Brian @ CLRN

Ok, not exactly a research title that will keep you from nodding off, nor one that implies some interesting data is buried within. However, you’d be greatly mistaken.

While I’m certain their forthcoming market forecast for 2012-2016, which typically sells for $4,800, will contain more data and even lovelier charts, Learning Technology Research Taxonomy does contain a number of trends and predictions that warrant our attention. Read on for what grabbed my attention or download the entire report here.

Mobile Learning

1. Looking at mobile applications purchased by consumers (not k-12 institutions), they found that the top selling education apps in most countries involve language learning. This includes apps purchased by consumers in Germany, China, India, France, Indonesia, Turkey and Nigeria.
2. Top selling apps in South Korea, Taiwan, and the UK are test prep and language learning. Why am I not surprised?
3. In the United States, though, consumers prefer educational games designed for preschool children.

Online Learning

Ambient Insight found that a substantial number of students in the United States are taking extracurricular online courses, a genre that is growing by 30% each year and projected to involve 15.7M students by 2016.

Last year, more than 1.6M students were enrolled in virtual/online programs including 760K Fulltime and Part-time home schooled students and 920K fulltime and part-time students in public and private schools. Ambient Insight projects these will grow by 44% each year, reaching 10.7M students by 2016. This amounts to 18% of all US students taking one or more classes online.

The report also notes a major trend that emerged last year. Traditional school districts are launching their own virtual schools “as a way to cut costs, attract home schooled students, and lure students back from virtual schools.”

Other tasty facts

K12.com reported that their enrollments grew from 99K to 141K last year, a 42% growth rate. (so, that explains the large bonuses). However, this doesn’t explain the dramatic drop in K12.com’s stock price the past year. Starting at $29 one year ago, LRN (K12.com’s ticker) settled at $21.60 today, a 25% drop. Worse, barely three months ago, LRN topped $36.79, representing a 41% decline in stock price. So, if things are looking up for K12.com, why did their stock price tumble after they reported their dramatic growth?

Computer-Using Educators (CUE) and the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN) are pleased to announce our call for speakers for the inaugural, 2012 eLearning Strategies Symposium (eSS).  The symposium will be held at the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa on December 7th and 8th, 2012. Three-hour workshops will be offered on Thursday, December 6th. We invite you to share your eLearning expertise with K12 educators, administrators, policy makers, and industry representatives.

 Two session proposal windows are offered. During this Early Bird window, which closes April 27th, we’ll be filling two-thirds of the concurrent sessions. A shorter, Just in Time, proposal window opens mid-August and closes in mid-September for the final third. Speaker acceptances for the first round will be emailed May 9-11, 2012. All speakers will receive a complementary registration to the symposium. Industry-sponsored sessions must include a Corporate Partnership Application.

Symposium presentations should focus on one of eSS’ five strands:

• Big Picture, which includes administration, management, evaluation, research, policy or advocacy;
• Content (curriculum and online course development, best practices, accessibility, or instructional design);
• Capacity Building (professional development);
• Gear (tools, technologies, learning management systems, or application development); or
• Pedagogy (engaging students, teaching and learning pedagogies, blended learning models, learning communities, or assessment).

Symposium presentations are one-hour in duration with one session each hour being live-streamed and recorded for future distribution. Speakers may opt-out of live-streaming.

With online and blended learning growing 20-25% each year and with more than 20,000 California students participating in virtual or blended learning, now is the time for a California conference focused on teaching and learning online. Please join us in Costa Mesa next December.

eLearning Strategies Symposium Call for Speakers

www.cue.tc/elearns

eSS Web Site

http://elearns.org

Twitter: elearns

Twitter Hashtags: #ess, #ess12

Oh, this is rich.

Yesterday, the California Charter School Association (CCSA), a charter school advocate, released a list of 10 schools they believe should be closed due to persistent “underperformance.” It was a bold move to ensure that charter schools uphold a high standard.

Today, the organization, California Parents for Public Virtual Education, blasted CCSA for undermining parent choice “under the guise of  ‘accountability.”

Really? Do parents really prefer to send their children to poorly performing schools? Wasn’t “parent choice” about taking students from underperforming public schools and placing them in a charter environment that would better address learning?

Apparently not. The parent group seems to prefer poorly performing schools, complaining that CCSA’s motivations were to “remove local control and transfer more power to CCSA and to Sacramento bureaucrats.”

I think the funniest part of the parent group’s press release is when their spokesperson, Barbara Lynch, says,  “There’s no denying that some form of accountability is essential. If a charter school is having difficulty demonstrating student achievement, it is the responsibility of parents, teachers, school administrators and the local school district to find a solution and to get the school back on track.”

Really?

If you won’t close a school that year after year performs badly; one whose students aren’t proficient in math or English; one that consistently places in the bottom 10% of all schools, then just how low should we place the bar before you accept that a school is bad for kids?

It’s ironic that the organization’s primary objective, as stated on their web site, is “protecting access to a quality, virtual public education in our state.”  So, if CCSA can’t recommend closure of 10 badly performing schools, which represents just 1% of the 912 charter schools in California, what is your definition of “quality?” Is a quality school one in which only 47% of the students are proficient in English?; does a quality school move just 25% of their students to proficiency in Math or 8% of them to proficiency in Algebra? Such are the scores of just one of the underperforming schools recommended for closure.

As the parent group likes to say, “Parents deserve the right to choose what’s best for their children. “ I’m assuming that what’s best, according to today’s press release, are poorly performing schools.

You don’t need a charter for that.

Imagine a child that has performed poorly in school for years. Despite assistance by district, state, and federal government to improve, the child still is still not proficient in reading or math. Yet, the school allows that student to matriculate. Now,  imagine the child’s parents demanding that their child be held back until she becomes proficient.

Such is the case with California Virtual Academy @ Kern and the California Charter School Association (CCSA). While CCSA is a strong advocate for charter schools, they also uphold high standards for their members. Their Accountability Framework sets minimum standards of academic performance to judge whether a school’s charter be renewed.

Today, CCSA recommended that California Virtual Academy @ Kern, a full-time virtual school run by K12.com, lose its charter for “academic underperformance.”  According to their press release, California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) Calls for the Non-Renewal of Ten Charter Schools as a Result of Academic Underperformance, “This public call for non-renewal represents a significant step towards advancing accountability and fulfilling our collective promise of quality education for children across the state.”

CA Virtual Academy @ Kern, according to its CDS Code, opened in 2002 and served about 500 students last year. Their Academic Performance Index (API) rose from 679 in 2009/10 to 696 in 2010/11. However, when compared to all schools in California, their ranking was a “1”, meaning they are among the lowest 10% of schools (with 10 being the highest ranking.) When compared to similar schools, CA Virtual Academy rose to 2^nd  (the lowest 20% of schools.) Moreover, in 2011, only 45% of their students were proficient in English-language arts and merely 25% of them were proficient in math. Just 8% of the academy’s students are proficient in Algebra I. Because of ongoing academic underperformance, CA Virtual Academy @ Kern was in Year 2 of “Program Improvement”, a program that mandates certain changes to address poor test scores.

Apparently, it’s not been enough, sparking the California’s Charter School Association to uphold their standards.

In the press release, the charter association stated, “We cannot have an honest discussion about education reform and increasing accountability without closing the charters that have demonstrated an inability to meet the challenge of excellence–granted to us by law–and chronically underperform.”

I’d say so. It’s also called “Walking the walk.” Well done, CCSA.

Now, if only eLearning advocates, those who love online learning as much as me, would be as honest with themselves about some of the problems in online learning land. We are stronger, and we serve eLearning better, when we uphold high standards for online learning.

“Just because online learning can work does not mean that online learning will work.” (Keeping Pace, 2011)

No truer words about eLearning have been spoken, but you wouldn’t know from the variety of recent reports and blogs about online learning. To summarize them, online learning is either all bad, consisting of for-profit companies churning out students who are far below grade level, or that they are all good and that eLearning is transforming teaching and learning.

The truth, I’m afraid, is somewhere in the middle and I’m somewhat disappointed that many eLearning advocates, those who believe in the promise and potential of online learning, are not more forthcoming about acknowledging some of the problems that do exist in virtual schools.  Michael Barbour, in his excellent Virtual Meandering’s post, Politics Of K-12 Online Learning?, framed it well. “…not only is K-12 online learning a political/partisan issues, but anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or intentionally trying to mislead you.” Keeping Pace 2011 tackles this issue pointing out some of eLearning’s problems while providing steps to correct them. This post reviews their findings and recommendations regarding quality, accountability, and research.

Data doesn’t lie.  (Although, data can be both misleading and misinterpreted). Given our country’s obsessive compulsion to judge quality based on test scores, all good journeys begin with data.

Keeping Pace 2011(KP) honestly accepts that “….online learning can be beneficial, but there are quite a few poorly performing schools.”  It cautions that data sets should not be compared to each other and worries that some blogs and articles compare virtual students’ proficiency levels to state averages (which I have done). However, KP warns that because many online schools work with at-risk students, we shouldn’t be surprised when student scores are below state averages. They believe a better measure would be to track individual growth over time. While I agree with the latter, the assumption that many virtual students are at-risk is anecdotal. I, and many others, assume that many full-time virtual students are at-risk, but we have no data to back-up our assumption. And frankly, if we’re going to make brick-and-mortar schools suffer penalties when their students perform badly, particularly when many have similar levels of at-risk, poverty-stricken, or language-challenged students, I see no reason for excusing virtual schools from similar penalties.

Keeping Pace 2011 begins their data journey with the now famous Minnesota report, “Evaluation Report: K-12 Online Learning” which was published last September.  KP quotes the same data both sides have been writing about since September: 1) Students are less likely to finish the courses they start; 2) Full-time online students dropped out much more frequently than students in general; and 3) Full-time students had significantly lower proficiency rates. However, rather than disputing the results, as some advocates have done, the Evergreen group instead lauds the report because “it looks not only at student proficiency, but also at student growth.”

This is how smart people advocate for online learning. You promote, you recognize flaws, and you suggest solutions.

KP rightly places the responsibility for virtual school quality on education providers including schools, teachers, content providers, students and families. It all comes down to accountability, though, and Keeping Pace outlines some of the problems and solutions regarding our current assessment system in their “Toward improved accountability systems” section. KP begins this section by recognizing that some current assessment systems, like required state tests, apply to both face-to-face and virtual charter schools so you can compare the two and hold each accountable. However, KP points out three stumbling blocks that are specific to online (virtual) schools: 1) Online students have high mobility, so it’s nearly impossible to compare a virtual schools progress from year to year; 2) Some school districts create virtual school programs that are a part of a face-to-face school. The virtual school & students don’t have a separate school ID, so it’s impossible to measure virtual student proficiency; and 3) Online schools often serve at-risk students whose needs haven’t been met by traditional schools. Our current system isn’t set-up to measure their growth on a year-by-year basis.

Clouding the issue are a rising number of virtual schools, consisting of public institutions receiving public education dollars, that are run by for-profit education management organizations (EMO). In those cases, KP asks who should be accountable?

What separates the Evergreen Group from other blogs and articles about online learning is that they not only shine a light on the problem, they also point out solutions.  They conclude their accountability section by recommending three changes to our assessment systems.

1.    Accountability should be based on outcomes, not on inputs.

Here they’ve adopted Michael Horn’s thesis that we must always look at the end results, which is a strong statement that results matter. However, I do appreciate their attention to “quality” inputs, which includes teacher credentials, student-teacher ratios, course design, and (I would advocate also) the quality of the course materials. Garbage in. Garbage out. Yes, a highly trained teacher can overcome bad instructional materials, but it makes more sense to begin with quality instructional materials.

2.    Data from online and blended schools must be disaggregated from overall district numbers.

Back in KP’s executive summary, they found that “Single district programs are the fastest growing segment of online and blended learning.” Many of these are small virtual schools embedded within a traditional school, so it’s impossible for anyone to determine how each group performs. I agree that this would be an important data point that states should require and track.

3.    Accountability must exist at the course level if students are choosing courses among multiple providers.

While it’s easy to hold traditional schools and their teachers accountable for student progress, we face a dilemma when considering online courses that are purchased. If a district hires an education management organization to provide the course and teacher, whose feet should be held to the fire when students’ don’t advance? KP suggests we need to consider tracking scores by individual course so we can identity weaknesses. They acknowledge that this is a confusing area, but suggest that we must strive to identify responsible entities.

Given a variety of data showing both virtual learning failures and stunning successes, Keeping Pace nicely frames the most important question, “Therefore, the challenge accepted by many researches is to change the question from ‘does online work?’ to ‘under what conditions does online learning work?’”  Online learning can work and while all advocates want to celebrate the many stunning successes among virtual and blended programs, we must also acknowledge the many stunning failures among them, not making excuses but providing solutions. Keeping Pace 2011 does not disappoint here either.