Many of the nation’s 57 million K-12 students will spend at least part of the 2020-2021 school year either dealing with distance learning or a hybrid model that keeps them out of classrooms several days a week. They’ll spend lots of time using teleconferencing software, with teachers either convening classes live or pre-recording lessons.

Getting children to excel won’t be easy. Zoom and similar programs can be challenging for teachers and boring for “digital natives” accustomed to watching more entertaining stuff on their devices.

Based on my experience both as a writer and a producer of films and TV shows in Hollywood and a lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh – where WQED, the nation’s first educational television station got started – I recommend four creative ways to overcome this problem. While challenging, this disruption in education can be a a unique opportunity for innovation. The made-for-TV French class produced by WQED was an early attempt at accessible distance learning. (Watch for the end for when one Fred Rogers’ first Daniel Tiger puppets pops out)

1. Tap star power

What if the producers, directors and writers who are skilled at explaining ideas visually over digital platforms – many of whom are currently sidelined because of the coronavirus pandemic – teamed up with teachers to make education more entertaining and engaging?

Having worked in both worlds, I can attest to how some TV and movie producers have no idea what a curriculum is, while even the best teachers and professors struggle to engage their own students with distance learning. But imagine a ground-up collaborative process, where educators who know the material they need to convey partner with the best storytellers who know how to get information across in the most compelling way?

Admittedly, it’s unclear where the funding might come from. But a burst of collaboration between educators, entertainment professionals and perhaps parents and students could create high-quality educational programs that could be accessed everywhere. The resulting online lessons could assist hundreds of thousands of educators and reach millions of students. Imagine the potential, especially if one or more networks or studios took part.

There have been some notable experiments along these lines such as Khan Academy enlisting basketball star Lebron James to illustrate probability. But what’s needed with the swift pivot to online education is a wide-scale collaboration to give teachers and students engaging educational materials.

Why not have comedian Dave Chappelle explain the theory of “Human Computation” developed by Luis Von Ahn, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who co-founded the Duolingo foreign language learning app Or how about a physics class with Billie Eilish singing a Schoolhouse Rock-style song about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity https://www.youtube.com/embed/iMqCSgqzmiQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Khan Academy enlisted LeBron James for a lesson about probability.

2. Unleash student creativity

The advertising company J. Walter Thompson and Snapchat together issued a report in 2019 called Into Z Future. It documented how the digitally adept generation born approximately between 1995 and 2012 is the most creative the world has ever seen.

Because I see the same kind of promise in today’s young people, I believe that schools should help unleash their creativity and encourage them to become active participants in making and sharing media as part of their learning experience.

I witnessed just how much students are capable of while producing a film about the development of the polio vaccine, “A Shot To Save The World.” It featured an interview with the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, talking about that important scientific breakthrough and today’s efforts to combat infectious diseases.

The film aired on the Smithsonian Channel and the BBC. We also used it as a prompt for a viral video competition called “Take A Shot At Changing The World.”

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Students from middle and high schools across Western Pennsylvania were challenged to make their own short films about the development of vaccines. The winners and their schools got cash prizes and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website featured their videos. In visually explaining how vaccines work, eighth-graders suddenly learned a lot about in virology and immunology.

The lesson for teachers thinking about remote assignments is the value of having students make their own movies. Those assignments, done right, immerse students in research. While gaining expertise, they acquire and sharpen creative skills that come naturally to their generation.

Steeltown, a nonprofit I co-founded, has been partnering with middle schools, high schools and nonprofits for more than a decade doing similar projects. Through hands-on, project-based learning, students have deepened their knowledge about the environment, history, hunger, social justice and other subjects aligned with their school assignments.

‘A Shot to Save the World,’ a documentary, told the story of the polio vaccine.

3. Tailor education to meet students’ needs

U.S. Math Olympiad coach Po-Shen Loh, another Carnegie Mellon professor, created a new learning platform called Expii. It customizes the way students learn by showing them various videos and tracking which ones they learn best from.

Several years ago, Loh and I enlisted high school students from across the Pittsburgh region to help make a video that would illustrate the Pythagorean Theorem. The students came up with a video of a kid who misses a bus and with a quick calculation involving a hypotenuse makes it to the next stop in plenty of time. It’s an example of how students are not only able to work through complex problems, but also help their peers learn – once they feel empowered.

Because people can learn differently, virtual instruction should be an opportunity to find what works best for each student.

Teen-produced videos can make mastering math more enjoyable.

4. Expand access to tech

Curiosity is increasingly important, as award-winning video game designer Jesse Schell has explained. “We have the entire field of human knowledge available at the touch of a button,” Schell said. It “gives the curious children an insane advantage because anything they would like to learn about they can learn, just like that.”

But Schell worries about what he calls a “curiosity gap”: When a child’s curiosity isn’t stimulated and they lack access to this digital universe, they can fall behind.

Providing all students with access to Wi-Fi and top-notch devices is starting to happen because of this pandemic, but this crisis could become a great equalizer. Even after COVID-19 is under control, I believe that every child who goes to school, whether in a brick-and-mortar building or from their own home, deserves access to the internet and their own iPad, laptop or desktop computer.

Just as TV stations are required by the Children’s Television Act to broadcast educational programs like “Bill Nye: The Science Guy” in exchange for their licenses, in my opinion, internet providers and other tech companies should also have to do more to help close the digital divide.

Carl Kurlander, Senior Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In 1955, after a field trial involving 1.8 million Americans, the world’s first successful polio vaccine was declared “safe, effective, and potent.”

It was arguably the most significant biomedical advance of the past century. Despite the polio vaccine’s long-term success, manufacturers, government leaders and the nonprofit that funded the vaccine’s development made several missteps.

Having produced a documentary about the polio vaccine’s field trials, we believe the lessons learned during that chapter in medical history are worth considering as the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines proceeds. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jp9V2p40kKw?wmode=transparent&start=0 Trailer from ‘The Shot Felt ‘Round the World,’ a documentary about the polio vaccine.

Sabin and Salk

Today, many competing efforts are underway to create a coronavirus vaccine, each employing different methods to generate the production of universally needed antibodies. Likewise, in the 1950s there were different approaches to making a polio vaccine.

The prevailing medical orthodoxy, led by Dr. Albert Sabin, held that only a live-virus vaccine, which involved using a weakened form of the polio virus to stimulate antibodies, could work. That theory stemmed from work by the physician Edward Jenner, who in the 1700s determined that milkmaids exposed to the cowpox virus-laden pus of cowpox-infected cattle did not catch smallpox. Smallpox was the deadly pandemic of the era, and this discovery led to a vaccine that brought about the disease’s eradication.

Jonas Salk, a doctor and scientist based at the University of Pittsburgh, on the other hand, believed a killed virus, which would completely lose its infectious qualities, could still trick the body into creating protective antibodies against the polio virus.

A nonprofit organization, the National Infantile Paralysis Foundation, funded and thus directed the polio vaccine quest. Established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former law partner, Basil O’ Connor, it raised money for polio research and treatment. As part of this fundraising effort, Americans were called upon to send dimes to the White House in what became known as the March of Dimes.

O’Connor gambled on Salk rather than Sabin.

Clinical trials

By 1953, Salk and his team had shown their experimental vaccine worked – first on monkeys in their lab, then on children who already had polio at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, and then on a small group of healthy children in Pittsburgh. One of the largest field trials in medical history soon followed.

It began on April 23, 1954. Some 650,000 children got the Salk polio vaccine or a placebo, and 1.2 million other kids received no injection but were monitored as an untreated control group.

Salk’s mentor, University of Michigan virologist Thomas Francis, independently monitored the study. After months of meticulously analyzing data, Francis revealed the results on April 12, 1955 – exactly 10 years after FDR’s death and nearly a year after the trial began.

A manufacturing error

When asked who owned the patent to his vaccine, Jonas Salk famously replied that it belonged to the people and that patenting it would be like “patenting the sun.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his belief that every child should receive the polio vaccine, without indicating how that would happen. Eisenhower charged Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Ovetta Culp Hobby to work out the details in coordination with Surgeon General Leonard Scheele.

Congressional Democrats advocated for a plan that would make the polio vaccine free to everyone, which Hobby rejected as a “back door to socialized medicine.”

Hobby also insisted that private companies should take care of producing Salk’s vaccine, licensing six of them to do so. However, she acknowledged that the government lacked a plan to meet the vast vaccination demand.

A black market arose. Price gouging jacked up the cost of a dose of the vaccine, which was supposed to be US$2, to $20. As a result, the well-to-do got special access to a vaccine the public had funded.

The hands-off approach changed once reports surfaced that children who had received Salk’s vaccine were in the hospital, with polio symptoms. At first, Scheele, the surgeon general, reacted with skepticism. He suggested that those kids might have been infected before vaccination.

But once six vaccinated children died, inoculations halted until more information about their safety could be gathered. In all, 10 kids who were vaccinated early on died after becoming infected with polio, and some 200 experienced some degree of paralysis.

The government soon determined that the cases in which children became sick or died could be traced back to one of the six companies: Cutter Labs. It had not followed Salk’s detailed protocol to manufacture the vaccine, failing to kill the virus. As a result, children were incorrectly injected with the live virus.

Inoculation resumed in mid-June with tighter government controls and a more nervous public. In July, Hobby stepped down, citing personal reasons.

Eisenhower then signed the Polio Vaccination Assistance Act of 1955, which slated $30 million to pay for vaccines – enough to fund wider public distribution. Within a year, 30 million American kids had been inoculated, and the number of polio cases had fallen almost by half.

Heeding a lesson learned

By 1962, there were fewer than 1,000 cases of polio in the U.S. And by 1979, the U.S. was declared polio-free.

Years after the vaccine’s development, Jonas Salk would recount that sometimes he would meet people who would not even know what polio was – which he found tremendously gratifying. But the events of this past year, with all the ups and downs of coronavirus vaccine research, have proved that the history of polio’s defeat is worth remembering.

Nine companies developing a coronavirus vaccine recently joined forces to jointly promise that they would not rush anything to market until and unless the clearly delineated standards for safety and efficacy are met.

But should a modern-day Cutter incident happen again with a coronavirus vaccine, the public’s already shaky faith in vaccines could easily crumble further, impeding the effort to get as many people quickly immunized against COVID-19 as possible.

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Bringing this pandemic to an end will require more than the government’s approval of one or more coronavirus vaccines that work. Coordinating a widespread vaccination campaign will also demand the navigation of logistics, economics and politics amid an equitable approach to the distribution of these new vaccines and the public’s willingness to be inoculated.

This final push will, in addition, require the often uneasy partnership among the government, the private sector and – as is true today with massive contributions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other charitable sources – philanthropy.

Carl Kurlander, Senior Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh and Randy P. Juhl, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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