Clayton Christensen |

This past week ISTE hosted the 2009 NECC in Washington, DC. It was a fun event, and I had the honor of participating in two events there—one being the keynote address on Tuesday morning the 30th and the other being at the Online Learning Institute on Wednesday, which was a great event with rich working-group discussions in essence that allowed nearly everyone to take home at least something new from what someone else was doing in the room.

The Tuesday keynote was structured as a debate. My team was selected to argue in support of the resolution: “Bricks-and-mortar schools are detrimental to the future of education.” NPR’s Robert Siegel moderated. Gary Stager was on my team along with Marshall Thompson, a high school debater from my alma mater, Walt Whitman. We faced off against Brad Jupp of the Department of Education, Cheryl Lemke of The Metiri Group, and another high school student, Erik Bakke from Virginia.

The big takeaway? It was something I knew going in, but as is so often the case, the resolution in essence posed the wrong question. It was absurd (purposely I hope)—and almost all of us argued variations of the same side. Cheryl Lemke delivered a wonderful speech that mapped nearly perfectly onto mine; we were in total agreement I think—and I highly recommend her remarks.

It seems obvious to me that for a variety of reasons, roughly 90-plus percent of students (that number is derived from some projections we ran when we were researching the book) could never take part in a fully virtual school program because of family structures and associated economic realities and the like, which is why hybrid-learning of various sorts will ultimately be so important to the future of education. Having a physical place for most students to go will always be important.

I had written several drafts of my remarks; in retrospect I think I wish I had kept one line in which was this: The exciting thing is that online learning is only in its infancy as we still struggle to allow it to escape our old assumptions about where and how learning must occur and to free it up to draw in learning opportunities for students from anywhere anytime.

I’m pretty sure including that would not have swung the debate to our side, however—so congratulations once again to Brad, Cheryl, and Erik!

Educational computer games—video games for learning (a.k.a. serious games or edutainment)—have gained increasing attention over the last several years in academic, education, and gaming circles. In Disrupting Class we referenced a few of the top thinkers on the role games and simulations can play in education—people like Marc Prensky, James Paul Gee, and Chris Dede.

One reason people are so excited about educational games is because of how engaging and motivating games are naturally. Emerging research shows that many students are much more engaged when learning through a game than in more typical learning environments—and high engagement results in higher achievement. It also doesn’t take a whiz to see that many children already spend a ton of time with video games; moving learning to where the students are holds potential.

Yet despite their promise, serious games haven’t had a tremendous impact in formal learning environments to date. There are some limited successes—like Tabula Digita’s math games, for example (this article gives a solid overview)—but for the most part selling to and competing for time within traditional schools and classrooms remain difficult given many of the barriers we articulate in the book among others.

I’ve been left to wonder what would happen if educational gaming companies instead took a disruptive path and targeted nonconsumption rather than trying to penetrate the system by going in head first. “After school” has been one promising place of nonconsumption that has received some attention, but for a variety of reasons, adoption is still spotty although there are some successes.

To me, one natural fit has seemed to be introducing edutainment through the online learning channel. Because of the shift in platform and educational model, online learning is naturally well suited to educational gaming and other virtual simulations. I’ve always figured that offering educational games as a part of or an option in a course for those who would learn best through this path makes eminent sense.

Florida Virtual School is showing that that instinct could be right—and that I may also have underestimated the potential synergies—as FLVS is launching the first complete online game-based course for high school students in the form of a full American history course based on an online game scenario.

It’s called Conspiracy Code and FLVS designed it in partnership with 360Ed Inc., an educational game development company whose CEO, Ben Noel, is a former Electronic Arts employee.

The game has the potential to scale, according to Noel in the eSchool News article, and it is in beta testing right now with 65 students to understand how effective it is and do further research to improve it. Ultimately the University of Central Florida is planning a study on this using fMRI scans and so forth to understand the learning it produces in students.

It’s going to be fun to watch as the experiment evolves—both from a research perspective and from the perspective of where it goes next as FLVS plans future courses with 360Ed.

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Also, keep an eye on OnLive as a disruptive service for bringing affordable and easily accessible gaming to the masses. Could it suggest a path forward for education gaming, too?

Clayton Christensen and I have a piece up on the Harvard Business Review blog titled A Solution to School District Budget Cuts. It is about the cuts that the LA Unified School District and others are making to summer school and the like–and how they ought to view budget shortages not as threats but as opportunities to transform the system. In this case, rather than simply cut summer school almost entirely–which might save money in the short run but will in fact create much bigger costs overall–why not offer many of these courses still but online? More detail is in the piece.

Simple and mindless cuts don’t make much sense, and we need people to think more strategically. Creative, disruptive solutions to transform old systems are vital. Business as usual isn’t going to return anytime soon.

A question I am asked frequently about online learning is: “Schools aren’t just responsible for learning. They are responsible for doing a socialization job. Won’t online learning hurt that?”

There are also many answers to this—and, I’d like to add, many other jobs for which schools are held responsible, too, that online learning in its most narrow form may not cover.

First, we should be honest and acknowledge that the socialization in our schools is not always a good thing and is certainly not always good for every student. Many a parent has said to me (paraphrased): “Online learning sounds great. The socialization that actually occurs in schools because of peer influence doesn’t help my child at all; in fact, it’s had a really negative and destructive influence!” Parents may mean different things by the statement, but we see forms of the sentiment all the time. Sometimes children are afraid to ask questions in classrooms; afraid to excel and be deemed “un-cool;” afraid to come to school because of bullying, and on and on. Online learning for many might provide the needed shelter to allow them to excel.

I also think that socialization is one of the dimensions where online learning will continue to improve. The interaction between teacher and student and student to other students in the first versions of online learning was clunky; the best didn’t come close to replicating a high-quality in-class experience. But, just like any technology, thanks to the work of players like Elluminate, this experience is predictably improving. As many have also written, many full-time online schools have added elements to foster student social interaction like field trips and the like (see the Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning report for example). And online interaction is increasingly a part of today’s society; students in online programs can theoretically interact with people from anywhere in the world, not just their locality, which is exciting.

In addition, online learning is increasingly becoming less and less of a distance phenomenon as hybrid- or blended-learning—which has a bricks-and-mortar component to it—is growing faster than the distance side of the equation, according to this Sloan Consortium report. This doesn’t surprise me. Because of the custodial job that schools need to fill for many families to the job of socialization, there are a lot of reasons to suggest that students will still go to facilities of some sort for their education—even if the platform for much of what they will do academically is online.

Finally, a recent survey has come out on the topic that you can read here. The results suggest that typical, mainstream students enrolled in full-time, online public schools are either superior to or not significantly different from students enrolled in traditional public schools with respect to their socialization. There are some reasons for caution on the survey that the authors acknowledge—the design is post-test only and because those in these schools are there by choice it wasn’t possible to “design a random assignment control group experiment”—so drawing a causal inference and saying enrollment in an online school results in better socialization would be dangerous.

But the study is important in one important respect even if it can’t be considered conclusive as it shows that there probably aren’t negative social characteristics or problem behaviors associated with participation in online public schools per se. If the end goal is to have children who are well socialized, that’s an important finding.

New school models are appearing that attempt to personalize learning and push education in a more student-centric direction. Some target drop-out students—a classic group of non-consumers—and therefore appear to have some disruptive elements potentially, whereas others are more conventional, but either way, all are something to pay attention to as we rethink what “schooling” should actually look like.

As Clayton Christensen and Jason Hwang write in The Innovator’s Prescription, when there is no non-consumption in a field, the only way for disruption to occur is for something to come in that is both significantly less expensive and better so that the decision to switch over makes consummate sense. Most chartered schools to this point haven’t hit on one or both of these, which has stymied their ability to scale and have broader impact. The below models may give us some clues as to how that could change.

One model is a new chartered school called the Redmond Proficiency Academy. Operated by Personalized Learning, Inc., the school plans to combine the best from “college-, online- and project-based class learning” to formulate a personalized learning experience for students. The school is also moving away from seat-time metrics and time spent in the conventional classroom and instead focuses on demonstration of “proficiency” or mastery inside and outside the classroom to satisfy state and federal requirements.

Westwood’s Cyber High School is another model to follow. It has two models that it lets students choose between. One is “My School,” which has a virtual and a physical component to it where students come into a school lab a couple times a week. The second is called “Not School” where the experience is entirely online. The concept comes from the “Not School” Program in the United Kingdom, and Westwood’s founders have studied the model to learn from its mistakes and successes. The schools target disaffected or drop-out students by allowing them to work in a proficiency-based model of online project-based learning. And it seems to have hit a niche, as many students are gobbling up the offering from all over Michigan.

One other school model that has some exciting potential is Mavericks in Education. It, too, targets drop-out students, with a model that turns the traditional school day on its head as it offers online learning with on-site mentors in its physical buildings during different times of the day for fewer hours to match each student’s unique circumstances—and all students have 24/7 access to learning from anywhere as well. It also has some neat perks that it has built in to motivate students to learn and accelerate their progress.

Learning from these models could go a long way in helping us transform education into a student-centric experience.

Note: The original post contained an error as it referred to the Redmond Proficiency Academy as the Richmond Proficiency Academy. I have corrected it above and regret the error.

CNN.com published a piece by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn today, June 2, 2009, on the recent federal stimulus funds for education–and on what the proper role of the federal government should be in in transforming our schools. You can read the commentary, “Don’t prop up failing schools,” here. Let us know what you think by commenting on the article, and we can also continue the conversation on this blog as well.

For those who follow our blog and are interested in online learning, a must read is the latest report by Anthony G. Picciano and Jeff Seaman, entitled “K-12 Online Learning: A 2008 Follow-up of the Survey of U.S. School District Administrators.” You can find the report here.

Published by The Sloan Consortium in January 2009, the report builds off an earlier one from two years before that the authors did in which they chronicled the emerging landscape of online learning in K-12 education through a survey that reached district administrators in a range of representative districts—rural, town, suburban, and urban. We used that report to inform our work in writing Disrupting Class extensively, as we found it to be among the best sources of information out there.

This report does not disappoint either. The highlights are good, but the fuller report is also rich—as is the fair discussion of our book toward the end of the report.

A few things worth noting from the report’s highlights (along with some brief personal commentary), and then I encourage everyone to read the report:

-    A whopping 75 percent of public school districts offer online or blended courses
-    Most of these districts anticipate their online offerings will grow, and the biggest growth appears to be in blended learning—something that makes sense to us for a variety of reasons.
-    According to Picciano and Seaman’s numbers, enrollments in online courses grew 47 percent from 2005-06 to 2007-08.
-    Online courses are meeting the needs of a range of students—from those who need credit recovery to those desiring advanced courses. This dovetails with our observations.
-    An encouraging sign in my view is that they report that school districts are relying on multiple online learning providers. I hope that this will give students different choices to find the best courses for their learning needs and styles.
-    Online courses represent an absolute lifeline for small rural school districts. Not only do they help them offer nice-to-have courses, they also help them offer basic, core courses, too, that they would otherwise not be able to offer. Again, this matches with what I see. For example, the Department of Education reports that 25 percent of schools don’t offer any advanced courses, as defined as anything above Algebra 2, Biology (so no Chemistry and Physics), and any honors English. I guarantee there are plenty of students in those schools who would like or need the opportunity to take those courses, however, so online courses are filling a core need.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that roughly $5 billion of the $19.5 billion in E-Rate funds committed to schools and libraries from 1998 to 2006 were never spent. This article from eSchool News does a good job of summarizing.

For those who don’t know, the E-Rate program helps schools and libraries pay for Internet connectivity. If roughly 25 percent of funds over that period were not used, does that indicate that schools don’t need the funds?

Far from it. Many schools lag in their Internet connectivity, and of those that are hooked up to high-speed connections, many don’t have enough capacity to handle large groups of people online at the same time. This of course limits the ability of online learning to transform education into a student-centric system as we write about since it limits how robust and dynamic an online learning experience can be.

So why would these funds not be claimed then? There are a few reasons, which range from the fact that the applicant’s needs changed or they needed fewer dollars than they applied for to the fact that the sheer complexity and bureaucratic red-tape in the program often caused people to leave money on the table—or, speaking from what I’ve heard on the road—not apply.

This suggests a few things. First, as we think about sending more funding down for broadband, we ought to figure out ways to first use funds already allocated for the cause.

Second, we can learn some valuable lessons from North Carolina’s work with E-Rate. The state of North Carolina saw that many smaller districts would not apply for the E-Rate funds because of the bureaucratic red tape and they just didn’t have the time or manpower to devote to it. As a result, the state stepped in and helped the districts apply for the funds, which has helped North Carolina extend broadband across the state to get every school online.

This effort of course also suggests that the process for applying for funds for broadband needs to be simplified.

And lastly, the federal government should push districts to install the bandwidth necessary not just for today’s needs, but also in anticipation of tomorrow’s. This might include installing wireless and extending that access to the broader communities, not just the school buildings, for example. When we invest in infrastructures of change today, we should do so with an eye toward the future, not just the present.

Attendees at the Milken Institute Global Conference this past week were privileged on Tuesday to hear from three Nobel Laureates—Gary Becker, Roger Myerson, and Myron Scholes—over a fascinating lunchtime discussion.

At some point, Michael Milken, who was playing the role of moderator, brought up the topic of K-12 education. Becker in particular made some interesting points, including some pontificating on how vouchers would improve our schools.

Regardless of your viewpoint on that, it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider reasons why vouchers and many other reforms have not pervaded and transformed public education, and why we have instead only been “tinkering toward utopia.”

One explanation could have come from Becker’s right in Myerson, an expert in game theory. Game theory helps us to predict what others’ corresponding actions will be if we take a certain action. We can use it to predict whether certain paths of reform are likely to be successful or instead to meet with such fierce resistance that they stand little to no chance of succeeding.

Game theory accounts for the power of entrants to beat incumbents through a disruptive strategy—where they use asymmetric motivation to their advantage. By offering a product or service that does not make sense for the incumbent to offer, the entrant creates a situation where the incumbent’s motivation is not to do what the entrant is motivated to do; rather the incumbent is motivated to flee “up market” and cede more and more ground to the disruptive entrant.

This helps to understand why vouchers and charters themselves are not disruptive and have not swept in to transform U.S. education. We write about this in the current issue of the School Choice Advocate in our article, “The Transformative Properties of School Choice.” By attacking players in the established public-school system head on, vouchers and charters do not create asymmetric motivation, as many established players are highly motivated to fight them (although these attempted reforms may pressure the system to improve itself and help pave the way for true disruptions, even if they themselves don’t ultimately win the day).

A few lessons from economics could have helped predict that.

Is owning content the future in education, or will it be more important to help people navigate through it and filter it to find useful learning that pertains to their needs and desires?

With the free resources increasingly on the Web—two of which we wrote about a few blog posts ago here—one can make the argument that content is becoming more of a commodity. Certainly there are many avenues to find free stuff to help you learn something, and Lifehacker has a post up that highlights several of these.

From resources to help you teach yourself a music instrument or to program code to helping you get a “Personal MBA” or similar formal learning objects that a liberal arts major would work with in getting a degree, there are tons of sites that Lifehacker gives some tips for finding—and then navigating.

There are some neat business models out there as well, such as TeachMate, which allows people to trade skills—the example Lifehacker gives is you can teach someone English and in exchange they teach you to cook.

What other free resources are out there on the Web that you are seeing and using to advance learning?