2.2. The US education technology plan
The National Education Technology Plan, Transforming
American Education: Learning Powered by Technology (see
http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010), represents a national
call to apply advanced technologies used in business
and everyday life in education to improve learning, accelerate
the diffusion of effective practices, and use data to guide continuous
improvement. The plan presents five essential components
of learning enhanced by technology: Learning,
Assessment, Teaching, Infrastructure, and Productivity. In
summary form, this plan calls for (a) cost-effective strategies
to improve learning outcomes and graduation rates, (b)
embracing innovation, prompt implementation, and continuous
improvement, (c) leveraging technology to provide engaging
and powerful learning experiences. While this plan does
explicitly mention any of the three technologies of focus in this
paper, it does advocate the same kinds of general things found
in the other reports. Moreover, it has been used as a basis to
justify personalized learning and learning analytics on many
occasions and as a basis for support of MOOCs and gamebased
learning less directly.