Tag Archives: blended learning

How eLearning will Save World Language Courses

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Much has been written about the value online and blended learning brings to rural schools. Given the small size of these schools, they’ll never have a critical mass of students to offer a variety of courses. Students will never have access to an assortment of Advanced Placement (AP) or world language courses, so eLearning provides an opportunity to enlarge course offerings for those students who need a rich and deep course catalog.

So, how does this play out where I live, Stanislaus County (pop. 514,000), which is in the heart of the central valley and just 90 miles from San Francisco?

Let’s start with our smallest town, Denair, CA 95316. Denair High School, with it’s 47% Hispanic and 38% white students fits the typical profile of a California high school. With a town population of just 4,000, Denair High School’s 361 students have few options when it comes to world language instruction.  They may take Spanish, Spanish, or Spanish. If they’re college bound, AP Spanish is on the menu too.  Would you like to take Japanese, Latin, or Arabic? Sorry, you live in the wrong district.

Just 10 miles to the north is Waterford, California, 95386. With a town population of 8,000, Waterford High School has just 613 students, including 47% Hispanic and 38% white. Students at WHS may take any world language course, as long as its Spanish 1-3 or AP Spanish. Want to take French, German, or Mandarin? Sorry, you live in the wrong Zip Code.

Ten miles north of Waterford is Oakdale, 95361. Founded in 1871, Oakdale sports a population of 21,000 and its high school’s 1613 students are 29% Hispanic and 65% white. While OHS has been a frequent winner of our county’s Academic Decathlon, their students have access to just two language selections: Spanish 1-3, AP Spanish, and French I & II.

How about Ceres, CA, our third largest city in Stanislaus County? Zip Code 95307 has 46,000 residents and two high schools. Ceres High has 1421 students who are 62% Hispanic and 27% white. Central Valley High has 1690 students who are 73% Hispanic and 16% white. Yet, CVHS students may only take Spanish 1-3 or AP Spanish. Ceres High students have those options plus German III and IV. Live in Ceres and like to take Mandarin. Sorry, your parents live in the wrong city.

It’s not much better in the county seat, Modesto. With our population of 201,000, we’re the 18th largest city in the state. Yet, students in Modesto’s seven high schools, which range from 1440 to 2500 pupils, don’t benefit from their larger district or school size.

Newly built Enochs High School, with its student population of nearly 2500, offers French I-IV, Spanish I-IV and AP Spanish.  Our newest high school, Gregori HS, with 1440 students, fares no better than Denair High, with Spanish I-IV and AP Spanish as world language options.

We could provide more examples of how small, rural schools will never have a critical mass of students to offer a diversity of world language courses, but, at least in Stanislaus County, your world language options are extremely limited whether you’re a student in a tiny town or if you live in an affluent part of the county seat.  The solution for all schools, though, is online learning. Whether a high school has 600 or 2000 students, all students should be able to choose the AP or world language course that meets their needs.  The Self Blend, where students augment a school’s course catalog with an online course that meets their needs, is the perfect solution.

Course publishers have long been on board. While CLRN’s new world language review site is first focusing on Spanish, French, German, Latin, and Mandarin courses (the CLRN Five), each publisher creates a variety of course options for their customers. K12,Inc offers the CLRN Five plus Japanese, AP Spanish, and AP French. Education 2020 and Plato/Edmentum also provide world language courses from the CLRN Five.

Online and blended learning have passed the tipping point and are here to stay. Now, it’s time to advocate both small, rural high schools as well as larger, urban high schools, to augment their course catalogs with online options.

Don’t Create a Lousy Online or Blended Course

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Online and blended learning, growing 20% to 30% yearly, have reached a tipping point. CLRN’s California eLearning Census, conducted between March and May this year, received responses from 30% of California’s school districts and direct-funded charters. While we found that 45% of all districts and charters are utilizing some form of online or blended learning, we were surprised that of those districts not currently eLearning, one-third were in the planning stages to create online or blended programs. Yes, online and blended learning are trending and many teachers and districts are jumping on the eLearning bandwagon.

 Flipped classrooms and the Khan Academy have received national attention as teachers place classroom lectures online and change classroom pedagogy to include project-based work. You may even be thinking of creating an online or blended course yourself. After all, you’ve taught for many years and you’re a master of your curriculum and teaching craft, so those skills should benefit you in creating an online course.

 Think again.

Remember how, during your first year of teaching, you spent countless nights creating lesson plans and units only to throw most of them away the following summer? Remember how difficult that first year was? Multiply that times 10 and you’ll have your first year of online or blended learning. I’m not saying, “Don’t do it.” I’m saying that you should go in with both eyes wide open, following the advice I’ve shared below.

We speak from experience. We know a lousy course when we see one. The California Learning Resource Network (CLRN), a state-funded technology service, reviews online and blended courses for their alignments to the Common Core standards, California’s original standards and to iNACOL’s Standards for Quality Online Courses, which we helped write. Under a new partnership with the University of California, online courses must be CLRN-Certified before U.C. will consider them for A-G approval. However, to date, only 25% of the courses we’ve reviewed have received our certification. So, if commercial publishers have so much difficulty creating a high-quality, engaging, and interactive course, what makes you so special?

By all means, dream large. Online and blended learning provide opportunities often unavailable in small and medium sized districts. Opportunities to take an AP course or any world language should be available to all students, not just those in large or affluent districts.  Begin with the end in mind, though.

Planning

Most successful projects begin with a thorough planning process that engages stakeholders, reviews research, and carves out a plan that solves a specific problem. Planning for online or blended learning is no different.

This year’s Keeping Pace , an annual census report and analysis of the online and blended landscape, includes a proposed 18th month planning process with specific tasks for each phase.  In the Systemic Planning stage, you bring together stakeholders and perform a needs analysis that asks: 1) What’s the problem you hope to solve? 2) What is your educational goal? 3) Who are the intended student groups? and 4) What are your district’s capabilities and desires?

That’s just the beginning, though, because before creating a solution, you also need to assess your technology infrastructure, your students’ and teachers’ technology skills, the availability of quality, standards-aligned resources, and teacher professional development.

But, assuming you’ve completed a planning process and targeted specific student groups or courses to affect, what’s next?

Normally, I’d suggest at this point a discussion about whether to build or to buy. Should you build courses from scratch (and do you have the capabilities to do so) or should you shop for quality courseware that you can pilot for a year or more?

But, you’ve already made the decision to create a lousy course, so let’s proceed.

Get Thee a Learning Management System

Whether you rent an existing course management system like BlackBoard or install an open source solution like Moodle or Course Builder, an LMS is a framework that contains your content, activities, and assessments, allowing you to track student progress and conduct online asynchronous and synchronous meetings. Whichever direction you choose, spend time mastering all the LMS’ components: installing curriculum, creating class rosters, embedding outside activities, and setting up discussion groups. Don’t start without an LMS, though.

Quality Content

Standards-aligned, engaging content can be purchased from a publisher, found in open source repositories, or created in-house.  With iNACOL standard A2 stating, “The course content and assignments are aligned with the state’s content standards..”, you want to make sure that the content you provide students not only teaches (demonstrates) a skill, but also provides students opportunities to practice and assess each skill or standard. CLRN’s reviews include these three components of each standard identified for a course.

Your textbook is not a course though. While textbooks are aligned with the standards and may include practice activities and assessments, placing your book online, be it commercial or open source, is amateurish, at best.

Quality courses will include text though, but not entire chapters printed screen after screen. The better courses CLRN have reviewed include portions of text mixed with video lecture clips, streaming video, simulations, games, and short formative assessments. Creating quality online lessons is a much more time-consuming task than creating face-to-face lessons. Provide ample lead-time to create online lessons.

Engaging Lessons

Online course standard B3 states that course instruction and activities must engage students in active learning, including authentic projects and activities that challenge students beyond knowledge and comprehension. Rather than focus primarily on multiple-choice tests for assessments, it’s best to provide students knowledge work where they create, evaluate, and analyze. Students should regularly participate in online discussion groups, be they synchronous or asynchronous.

Just What Part of the “Accessible” Memo Didn’t You Get?

All teaching and learning materials must be accessible to all students. Period. If you’re creating video lectures, streaming video clips, or providing narrated presentations, each must either have closed-captions or a transcript. Online standard D10, and the Department of Justice, expects it and your students deserve it. Sites like Universal Subtitles are easy to use and allow your captioned videos to play from their site, or you may download the time codes to upload to YouTube.

Professional Development

While you may feel like you’ve mastered your craft when teaching face-to-face, teaching an online or blended course requires a different skill set and mastery of different tools. In an online poll we conducted, online teachers recommended that newly converted online teachers master the following tools before beginning to create an online or blended course: 1) SlideShare or a similar online presentation tool; 2) Collaborative meeting tools and related skills to set-up and conduct online discussions; 3) Portfolio creation tools for students to assemble examples of their authentic work; 4) Synchronous presentation skills because teaching “live” to online students offers completely different challenges and requires new solutions; and 5) Universal Subtitles for creating closed-captions.

One avenue of professional development is the Leading Edge Certification (LEC) for online teachers. The 45-hour LEC course includes units in online pedagogy, building an online community, accessibility, assessment, and preparation. Based on iNACOL’s Quality Standards for Online Teachers, LEC provides an opportunity to become a highly-qualified online educator.

Online and blended learning are growing quickly for a reason. These courses can help personalize learning, allowing schools to vastly expand their course catalogs, and providing students the opportunity to learn any time, any place, any path, or at any pace. We understand your eagerness to provide an online or blended option to your students. Before jumping into the water, though, we just ask that you learn to swim. Anyone can create a lousy course. It takes time, talent, and perseverance to create a great one.

 

 

eLearning: The Journey between Tipping Point and Critical Mass

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As predicted by Christensen and Horn in Disrupting Class, we’ve reached online learning’s tipping point. Data from this year’s Keeping Pace shows annual leaps in both the number of districts implementing online and blended learning as well as the number of student participants. In California, last spring’s eLearning census revealed that 45% of all districts and charters are implementing online or blended learning and that one-third of the remaining districts are in the planning stages.  Certainly, we have a critical mass of districts and charters that recognize the benefits of online and blended learning.  We have reached a tipping point.

The number of students involved, though, remains small at this point of the revolution. In Florida, FLVS reported 304,000 course completions last year, which while seemingly significant, actually represents only about 30,000 full-time students. (This is assuming that each full-time student takes five fall courses and five spring courses.) In California, which has about 210,000 students learning online, only 3.4% of the student population is involved, so while the numbers of students remains small, the interest and involvement at schools and districts can not be ignored.

So, what happens now? How will online and blended learning grow and evolve between the tipping point and critical mass? If online/blended learning has reached puberty, as I explained in an earlier post, what must we expect, or even demand, between now and adulthood? (While we could make a case that online and blended learning has attained critical mass, a point where there is no turning back, we’re defining it as 2019, the year Christensen and Horn predict that 50% of all courses are taught online.)

What has to happen the next six years for online and blended learning to succeed, for districts, teachers and students to embrace it fully, and for online learning to positively affect student achievement?

The case that current virtual school student achievement is problematic has been made in a variety of reports and this year’s California Academic Performance Index (API) shows a significant number of virtual schools in Year Four of Program Improvement.

So, with online and blended learning receiving increasing attention, both locally and nationally, what happens next?

Teacher evaluation using student performance data hits a wall.

With more districts and states weaving performance data into teacher evaluations, expect a pushback by virtual teachers. With many online courses teaching less than 50% of the required Common Core or content standards, and with many courses resembling little better than an online, flat textbook with few, if any, engaging activities and rich media, someone’s going to notice that online course material is more responsible for poor student achievement than is the teacher.

If, and when, this happens, educators will begin to realize that outcome-based evaluation can only succeed when you have quality inputs. Garbage in. Garbage out. Reporting about quality inputs is, and will remain, CLRN’s mission.

Competition Increases

With several dozen online/blended learning publishers/providers creating courses, expect several things: 1) New publishers/providers will appear to both fill-in gaps and compete directly for new territory; 2) Corporations, be they larger online publishers or outside companies, will continue to purchase successful publishers, narrowing the field, a trend that has already begun; and 3) Publishers with inferior courses will leave the market or go out of business.

Quality will Increase

Up to this point, CLRN has certified only a quarter of the courses we’ve reviewed. http://clrn.org/browse/index.cfm/online-courses. As a whole, the majority of courses we’ve seen are text intensive, causing students to read page after page followed by a multiple-choice test. Many courses do not include activities that engage students in higher order thinking and authentic learning experiences. Rich media, simulations, and video lectures are but a dream.

However, we are encouraged by the number of curriculum directors within online providers who are currently working with us to improve their non-certified courses. Using data from our reviews and the specific review comments from partially or not-met standards, curriculum directors are driving course improvement in their companies.  To encourage this trend, CLRN revised our review policies to allow publishers to resubmit their updated, improved courses for re-review.

Over the next few years, courses will improve to engage all students, not just those who are highly motived to pile through boring content. We expect, as Christensen and Horn predict in Disrupting class, that courses will sense students’ learning styles and customize teaching methods depending on student needs. We also expect that formative assessments, those short, multiple-choice tests spaced throughout lessons, will determine a student’s path through the course, stopping to reteach using new examples or even new methods to ensure students master the content before moving to the next concept.

CLRN will expand both to meet our customer’s needs and to drive course quality forward

Currently, CLRN reviews courses from English-language arts, history-social science, mathematics, science, and visual and performing arts. Our world language review site has hired reviewers and begins reviews course reviews this January. While English and Math courses are reviewed against the Common Core standards, we’ll continue to look for exemplary standards to augment our work. For example, when California adopts the Next Gen Science standards next year, CLRN will add them to our database, while removing California’s original science standards.  CLRN’s next expansion, should money fall from the sky, are Career Tech Ed (CTE) courses, for which California has specific standards.

In September, we announced our partnership with the University of California, where UC will rely only on CLRN’s Certified courses for UC a-g approval. To earn CLRN Certification, courses must meet at least 80% of both the content standards and iNACOL’s standards for quality online courses. In addition, 15 power standards must also be met. CLRN will be engaging with other organizations and states to share our resources, to collaborate on reviews, and to create new partnerships.

Next month, we debut our eLearning Strategies Symposium, an annual online and blended learning conference in California, co-produced with Computer Using Educators. As of this post, 296 educators have registered for this two-day event on December 7th and 8th at the Hilton Costa Mesa. We’re pleased to have Susan Patrick as our closing keynote. A complete symposium schedule may be found here.

Having tipped, or reached puberty, online learning is on a steady path towards critical mass or adulthood.  It’s everyone’s job to expect more from these valuable resources in order to provide high-quality learning resources and personalized learning for every student.

Online Learning, UC A-G, and CLRN-Certified Courses

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It’s been quite a year for the California Learning Resource Network. After investing a year to create the standards and review process for online courses, CLRN began reviewing English-language arts and mathematics courses last summer, spending much of last year training our reviewers and norming the process to ensure consistency. Last spring, we added history-social science, science, and visual and performing arts courses and plans are under way to add world language reviews this winter.

During 2011/12, CLRN reviewed 55 online courses from seven publishers: Accelerate, Aventa, Education2020, K12, Inc, Pearson Digital Learning, Plato Learning, and Thesys International. Our 2012/13 review queue currently holds 88 course submissions, including many from Advanced Academics, Apex Learning, Cambium Education, National University High School, and Odysseyware. Still, many of our customers have asked us about course approval for the University of California’s A-G requirements, since A-G approval is required for courses students take for admission to the University of California. We now have an answer.

CLRN is proud to announce our partnership with the University of California. By agreement with UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), online courses must now be CLRN reviewed and CLRN-Certified® before UC will accept them for their final review and approval for A-G.

To achieve CLRN-Certified® status, online courses must address at least 80% of the course’s content standards (Common Core or California State Standards) and 80% of iNACOL’s Standards for Quality Online Programs. Fifteen online “Power Standards” must be among those verified by CLRN. These Power Standards include: Content: A3, A9 & A13; Instructional Design: B3, B4, B5 & B10; Student Assessment: C2, C3 & C4; Technology: D4, D10 & D11; and Course Evaluation and Support: E3 & E10.  Course publishers may utilize the CLRN-Certified® term and logo in association with their certified products.

By request of the University of California, CLRN reviews will now include the “Not Met” content standards within posted reviews. Also displayed on CLRN’s browse page and within each course review, will be the percentage of content and online standards met. CLRN-Certified® courses will include both a reference to its CLRN-Certified® status and the new CLRN-Certified® badge.

View UC’s Press Release.

Blending Learning Evolves

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Last year, in Heather Staker’s landmark paper, “The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning”, the online learning community finally found its Occam’s razor, a simple, yet effective definition of blended learning. Last year, blended learning was defined as:

 Blended learning is any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.

Staker’s admission that blended learning models would continue to evolve proved true in version two of her report, entitled “Classifying K-12 Blended Learning“, co-authored by Michael Horn.

In it, blended learning’s definition has also evolved to become more succinct. It now reads:

Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace and at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home.

The updated definition is important for several reasons. First, by adding the qualifier “is a formal education program” they have separated blended learning from informal, unstructured learning such as students playing video games on their own. The second difference in this updated definition is the addition of another qualifier, “online delivery of content and instruction.” Here, they distance blended learning from supplementary online learning and tech rich classrooms. From the first computer labs in the 1980s, teachers have utilized software and online resources to supplement their curriculum. However, in no way could you classify these exercises, whether random or regularly scheduled, as online learning. The dividing line, as Heather states in her definition of Technology Rich Instruction, is student control of time, place, path and/or pace.

In all, the new blended learning definition now more clearly separates supplementary, tech rich activities from true online learning.

More to follow.

There’s No Room for Partisans in the eLearning Revolution

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Dear Larry. You Don’t Get It.

I always feel proud when Red and Blue join together to support a common cause. Such is the case with online learning as both sides of the political spectrum understand the great benefits that online learning can provide to both teaching and learning. Consider Democratic Governor Bob Wise’s and Republican Governor Jeb Bush’s Digital Learning Now project. In Congress, Republican Kristi Noem, a conservative House member, and Democrat Jared Polis, a liberal, created the eLearning caucus to “promote research on successes and failures in eLearning.”

But, I’m not surprised when a partisan from one side imprints their own political agenda on the effort. Such is the case, I suspect, with Larry Sand’s article, Disrupting Class, on the City Journal. In it, he claims that “California’s teacher unions will eventually go the way the way of the Betamax.” Larry cites Hoover Institution claims that unions will be marginalized and that they can’t stop the online learning revolution from happening.

Really Larry? Is that the best you can do? Your proof of your claims is a recent development at the University of California where its teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers, fought against online education in order to “protect our members from potential adverse effects of UC’s rapid adoption of online instruction. Larry states that the union will “fiercely protect their turf at any cost.”

Really Larry.

You compare teaching to the horseshoe business, which became significantly less relevant with the advent of the automobile. Yet, Clayton Christensen, in his book “Disrupting Class”, recognizes that K-12 education has a long history of changing itself and rebuilding the education airplane while its flying.  No one claims that brick-and-mortar schools will go the way of the blacksmith or that teachers are the next farrier.

In fact, K12’s primary teachers’ union, the NEA, is ready to prepare its members for the online future. In their publication,  “Guide to Teaching Online Courses”,  they outline their support for eLearning and repeat much of what other online supporters have stated is necessary for the revolution to succeed. The NEA recognizes that “every student deserves a highly qualified teacher online.” They support online learning as a way to expand teachers’ professional roles without leaving the classroom.  One example they provide reinforces how online learning can support students who don’t have access to a full range of courses, namely that a German teacher could offer an AP German course, even if no students in her school take German.

Does that sound like a union that is trying to stop online learning, Larry?

The NEA paper lays out their core beliefs, which don’t vary from what other online supporters have proposed. The NEA believes that online courses should be instructor-led. (No one has advocated for teacher-less classrooms, Larry.) They believe that online courses should be student-centered, that learning should be collaborative, and that activities and assessments should account for different learning styles.  These are all components promoted by a variety of eLearning proponents.

This might make you angry, Larry, but the NEA believes that “schools should set high standards for their online teachers” and that states should recognize each other’s credentials so a credentialed teacher can teach in many states. They also advocate that since online teaching is different from face-to-face, teachers should be provided professional development regarding effective pedagogy and delivery, appropriate and timely feedback, online discussion facilitation, and learning management system navigation. Their publication includes 19 skills that teachers should acquire before they teach online. Skills repeated by other organizations as essential.

Sound like the union is in denial, Larry?

You cite Rocketship Education’s charter network, which uses blended learning to dramatically increase student proficiency. Yet, Rocketship pays their teachers more than surrounding districts and they’ve made regular, ongoing professional development a core component. As Heather Staker believes in her report, “The Rise of K12 Blended Learning”, 90% of all online learning will take place in brick-and-mortar schools, which utilize real teachers. And those teachers will require initial and ongoing professional development to best utilize this new medium.

So why does the NEA support online learning? Well, as many of us have dreamed of for the past 20 years, online learning enables teachers to move from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side”, just as advocated by Sal Kahn with his excellent set of lectures. It’s about growing our profession from lecturers to one that can meet every student’s needs.

You say, Larry, that “a superior education for far less money will eventually overwhelm and decimate the unions, and for some, that will come not a moment too soon.”  No one claims that blended learning will cost “far less money.” In fact, some day that online learning can initially cost more.

Yes, K12 education excels in rebuilding its airplane while it’s flying. My only problem is when the qualifications of the next version’s designer is that he took a flight once. Save the partisan efforts for others. I’m proud that Red and Blue fight for the same side in the online learning revolution and I look forward to eLearning’s transformation of both teaching and learning.

Response to “Online schools a virtual waste for students”

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“Online schools a virtual waste for students”, a Detroit News article by Michigan Education Association president, Steven Cook, grabbed my attention yesterday and it prompted me to follow the breadcrumbs to the research he referenced in his opinions & conclusions. In summary, Mr. Cook makes a number of claims that aren’t backed-up by the report. Other statements are slanted against virtual schools, or are based on the fear that virtual schools are siphoning off money intended for brick-and-mortar schools. Below I’ll provide Mr. Cooks’s claims, the research, and my take on both. The Glass/Welner research has a variety of points I believe are misleading and some conclusions that are spot-on. I’ll cover these later.

Let’s begin.

The research referenced is the October 2011 report, “ONLINE K-12 SCHOOLING IN THE U.S.: UNCERTAIN PRIVATE VENTURES IN NEED OF PUBLIC REGULATION”, by Gene V Glass and Kevin G. Welner, from the University of Colorado, Boulder. My initial impressions are that the report utilizes a variety of aged-data, which has contributed to its sloppy thinking and analysis. Let’s take a look at the article’s claims and the report’s analysis, which will be followed by my viewpoints.

Learning Outcomes

Detroit News

“…there is no reliable evidence showing that theses virtual institutions are an effective alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar schools.”

Glass/Welner

“Little or no research is yet available on the outcomes of such full-time virtual schooling.” “blended approaches….have been studied fairly extensively…..research has shown the virtual courses to produce test scores comparable to those from conventional, face-to-face courses.”

 Me

More research is certainly needed, as I’ve advocated in past posts. The data I’ve written about in California and Minnesota do point to potential problems in full-time, online virtual schools, but many variables need to be sorted out and researched before we point blame. There are bad virtual schools, just as there are bad face-to-face schools. Both must be reformed or closed. Just don’t paint all schools, or all variables with the same brush. Just as weak curriculum could be the cause, so too could be the preparation students require to effectively complete courses, the degree of teacher/student engagement, the amount of initial and ongoing professional development offered to teachers, etc.

For-profit Virtual Schools

Detroit News

“Advocates for full-time virtual learning are more interested in increasing their profits than investing in our children.” “The last thing our schools need  – on top of the $1 billion already cut this year -  is having more crucial funding siphoned off and diverted to virtual schools, whose effectiveness is questionable, at least.”

 Glass/Welner

Virtual school “growth is due in large part to the entry of for-profit companies into the arena of K-12 public education.” “Virtual charter schools have sought ot be funded exactly as if they were “brick-and-mortar” charter schools.” They “insist that expenses for virtual schools are comparable to those for conventional schools. Providers lobby legislators vigorously for equal funding.”

 “The privatization of K-12 public education is a new field on which the machinations of crony capitalism can be played out…” “As Rupert Murdoch said,…’When it comes to K through 12 educaiton, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed…”

 Me

Which comes first: the chicken or the egg? If brick-and-mortar schools are unable to offer a full range of course offerings, including AP and world language courses or if schools can’t provide credit recovery courses to their students, is it the fault of for-profit companies for providing service to your customers? We should be acting like customer-centric institutions, not ones that are afraid of losing business to someone who can do our jobs better.

Yes, for-profit companies have entered the arena, just as they did in the textbook publishing industry. While I, too, am concerned about large portions of a virtual school’s ADA/funding being send to companies, funding regulations, as proposed by Digital Learning Now, would help to correct the problem if they were implemented by more states.

(63) Under state law, state provides final installment of funding when a student successfully completes the course.  (7 states)

This are patterned after Florida’s formula that only provides funding IF and WHEN a student completes a course. Utah has adapted the formula to provide vendors 50% up front and 50% upon completion. I personally prefer California’s use of ADA which provides funding for each attendance day, which I realize is a confusing when considering online attendance.

Regarding the opinion that commercial course vendors are just out to make a buck, I couldn’t agree less. Because companies are profit-driven, they’re also very attuned to their customers, your current/former students. They listen attentively to students, educators, CLRN, and their competition about how they can improve their courses. Can brick-and-mortar schools say the same?

Yes Rupert is getting into the business and I presume his intentions are less than honorable. However, I’ve met a variety of online publishers who care very much about the quality of the courses they provide to students. Competition will only improve their products.

 Profits vs. profits (I just had to include this quote again)

“Advocates for full-time virtual learning are more interested in increasing their profits than investing in our children.” “The last thing our schools need  – on top of the $1 billion already cut this year -  is having more crucial funding siphoned off and diverted to virtual schools, whose effectiveness is questionable, at least.”

I find Mr. Cook’s two statements, when posed side-by-side quite telling. On one hand, he’s concerned that online course publishers are just in it for the big bucks. However, his second statement shows his hand as someone more concerned about losing money. Tell that to Kodak and Polaroid. They didn’t adapt to digital cameras and now one is bankrupt and the other is preparing for bankruptcy.

It’s about teaching and learning. It’s about meeting all students’ needs. Get on the train or get run over by it.