Clayton Christensen |

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.

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?

As readers of this blog will know, we are fans of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS) as it represents one of the more noteworthy policy innovations by a state legislature across several dimensions. There are some foolhardy and misguided attempts currently floating around the Florida legislature, however, that threaten to unravel much of the FLVS innovation.

We wrote about one part of this misadventure in an April 15th op-ed on the Huffington Post and recommend it to our readers.

Suffice to say we hope that Florida does not reverse 13 years of innovative policymaking over the next few weeks by striking at the very areas that made FLVS a welcome disruption—and a potentially transformative force to move public education one step closer toward a student-centric learning system.

Days ago YouTube launched a new “channel” or sub-site—YouTube EDU. The site gathers thousands of free lectures from over a hundred universities across the country and offers them online for free. The site doesn’t just have scattered videos—it has hundreds of full courses, too.

As some have been quick to point out, this isn’t “as good” as actually paying thousands of dollars a year to go the universities so you can get interaction with the professors, have a human touch, ask questions and so forth. You also can’t get a certified degree through YouTube EDU.

But as many others have pointed out, you often cannot get that personal touch in many large lecture classes anyway, and what’s more, many people can’t pay the high tuition rates at these universities or gain admission to them. YouTube offers it all online for free—thereby bringing the opportunity to learn from the leading academics to anyone at any time nearly anywhere. It looks like disruption at its finest—and if someone like the University of the People, which is opening in just days, wraps this in a new business model and offers certification and a degree or perhaps a service like StraighterLine offers access to human beings to answer questions, who knows where this all could go and how it might improve over time to meet these initial shortcomings.

There are other players out here playing in this game as well, such as Academic Earth, which offers better navigation features to find the lecture in which you’re interested and so forth, but reportedly has fewer videos up at the moment.

Who knows how it will evolve, but here’s a guess that the disruption will improve in a myriad of unforeseen ways and will come to benefit the lives of many more people who couldn’t access the original expensive and inconvenient offering.

In the Winter 2009 issue of Education Next, John E. Chubb and Terry Moe debate Larry Cuban in a forum over whether educational technology will change the role of the teacher and the nature of learning.

It will perhaps come as no surprise to readers of Disrupting Class that Cuban is skeptical that it will. As Cuban has written in the past, technologies have repeatedly promised much but delivered little besides the hype. We cite his work extensively in our book and agree with his analysis of why this has been the case.

But as readers also know, we see a new opportunity for an educational technology like online learning to now make a transformational impact—provided people take a disruptive approach. Although certainly some concerted efforts can—and have—changed the fundamental classroom, we think that most of the change from technology won’t come in our traditional classroom at all (so there’s no real disagreement here with Cuban in many ways), but instead will come by being wrapped in a new organizational model and targeting non-consumption.

Chubb and Moe share our view about the potential for change, and in their upcoming book, Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education, lay out their case for why and how this will happen. They approach the question from a different angle, and as it appears from the article, have some interesting insights. Can’t wait to read the book!

Also, take a look at the graphs of online learning growth in the article—particularly Florida Virtual School’s growth. Quite stunning. I think it shows the power of removing many of the barriers to this disruptive innovation and letting it grow at its natural pace.

Paul Tough of the New York Times chronicled a fascinating innovation—the One-Room School Bus—in the 8th Annual Year in Ideas.

Professor Billy Hudson of Vanderbilt University started up the project, the Aspirnaut Initiative, to turn the school bus into a mobile classroom. Buses are wired for connectivity, and students receive laptops or netbooks and are enrolled in online math and science courses. On the way to and from school, children take the courses, complete assignments, do research, and communicate with instructors online. In the pilot project, other students use video iPods to watch science and math content.

What is equally fascinating is where Hudson started the project. In rural Grapevine, Ark., children spend up to three hours a day on the school bus—wasted idle hours at the moment, but also a perfect example of nonconsumption and a golden opportunity. By next fall, Hudson and his wife hope to have enrolled 2,000 students in rural communities across Arkansas.

For districts and states seeking to foster some disruptive innovations, thinking in ways similar to this is a good start. Any other similar stories out there?

There is a great encapsulation of the potential of online learning on TV and the Internet right now in the form of this advertisement for Kaplan University. In it, James Avery (known to many as Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air) stands before students in a conventional college classroom and apologizes for how the system has failed them—and suggests a brighter way forward.

One governor who seems to understand the potential of this disruption is Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. In his State of the State address, he called for a firm cap on higher education tuition and challenged Minnesota’s colleges and universities to deliver 25 percent of their courses online by 2015.

As we’ve pointed out many times, it is a disruptive innovation that will solve the problem of affordability in higher education. The Department of Justice, for example, did not lower computer prices by busting IBM’s monopoly and pitting mainframe against mainframe. Affordability came through disruption in the form of the personal computer. The same is true in higher education. Asking colleges to hold down costs is unlikely to transform anything; giving more grants to students won’t transform the situation either. Teaching and online universities or other such disruptions are what will transform the landscape and deliver affordability.

A question, however, is if the existing universities and colleges will be capable of doing this. Although they may be able to port their courses to an online environment, truly transforming their business model and making it less costly will likely mean they have to set up an autonomous division with different resources, processes, and priorities from the existing organization. The challenge contained in Pawlenty’s speech—and the ask to require Minnesota high school students to take at least one course online before they graduate—moves the needle forward at least.

In his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, President Obama made education a cornerstone of his remarks—and properly so given the urgent need to improve education in this country. Obama also made a point of saying that it isn’t enough just to give education more resources; schools also need more reform. This echoes a piece that Clay and I authored last week. Obama elaborated that offering preschool options isn’t enough, for example. We have to continue to improve them, he said, as well as cut “education programs that don’t work.”

We hope that concrete action follows this encouraging rhetoric. One thing we remain worried about is that the money in the stimulus package targeted for schools will be used to fund a continuation of the status quo. This is borrowed money. Charging education isn’t the same thing as changing it. Budgetary crises sometimes compel us to adopt disruption—which can lead to wholesale transformation of a system to something that serves many more people far better and far more affordably.

A point that Obama also touched upon in the speech is the fact that the price of tuition for post-secondary education is higher than ever. This is a big problem. But as we’ve pointed out in many posts on this site (here and here, just to give two examples), the solution isn’t to subsidize tuition to expensive colleges through scholarships or loans. If we do that, all we’re doing once again is charging education, not changing it. We haven’t made the system any less expensive; someone is still paying for it.

Industries only become more affordable through disruption. We need teaching universities and online universities to take more market share with a more affordable model to bless the lives of many more people. Subsidies will only delay the transformation to models like Andrew Jackson University and StraighterLine.