CSOL and Beyond: Reflections on the Chicago Summer of Learning
It's that time of year . . . leaves are changing, evenings are getting cooler, and parents everywhere are celebrating the kids being back in school. This year, there is plenty for the children to be celebrating too, especially those who participated in summer learning programs.
The Chicago Summer of Learning dominated many of the Open Badges team's waking moments this summer - after all, designing, implementing and deploying a city-wide badging system across America’s third largest city in collaboration with nearly 100 different organizations within a few months was an ambitious undertaking, to say the least.
So now the question is: How did it go? Mozilla's Director of Badges + Learning Erin Knight offered her thoughts in a recent blog post, revisiting the goals of CSOL and reflecting on the outcomes of this ambitious and rewarding project.
What were the overarching goals for CSOL?
Challenge all Chicago youth to learn over the summer
Encourage youth serving organizations to collaborate and support learning initiatives over the summer
Highlight opportunities in the city related to STEAM
What were our goals for our team?
100,00: Our goal for reaching as many youth as possible, especially low-income or minority kids, and getting them to earn at least one badge
1,000: Our goal for the number of kids 'leveling up' through pathways we provide for youth to encourage additional learning
100: Our goal for getting as many participating orgs as possible
Worthwhile badges: Make the badges ‘worth something’ by avoiding having too many ‘participation’ badges as well as engaging CPS and local institutions to recognize badges.
So, the first question to ask is: did we achieve these goals, both external and internal?
Let's take a look at the numbers:
~125 organizations issuing badges
1,000+ total badges available for earning
Badge types (%): 3% participation, 92% skill, 5% achievement
~150,000 total badges issued (note: number includes some badges that are still in the process of being issued)
~50,000 total badges claimed to date
5,000+ total badges wish listed
Gender breakdown: (of reported) 53% Female, 47% Male
Race breakdown: (of reported) 56% African American, 7% White/Caucasian, 6% Asian, 29% Latino/Hispanic, 2% other
Age breakdown: (of reported) 26% under 13, 60% 13-17, 9% 18-24, 5% over 24
~6 mins average time on site
~600 total youth who earned city-level badges
~300 total youth who completed challenges, or successfully leveled up
Erin summed up her initial reaction in a word: WOW.
"We can go down the goals and check them off across the board. Over 100 [organizations] and 1000+ badging opportunities represents not only a lot of co-ordination and collaboration [...] but also an incredible coverage across the city and a heck of a lot of learning opportunities. The badges themselves were really great - [...] most badges focused on skill development with robust assessment and criteria.”
Media reports on CSOL have lauded it as a successful initiative, with Mayor Rahm Emanuel announcing in August that, due to this year’s success, the City of Chicago will continue this program next summer so that every young person in every neighborhood has access to high-quality learning programs when school is out of session.
Last month, Emanuel was awarded the inaugural Playful City USA Leadership Award for his substantial investments in play, due in part to his support in driving the CSOL program. "Cities are critical drivers for achieving play outcomes and most play-focused infrastructure investment, policies and programming happen at the local level. That is why we give special recognition to municipal leaders who prioritize play," said Darell Hammond, Founder and CEO of KaBOOM!, at the 2013 Playful City USA Leaders’ Summit, sponsored by the Humana Foundation. “I am delighted to recognize Mayor Rahm Emanuel for championing play throughout the great city of Chicago, with the first Playful City USA Leadership Award.”
"The Chicago Summer of Learning stands out as a national example – for its innovation, scope, and the tremendous partnerships that make it possible,” said Senior Advisor for Nonprofit Partnerships at the U.S. Department of Education Michael Robbins. “And this is not just about summer – the work that is being done here in Chicago can inform how we advance student engagement and learning year round."
Applying the Chicago Summer of Learning to other communities and to year-round learning programs is a natural next step: Sunny Lee, our Product Lead at Mozilla, examined “all the bits and pieces” of CSOL that the Open Badges team learned, tested and implemented over the summer, as well as looking at what’s next.
“This city-wide initiative has provided an opportunity for the Open Badges team to test new features and functionalities that we hope to loop into the core product in coming months,” she wrote. Click here to read the full post on her blog.
Tools developed and implemented for CSOL:
A backpack that supports children under 13 - Because of the requirements of the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, the reference implementation of the Mozilla Backpack currently does not support youth under 13. In a program aimed at a city’s youth, we knew this would be limiting and found a solution: two backpacks, two CSOL experiences. The 13+ youth backpack would act just like the Mozilla Backpack, enabling share capability and user volition without parental oversight, whereas the under-13 youth backpack would lack share functionality as it has no integration with existing social media; however, it would have a robust parental notification system to ensure parents and guardians are able to maintain clear oversight over their children’s activities.
Open Badger https://badge.chicagosummeroflearning.org/ - Chicago was the 2nd client to use Open Badger, an open source badge issuing tool we created last year to help Mozilla webmaker create and issue badges. This provided an opportunity for us to scale up the features of Open Badger to account for not only the number of organizations involved, but the badges themselves - While there were a total of 12 webmaker badges, there were a total of 442 unique Chicago Summer of Learning badges.
Aestimia https://assess.chicagosummeroflearning.org/ - Aestimia is a badge assessment tool. In Chicago Summer of Learning, it was important to ensure there were plenty of online, self-paced learning activities for youth. In order for the learner to earn any of these online, self-paced badges, they would have to go through the activity and apply for the badge by submitting evidence and reflections. Once a badge was submitted, it would go into a badge application queue that is accessible by selected mentors. The badge application review process is enabled through Aestimia.
Badge studio http://badgestudio.chicagosummeroflearning.org/ - Badge studio is a web-based tool that helps anyone to easily create a badge design. This is something that’s been in high demand in the community as many organizations don’t have a visual designer on staff. For CSOL, streamlining badge design was critical due to the high volume of badges that needed to be designed with minimal resources. It was agreed that badges that were part of the Chicago Summer of Learning would have a cohesive look and feel. As such, the badge design tool is intended to be templatized.
Sunny concluded by saying the next step for the Open Badges team is to modularize all the code created for these tools so they can be repurposed to fulfill the needs of the community, and for other cities wishing to launch a learning initiative like CSOL.
October 1 marked the beginning of the second annual Connected Educators Month, for which we repurposed the tools we developed for CSOL to create a set of badges with criteria and assessment using Open Badger and Aestimia. As well as helping teachers stay connected in an increasingly digital education environment, CEM has also developed programs specifically for states and districts.
The badge system includes approximately 25 badges that educators can earn to start, and then over 100s of event and participation badges will be added and continue to be issued throughout October. Nearly 200 organizations are participating nationwide in events designed to enhance professional development through online collaboration.
Longtime education reporter Dale Mezzacappa wrote a piece for Notebook.org looking at a number of states and districts serving large numbers of children from low-income communities that are “on a mission to reinvent summer experiences for them,” transforming the idea of summer school as a punishment for students who fall behind in school into something that is part of a larger, more engaging learning experience that students value and want to participate in:
Rather than aiming directly at test scores or courses, the new goal is to curtail summer learning loss, which researchers say accounts for a huge part of the academic achievement gap that opens up between low-income children and their wealthier peers as they progress through school. Without interesting and stimulating summer activities, students’ skills atrophy. In the fall, teachers spend months helping them catch up instead of moving ahead.
Summer programs must “provide enrichment opportunities for kids,” says Gary Huggins, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association. “And kids have to want to come. Otherwise, we will not achieve what we want to achieve.”
Huggins’ organization has launched the New Vision for Summer School initiative that includes 25 urban districts, including Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and several districts in California, including Fresno, Oakland and Sacramento. Those districts collaborate on ideas, but also are committed to maximizing the use of federal funding, building a network of community partners, and collecting data on what is effective.
As active as the field has become, inroads made by the growing number of non-profits that specialize in summer programs are incremental. Earl Martin Phalen of Summer Advantage Inc. has been in the field for 17 years. His programs now reach 10,000 students nationwide.
“There’s going to have to be a growing level of, ‘How do you help scale this up through philanthropy?'” he says.
The Chicago school district sent roughly 15,000 students to traditional remedial summer schools to catch up on academic work this past summer; most of the activities, however, were from the CSOL initiative, which began by forming partnerships with 140 organizations, including Phalen’s.
Activities were themed around STEAM subjects -- Science, Math, Engineering, Arts and Technology -- with students earning digital badges for demonstrating mastery of certain skills and tools through these activities. Though youth engagement and collaborations among organizations within the Hive Chicago Learning Network, the STEAM Studio gave students opportunities to learn in new ways - for example, teaching math using fashion, by cutting patterns and figuring out how much fabric is needed for projects in the Fashion & Media House. Other activities focused on learning through making, with an Open House giving youth access to a 3D printer, vinyl cutters, jewelry design tools and robotics in a pop-up “makerspace” in Chicago’s Cultural Center.
We spoke to Sybil Madison-Boyd from Digital Youth Network, a key part of the CSOL initiative, to get her thoughts on the summer's success:
“As we debriefed our team's experience of designing and implementing STEAM|Studio, an innovative combination of pop-up maker space and geeked-out fashion design and media house, we all marveled not just about how we pulled off a big project under little time and much duress, but mostly about how we witnessed young people engaged in meaningful and rich learning experiences in an environment that was interest-driven, personalized, and uniquely resourced. I think that we also felt a collective sense of pride and accomplishment to hear updates on how one of our jewelry designers was meeting with the jeweler to advise on the casting of his winning piece and how 3 of our fashion designers' t-shirts would soon be sold at a local boutique and online. It truly wasn't just a "summer of learning", it was the start of something that seemed really big."
Mezzacappa’s article looked at four other U.S. cities aside from Chicago that are offering - or struggling to offer - summer learning programs:
New York City completed its second year of a program called NYC Summer Quest, which uses a combination of public and private dollars to provide eight hours daily of academic and enrichment activities over five weeks to 1,100 students.The program relies on survey data from parents and students, attendance rates and parent engagement to gauge effectiveness. This year, some students who qualified for remedial summer school attended Summer Quest instead, and they took tests to see how they fared compared to those in the traditional program.
In Philadelphia, the Department of Human Services has an “out-of-school time” initiative, which coordinates after-school and about 140 summer camps run by 70 provider agencies that serve more than 10,000 children. The Free Library, which estimates that 50,000 children and teenagers use its facilities during the summer, has increased its organized programming.
In Oakland, there is a focus on STEM and hands-on activities. 6,000 students are being served, including high school students who need to make up course credits. In California, the push for more summer programming is statewide, showcased in 13 districts through the “Summer Matters” campaign, run in partnership with the nonprofit Partnership for Children & Youth and funded by several foundations and the districts involved.
Los Angeles exemplifies the fiscal pressures on many large urban districts that have led to the demise of traditional summer school. Five years ago, the district spent $42 million on summer programs; this year, the budget was $1 million. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, high school students who needed to make up credits lined up for limited remedial offerings. In California cities, most of the summer options are run by nonprofits in the different locations, using both private dollars and federal funds, like those funneled through the 21st Century Learning Centers program.
The City of Chicago is using technology to track after-school activities and provide parents with improved access to the wide variety of after-school programs available, currently scattered without an easy way to see what’s on and where. Sandra Guy reported for the Sun Times:
The Chicago Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Cooperative, as one example, counts more than 500 groups running 2,032 out-of-school STEM programs. The city is in the process of creating a Web portal, ChicagoYouthOpportunities.org, to give parents and older students links to the websites of major city agencies and nonprofit organizations that run after-school programs, said Beth Swanson, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff for education. The link is expected to be live this fall.
The city has met with its partner agencies and more than 100 nonprofits to figure out how summertime and after-school activities can be coordinated with Chicago Public Schools, city libraries and the Chicago Park District, Swanson said.
To figure out what programs are needed and where, the city for the first time this summer tracked students who earned digital badges for participating in the Chicago Summer of Learning Initiative. “We can see students as they collect a virtual backpack of badges from programs sponsored by private and public institutions,” Swanson said.
Read the full article: City tapping tech to track after-school activities for CPS
One question that was asked throughout the summer by learners, parents and participating organizations was: will the badges students are earning count for academic credit?
DePaul University has announced that they will accept some of the badges earned through the Chicago Summer of Learning for credit in their institution. Erin wrote in her blog post that Chicago Public Schools “is working to define rewards and advancement that they can offer for the badges," which should help fit the badges into the education environment in a way that ‘counts’ for the many students who participated.
Ultimately, the Chicago Summer of Learning has been one of the most incredible learning experiences the Open Badges team has had thus far - and could not have achieved it without the massive amount of support from the Chicago Mayor’s Office, the students and parents who eagerly took part and earned badges, and the 100+ organizations that signed up to help develop programs and activities for students to earn badges.
We'll leave you with some final words of appreciation from Erin:
“The Chicago organizations really stepped up and came into this summer and this new concept of badging with open minds and a dedication that was astounding. Huge kudos to all of them - they are the ones with the content, experiences and relationships with youth that matter. The badges are just the recognizer on top of that learning.”
