A territorial learning ecosystem for parents’ participation and cooperation

Abstract

Parents are critical to student attainment and learning. It is therefore key to foster their active participation in their children’s education and provide them with tools to be effective. This paper describes the implementation of a territorial learning ecosystem that provides K12 parents with the facilities to support their children’s learning at home, track progress against the national curriculum, and network and share their experience with other parents. The territorial learning ecosystem includes an interactive map of the country. This map displays indicators of the level of overall activity in the subject, as well as in each of the specific learning objectives defined by the national curriculum. The ecosystem provides indicators at four different levels: region, district, school, and classroom. During the second semester of 2019, a total of 1235 first grade classes voluntarily adopted the system. In mid-October, educational videos made by parents were uploaded to the system, in which they shared examples of homemade activities and teaching strategies. 98 schools from the most populated region submitted 98 parent-made videos to be shared during a public event. 82% of the videos showed a mother with her child learning to read or write, 49% showed word segmentation activities, 48% showed homemade educational games, and 26% showed activities using glove puppets. Experts rated the communication and educational quality of the videos. We found that a much higher proportion of videos involving glove puppets were rated as ``very good" when compared to the other types.