Photo of students walking down a school hallway, with a bank of electronic devices on their right.

By Joe Pickett, OCW Publication Director

The school year has wound down, and summer promises to be a time for recharging batteries and reflecting on how things might go better, or even be different, next time around.

Many instructors, indeed entire school districts, see great potential to transform education by implementing new technology in the classroom.

But the landscape of videos, online assessments, tracking tools, and evaluation metrics remains an intimidating one. How can teachers hope to get up to speed in the vanishing weeks of summer?

Professor Eric Klopfer’s edX course 11.133x Implementation and Evaluation of Educational Technology offers an easy way to get into the pool and make waves.

The course starts on July 15, giving teachers enough time to decompress from the school year before taking on a new assignment. The course should also be of interest to entrepreneurs, developers, practitioners, and leaders in educational technology. Running for seven weeks, 11.133x has a very manageable workload of only 4–5 hours per week.

Professor Klopfer is practiced hand at online teaching. He has developed and led three successful courses on edX already.  11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology ran last fall. It is not a requirement for 11.133x, which is open to all comers. Two other edX courses offered in the past year tapped into a second area of Professor Klopfer’s research—games in learning: 11.126x Introduction to Game Design and 11.127x Design and Development of Games For Learning.

Students interested in gaining some background might examine Professor’s Klopfer’s courses available now on OCW:

As the course registration page says, 11.133x “provides a practical overview for selecting, integrating, implementing, and evaluating educational technology initiatives in formal educational settings, primarily in the US. It will include the perspectives of stakeholders that make such initiatives possible, and consider how to evaluate for efficacy.”

Like nearly all of Professor Klopfer’s offerings, this one is project-based. Students will learn by doing. Lounging on a beach towel is not an option!