Institutional Partnerships

As part of the mission of the IIS project, we seek to explore new ways to create useful technologies at scale. The IIS seeks direct partnerships among schools, the university, and commercial firms to advance an effective educational research and development enterprise. Through the academic-business-clinical partnerships at the heart of the IIS work, we seek to explore a new institutional form for educational research and development aimed at creating high quality, technical innovations that can be sustained in practice.

We believe that university researchers and clinical practitioners are very good at identifying problems of practice and documenting problems of practice in the context of day-to-day work. Commercial actors have very good mechanisms for creating technical applications that are robust and useable. We seek to harness these diverse forms of expertise in the service of school improvement.

The IIS brings together:

Researchers and designers:

• The Center for Urban School Improvement at the University of Chicago (USI)
• Stanford University
• Northwestern University
• University of Illinois at Chicago
• The Ohio State University
• Lesley University
• Literacy Collaborative

Clinical practitioners:

• USI
• Literacy Collaborative
• North Kenwood Oakland Charter School
• Diverse school implementation sites

Commercial technology developers:

• Teachscape
• Wireless Generation

We believe the IIS model may fill an important void in the organization of educational research. The university has often ignored the type of activity being pursued by the IIS, leaving important development work to commercial actors. Commercial actors, not surprisingly, market tools that they believe districts will buy. Districts may espouse a "break the mold" orientation, but purchase products to respond to immediate political pressures for "a quick fix."

We expect that our diverse array of prototype tools and what we learn about the principles that undergird them will create broad intellectual resources that can be exploited by the commercial sector. We are confident that firms will build toward integrated systems like these if they sense an alternative market demand.