Clayton Christensen |

Senator John McCain, the Republican Party’s nominee for President, just finished delivering a speech at the NAACP convention. He spent a good part of the speech talking about the need to reform and improve public education.

One paragraph in particular caught my attention, as it’s all about virtual and online education. According to his Web site, he said:

“We can also help more children and young adults to study outside of school by expanding support for virtual learning. So I propose to direct 500 million dollars in current federal funds to build new virtual schools, and to support the development of online courses for students. Through competitive grants, we will allocate another 250 million dollars to support state programs expanding online education opportunities, including the creation of new public virtual charter schools. States can use these funds to build virtual math and science academies to help expand the availability of Advanced Placement math, science, and computer science courses, online tutoring, and foreign language courses.”

I haven’t dug through the details of this yet as it just caught my eye, but this isn’t the first time Senator McCain has talked about computer-based learning. Clearly he has caught on to the disruptive innovation that is beginning to enter so many of our nation’s school districts and that we chronicle in our book, Disrupting Class.

I’m not sure yet what the proper role for the federal government should be in online learning, but talking about it and making everyone aware of it is a big step forward in bringing this innovation to the market at large so all students can benefit from its exciting potential.

I’d love to hear from people about what they know about the proposal, whether they think it’s a good idea, what they would have the federal government do for online learning in an ideal world, and so on.

In a Slate article, Ray Fisman writes about “why giving poor kids laptops doesn’t improve their scholastic performance.” The title of the article is “The $100 Distraction Device”, a thinly veiled slap at the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, originally known as the $100 Laptop.

The article does ultimately reach a subtler conclusion. Merely having computers doesn’t necessarily improve academic performance. For the readers of Disrupting Class, you’ll already know that we agree. Far more important is how computers are used and implemented into people’s lives.

The article builds on personal anecdote as well as new research by economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches, who had access to a great situation from a research standpoint from the Euro 200 program that gave poor families vouchers for computers in Romania.

Fisman also recounts the billions that the federal government spends on helping to equip schools with computers. The result from this, as our book and Larry Cuban has documented, is not much improvement. The union study that I blogged about earlier reaches the same conclusion.

Fisman concludes that if children have computers on which they just play games to the detriment of work, they will perform poorly in school. If they do academic work with them, of course they might have different results. Marc Prensky and others might take issue with this, as they see tremendous educational value in some video games.

The bigger point is merely giving computers to people or cramming them into classrooms will just waste more money and not help poorer students. Merely handing out the OLPC across the developing world won’t help.

But as readers of our book and this blog know, there are many ways computers can have tremendous impact if used correctly. If the OLPC program is used not as an ends, but instead as a means, it could have exciting results to produce a disruptive outcome that leapfrogs the U.S., similar to how so many developing countries leapfrogged the U.S. in cell-phone adoption. To do this, the OLPC must be used as a portal to connect students to engaging learning opportunities through enriching interactive software. If done correctly, we might see that although computers don’t help poor kids, computer-based learning does.

One of the biggest questions I am often asked is, “Can online learning benefit minority students or those who struggle most to learn in school?”

It’s asked because one of the easy examples of non-consumption where online learning has taken root is for Advanced Placement (AP) and other advanced courses. The assumption that drives the question is that where we need to improve outcomes isn’t for those at the top; it’s for those who are dropping out, not learning how to read, and so on.

An article in eSchool News titled “Panelists: Online learning can help minority students” begins to answer the question quite well.

Sharnell Jackson, the chief eLearning officer for the Chicago Public Schools, and Themy Sparangis, the chief technology officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, along with Ray Rose, director of programs at MentorNet, were the panelists in a Webinar that the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) hosted on the topic. Their conclusion? Online learning can be a big benefit to underrepresented student populations.

And it’s a benefit in precisely the places we’d predict: areas of non-consumption, including for dropout recovery, for kids in juvenile detention centers, where school courses don’t have enough enrollment, and for schools that don’t have enough educators to teach a specific subject. Online courses help in the latter two cases to ensure equitable access for all students, Sparangis said.

As Jackson said, “Online can be an alternative to school if either you physically cannot attend school or if a traditional classroom setting does not fit your specific needs. With online learning, a student can finish their high school degree, make up credits, and enrich traditional curriculum.”

Interestingly enough, out of all the high schools in Illinois that use online learning, a predominantly Hispanic high school has the highest online learning pass rate.

The panelists went on to explain how online learning is often more rigorous than regular classroom learning and, in their experience, how students often have the same if not better learning outcomes, as measured by state tests. Classes can be more individualized, have increased assessment and monitoring, have interactive options, and provide a host of online resources for students.

In our view, this is just the beginning of a truly student-centric learning experience for our children. The disruptive innovation of online learning is planting itself in these footholds for students who otherwise would have no other course option and are not well served, and as it increasingly does so, it will also gradually improve. As it does so, it will benefit students who have struggled traditionally in schools far more than anyone else.

An April article in eSchool News titled “Schools mull needs of adult distance learners” discusses the growing demand from adults to take online courses.

This is a classic area of non-consumption. Many adults would like to have some form of ongoing education for any number of reasons –- to gain new skills for a future job, for general enrichment and curiosity, and so on — but often there have not been good options to fulfill these jobs. Most colleges have historically been tailored for the 18- to 22-year-old demographic, for example, and it’s hard to attend a school full time if you need to work or have a family. Night school often is not a satisfactory option.

With its convenience of allowing a student to take it any time, any place, and at any pace, online education is stepping in to fill the need. According to Capella University Vice Chairman Michael Offerman, the average student at Capella is 40 years old –- which shows there is a big untapped market here. As further proof of its power, Bill Gates recently told NBC’s Tom Brokaw in a June interview that he takes online education courses –- and finds them very useful.

As Offerman writes in his blog, “Despite clear changes in the demographics of American higher education, public discussion and public policy consideration are still based on the tradition of the 18-year-old going directly from high school to full-time, on-campus study.”

We’re just at the beginning of seeing how the Internet can revolutionize learning. Disruptive approaches to learning such as targeting adults will help improve the medium and push the conversation forward.

In classic disruptive fashion, according to the article, at the moment adult online education works best for the more motivated students, just as K-12 online education does. But over time, we can imagine it improving. Providers are fashioning it to be student centric. If the technology is honed in this foothold market in this fashion, this could have a big payoff for K-12 education down the line if providers transfer the relevant portions of what they learn from serving adults.

Worries over the United States’s economic competitiveness in the future come from all quarters. In his op-ed titled “Taking On The World” in the April 5, 2008 Wall Street Journal, Michael Malone makes an interesting argument about how much stiffer this competition will become as more people in the world become true players in the consumer global economy over the next few years.

In his words: “Ultimately, our strongest competitive advantage is the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of the American people.”

Malone then suggests several things the government can do to encourage further entrepreneurship and retain a competitive advantage for the United States.

One of his suggestions revolves around education. He says: “Make education more open. It is time for the rest of us to accept the reality that education in the U.S. is now a multi-platform (public, private, home) experience, and begin building Web-based curricular support for all three. It is in our national interest to make all schoolchildren well-educated and competitive in the modern economy.

Why shouldn’t kids, wherever they are taught, have access to the same teaching tools, and take classes together in classrooms in online virtual worlds such as Second Life, etc.? The curriculum should be increasingly non-linear as well: Why, when mom and dad are multitasking jobs at their laptops at Starbucks, are classrooms still bastions of rigid hours and even more rigid schedules?”

It’s a compelling point and echoes many of our own conclusions in Disrupting Class. Many of the leading education progressives have been thinking along these lines and asking these same questions, too, for some time.

One of the best questions often unasked is how can we move forward toward this vision? It is not at all clear the federal government is the best point of leverage here.

Heeding the lessons of disruption by using Web-based programs and so forth to compete against non-consumption is how. This is one of the theses in Disrupting Class, particularly about how to transform schools themselves, but as Malone suggests, there is a whole part of this equation that does not occur inside classrooms.

Marc Prensky often speaks of this. One of his central points is that some of the biggest and most exciting zones of non-consumption are in what he calls “after school.” He’s spot on. As the Kauffman Foundation has observed, education entrepreneurs introducing exciting new ways to learn on the Web and through games would be well advised to think of markets outside of K12 schools to make a meaningful impact. By targeting these zones of true non-consumption, they won’t have to serve the legacy jobs for which schools were built. These legacy processes and priorities are what make true innovation so hard.

We’d love to hear from people about any zones they see that are being transformed by these disruptive innovations outside of school and how these innovations take root and operate—and then how they might transform the six-plus hours children spend in schools, too.

According to eSchool News, a June 10th report released by the two teachers’ unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), show that after a decade of investment in technology, teachers still don’t feel comfortable incorporating it into their lesson plans.

Although educators have plenty of access to computers and the Internet and teachers use it quite a bit for administrative tasks, they don’t believe they have the proper training and support to use it for instructional purposes. There are also some complaints, particularly in urban areas, that the computers are outdated or there are not enough of them.

The fact that technology is not widely used in instruction of course is not news. Larry Cuban has documented this. The NEA/AFT study confirms what our book says as well.

We are certainly on the same page as the NEA and AFT presidents when they say that technology must play a much bigger role in our schools. Computer-based learning has the potential to provide students with a student-centric learning experience that is customized for the ways in which they learn and would be far more intrinsically motivating as a result.

Although lack of training or insufficient technology may be problems, the real problem is in the mindset over where technology should be used and how.

The lessons from our studies of innovation are that if you want an innovation to transform a market, you can’t implement it by cramming it into the mainstream of an organization. That organization will always co-opt the technology into its existing processes to just do what it does better.

Hence, teachers use technology to improve their ability to do administrative tasks. Implementing technology to carry out instruction, however, doesn’t fit the mold so easily. After all, we couldn’t expect a teacher to say, “Children, today is a great day because have this computer that will deliver the instruction, and you don’t need me for my lesson plans anymore.” It’s simply implausible.

On the other hand, if you look at places where there aren’t course offerings—such as for credit recovery programs and in alternative schools—technology is making a big impact and transforming schooling. Just keep your eye outside the mainstream, and you’ll see something very different—and very exciting—happening.

In an article in the April 2nd, 2008 issue of Education Week, Andrew Zucker writes about how all too often we have a simplistic view of educational technology. He writes, “either it’s the greatest approach to education ever invented or it’s a waste of money. … Instead of taking sides, we should think about how to use digital tools well.”

We couldn’t agree more. Although Zucker focuses more on how technology can be used to facilitate goals well beyond increasing student achievement (a point with which we also agree), we also see great value in technology to improve students’ learning. The key is, just as Zucker says, how it is used.

As we discuss in Disrupting Class, all too often technology and computers have been crammed into the classroom as an add-on on top of the existing teaching processes. This is all we can expect from any organization; the mere implementation of technology won’t transform the classroom by itself.

And yet transformation is desperately needed. As Zucker writes:

(1) We need to transform American schools into higher-performing organizations, whether or not we use technology; (2) Digital technology provides a powerful toolkit, offering unique advantages (such as bridging time and distance, democratizing access to information and services, and leveraging exponential increases in computer power) that have helped transform other organizations, especially those based on information and knowledge.

He’s right on both. Technology also offers the possibility of customizing an education to the unique way in which each student learns. The way to get there, however, isn’t just to throw more technology into the classroom. If we want to move forward, the most natural way to do so is to introduce it disruptively—by letting it compete where there is no alternative for a student, which means no class or teacher option.

Disrupting Class and Zucker both point out that this is already happening—just witness the explosion of students taking online courses.

The classroom of the future is beginning to take shape—just not in the places we normally look. It’s time to take notice and change the conversation.

I recently visited the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, Mass. It’s a fascinating place—and not at all what one would expect to see in the middle of Dorchester.

It’s one of these schools that provides a laptop for every child; there are no textbooks. But how the students use the laptops is what makes the school so interesting.

They don’t use the laptops just to do research or type up a report. Students actually receive instruction and learn from the computers. And the school takes advantage of this to differentiate instruction for each student in every class.

For example, in one class where students were learning about tornadoes, all the students read at different levels. In the traditional classroom with one teacher for many students and the same textbook or handout for everyone, this would be a big problem.

Not so at this school. Here, the faculty has selected software that can offer the content in multiple ways to target students with dramatically different reading levels—from a student who reads at a third-grade level to one who reads at an 11th-grade level. After students learn about tornadoes on the computer, the teacher facilitates a discussion among the students about what they learned. Sure, they didn’t learn it in the same way, but nonetheless, they all know something about the content now and can have an engaging and informative discussion that reinforces and deepens the learning.

In a school where one-third of the children are special education students, one-third don’t use English as their primary language, 87.5 percent are on reduced lunch programs, and 50 students can’t read at all, it’s striking to see how focused and engaged the students are in their classes. Walking around, you see students engrossed in their learning and proud of what they are accomplishing.

This isn’t an example of computer-based learning being introduced disruptively, but as we think about what needs to change as computer-based learning makes bigger inroads into the traditional system through a disruptive path, we could learn a lot of lessons from Lilla G. Frederick. As a Boston pilot school, Principal Debra Socia has established a heavyweight team to redefine the process of schooling and provide us with lessons for how students and teachers should interact in the classroom of the future.

The school had many other striking elements, so I’ll blog about my visit a few more times over the next few weeks.