School
• Part 12 – KM Global: Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Learning Design
• Part 13 – Chasing Competencies at KM Perform
• Part 14 – Reaching Out into the Community at High School of Health Sciences
• Part 15 – Practicing What They Preach: Micro-Credentialing at Kettle Moraine
• Part 16 – Distributed Leadership at Kettle Moraine