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Time to LEARN, North Carolina! This spring teachers in more than 40 school systems will be trying out North Carolina's new education online service, LEARN North Carolina.

LEARN is a "performance support system" for North Carolina educators--teachers and administrators alike. Its aim is to provide ready access to tools for teaching and guiding the public schools.

At its heart, LEARN NC is based on a very simple idea: the users should decide what is on the system and how it should be organized. To carry out this plan, LEARN has been operating in a pilot mode for nearly a year while teachers and administrators in six school systems worked to plan and test the system. These educators were organized into three pilot teams: the Central Team (Chatham and Johnston County Schools), the Southern Team (Charlotte/Mecklenburg and Cleveland County Schools), and the Western Team (Asheville City and Buncombe County Schools).

Based strongly on this teacher input, LEARN's developers are organizing resources in five principal areas:

Lesson Plans. LEARN will include a large database of lesson plans organized by subject and grade level and tied to the Standard Course of Study. Nearly all the lesson plans will be contributed by North Carolina teachers. Many of them will be tied to Internet resources. The lesson plans will be reviewed by other teachers and by content specialists for accuracy and appropriateness.

LENI (Learners' and Educators' Networked Information), a collection of links to Internet resources you can use for lessons, for professional development, for student counseling, or for many other educational purposes. Teachers are invited to suggest worthwhile Internet sites for LENI's database. Each site is carefully checked for accuracy, suitability, and timeliness.

Standard Course of Study. With the enthusiastic support of the Department of Public Instruction, LEARN NC is loading the entire Standard Course of Study into an easily browsed database. This database will be linked to the Lesson Plan database and other resources, so you can see just what's available to support each goal and objective.

Curriculum Resources. LEARN is working with resource providers in many parts of the state to acquire useful databases of resources. The pilots for this area have been provided by the Morehead Observatory and Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill. Eventually, dozens of museum collections, library collections, and resource databases should be available for use by teachers or students.

Discussion Forums. LEARN can support "threaded" discussion forums, in which a particular topic can be followed easily without having to read an entire listserve. Some discussion forums will be for general discussion, and some will be restricted to particular groups working special projects.

The only thing you'll will need to access LEARN NC will be your Internet browser (Netscape 2.02 or better). All the sophisticated software will be at LEARN's end, where the databases are managed by Lotus Domino. A Domino server has the power to put together Web pages "on the fly" containing exactly the information you request.

The idea for LEARN originated with two units of UNC Chapel Hill: the Center for Educational Leadership (CEL) and the Institute for Academic Technology (IAT). Financial support has been provided by UNC-CH Chancellor Michael Hooker using special technology funds distributed to the UNC System by the General Assembly. There is no subscription fee for schools or for individuals.

Parts of LEARN NC are public, and parts are password-protected. In general, the LENI database, the Standard Course of Study, and the Curriculum Resources will be public--this means you can look at them now and watch them develop in the coming months. The Lesson Plans and most of the Discussion Forums are password-protected in order to limit their use to North Carolina educators.

You'll have access to the restricted parts of LEARN NC as soon as your school or school system is "turned on" to LEARN. During the fall and early winter of 1997-98, orientation meetings for school system administrators were held across the state. Approximately 40 interested systems signed up and were accepted as initial users. Each of these systems will send a central office team to be trained in supporting LEARN NC users within their system, so technical support will be available locally. These system teams will then provide professional development to teachers on use of the system.

The plan is to add 40 more school systems as LEARN users during the 1998-99 school year, and then the remaining systems during the fall of 1999, so all North Carolina teachers have full access to the system by January 1, 2000.

On January 1, 1998, LEARN will have its first full-time Director. He is Dr. Robert A. Berlam, an adult educator formerly Director of Governmental Relations for the NC School Boards Association. Under Dr. Berlam's direction, LEARN will be expanding dramatically during 1998.

Several other states are establishing online services for teachers, but no other state envisions a resource as comprehensive as LEARN North Carolina. With adequate support and enthusiastic use, LEARN seems likely to become an important tool for North Carolina teachers in the coming years.

Internet Sources

LEARN North Carolina

The LEARN site is easy to find at http://www.learnnc.org/.

FEEDBACK: We'd be happy to have your comments and suggestions.

Posted January 2, 1998. Features remain online as long as they remain current; they may be updated if new information becomes available.

Copyright © 1997, Center for Mathematics and Science Education. Teachers have permission to duplicate this page for use in teaching their own classes. All other rights reserved. You are welcome to link to this page, but do not copy its contents.

The lighthouse logo is a trademark of LEARN North Carolina.

Center for Mathematics and Science Education CB # 3500, UNC Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3500 (919) 966-5922 http://www.unc.edu/depts/cmse/MSEdNC/LEARN.html

CMSE Online Front Page ProgramGuide courses and workshops NewsLink math/science education news Sitefinder access to teaching resources FeatureIndex browse our past features SiteIndex complete table of contents