Clayton Christensen |

A proposed budget out of Washington State’s House and Ways Means Committee last week would have eliminated funding for the state’s Alternative Learning Experience (ALE) programs for students in K-6. Given that K-6 online public programs operate under ALE, if that had been enacted as proposed, they would all have been shut down.

After an outpouring of responses from families across the state that would have been affected, Representative Pat Sullivan stepped in and introduced an amendment that restored ALE and restored the supposed savings through cuts to transportation. The amendment passed unanimously. Good move.

I get that there is a budget crisis right now and that things need to be cut. I advocate for that in many cases. Although we might wish for more funding for everything, it is neither realistic nor a good idea.

But eliminating programs that have the potential to disrupt the traditional monolithic education system and be part of the wave that transforms the education system into a student-centric one isn’t smart. Online learning can be a way to transform the system into a lower cost one that saves the public money and gets better results—read Tom Vander Ark’s blog on the topic here and Governor Bob Wise and the Alliance for Excellent Education’s report on how online learning can help solve the shortage of quality teachers, improve student outcomes, and allow states to do more despite flat education budgets here.

Walking away from this opportunity and kicking out the homeschoolers who have joined public education in the last decade won’t cause this revolution to stop. It just means that the revolution would not have been under the auspices of the state of Washington’s public education system.

Online providers are innovating constantly in the private space to deliver affordable high-quality education. For example, in a list that’s growing nearly every day it seems, another online school of which I had not heard popped onto my radar recently. It’s called Advantages Online Private School, and it offers a full-year of schooling for tuition rates between $3,000 and $4,000.

Public systems will push out online learning only at their own peril—and to the detriment of their students. Perhaps we wouldn’t expect this not to be a struggle in the public landscape? After all, it’s hard to overcome the innovator’s dilemma and disrupt yourself. That doesn’t mean disruption won’t still happen or that ignoring it is a good idea. Washington’s public education system dodged a bullet here. To follow this storyline, you can check out these sites here and here.

I spent last week in Japan as the guest of Sumitomo Corporation to learn about and research the potential for online learning to help the Japanese learn English. One night at dinner, one of my hosts, Chris Campbell, said: If you were to write a second edition of Disrupting Class, I would include a chapter about why video games are so motivating and what we can learn from them.

He continued: It’s useful to think about why video games are so motivating; in many cases it’s not obvious that they would be. Their topics are not always inherently interesting; they can be quite challenging to access. To bring the point home, think about it this way: what if video games were like schools?

I had never thought about it that way. I’m sure people have written about this, but it had not hit me so clearly. Despite reading Prensky and Gee and others about the potential for video games in learning, I had not seen it from the reverse perspective.

The answer is that if video games were like schools, they would be incredibly de-motivating for most no matter how interesting their topic. Just imagine. You have cleared a maze of enemies perhaps. Sorry, you can’t advance because it’s not the predetermined time when you are allowed to yet. Or sorry, you cannot level up or advance to another challenge until everyone in your randomly assigned cohort has done so as well. You say you’ve been through the challenge 5 times already and mastered it? That’s nice but sorry.

Or perhaps think about the reverse. You’re struggling with a certain challenge and have not yet mastered it, but some arbitrary time limit doesn’t just say time is up, you lose, try again. Instead it says: Time is up, on to the more advanced challenge. You need tools from the previous challenge to conquer the further problems? Sorry, that’s just too bad. We have to keep moving.

It’s not hard to extend the analogy further into team “project-like” settings and others. I’d love for people to do so here. But can you imagine the frustration? Or boredom? Or downright bewilderment? Could you blame someone for tuning out?

There is a compelling commentary in the September 23, 2009 Education Week titled “Failing to Learn from Failure.” Written by Craig D. Hochbein & Daniel L. Duke, the authors make the point that in education, unlike in many other fields, we don’t do rigorous post-mortems on failures.

As they write, “Instead, the fulcrum of many school reform policies and turnaround strategies has relied on leveraging the elusive notion of ‘better.’” This is in line with what I’ve seen—most strategies are incremental improvements to the existing system, or, as they write: “better recruiting, training, and pay of school personnel, better use of academic time, implementation of better curricula, access to better early-childhood education”, and on and on.

They write about how education research needs to be overhauled—and in many cases, the system really needs to open itself up to research period. In doing so, we must learn the real causal lessons of why things happen the way they do, not just things at the level of correlations, which has hurt education research for far too long as we wrote about in Chapter 7 of Disrupting Class.

The writers focus on addressing what are the early warning signs that a school is in decline. I would go a step further; are we asking the wrong question? Rather than ask why aren’t schools performing as they should, perhaps we should be asking why isn’t each student learning? If we changed the question, then what would we find?

Secondly, I’d also focus on another aspect here, which is that taking risks and learning from them is a valuable thing. It’s something we teach all the time, but we don’t necessarily do in education and instead try to stay with the “safe” thing, which hasn’t brought us great results either. Without taking risks in health care and many other fields, where would we be today?

The key is taking smart risks, by which I mean not betting the farm at first, but making small bets to test assumptions, learn rapidly, and then adjust our course. If we find success, then we can scale gradually. Doing so will also make a significant contribution to our body of understanding in education.

In a Wall Street Journal article titled “Online High Schools Test Students’ Social Skills,” Paul Glader writes about the challenges online schools and students have with regards to the lack of in-person social interaction.

In our case study about the Alpine Online School, we chronicled how that school dealt with this by holding activities and creating opportunities for students to mingle with each other in person. Glader chronicles similar attempts as well as some online attempts to foster more social interaction such as having an online student government and model U.N. In many cases, however, these attempts have not worked, as students have clamored for more in-person contact.

We’ve addressed some of the broader related concerns around socialization in a blog before, but this element of not meeting the students’ own needs and motivations should be of concern, too, if we’re trying to build a student-centric system. As we think about how the online learning disruption improves year over year, its ability to better connect students to other students and teachers is likely one facet of this—whether this be through improved video chat functionality or discussion boards and the like or by adding a brick-and-mortar element to the online offering to form a hybrid-learning environment. For a variety of reasons I continue to believe the latter will be the form that serves most of the K-12 students in the future.

In essence, we “hire” education to do several jobs. One of these is learning, but there are other important jobs schooling does including a custodial/safety job as well as allowing children to socialize and have fun with friends. Migrating the learning job to an online platform but keeping children in a physical spot—creating a bricks-and-clicks environment in essence—should allow us to get the best of all worlds.

There has been some buzz in the media (here and here for example) about a new school that opened this year in New York City called the Quest to Learn (Q2L) school—the curriculum of which is based entirely on learning through (mostly video) games.

The idea that students could learn through playing video games is not new. As we’ve written in Disrupting Class and on this blog, many have written and researched about this—from Marc Prensky to James Paul Gee most notably. As we’ve discussed, Florida Virtual School pioneered a revolutionary fully online video-game based American History course, Conspiracy Code, earlier this year, under the idea that it should be working to make the work itself in education more engaging.

The research behind Q2L is in fact inspired in part by Gee’s research, according to the Economist. And the school itself appears to be the brainchild of Katie Salen, a games designer and a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.

What is new about the school—which started with 12-year-olds this year and will keep the students until they are 18—is two-fold. First, the whole curriculum is based on games. Second, the curriculum is dramatically different from that of the traditional one with the familiar English, Social Studies, Math, and so on. According to the Economist: “Quest to Learn’s school day will, rather, be divided into four 90-minute blocks devoted to the study of ‘domains’. Such domains include Codeworlds (a combination of mathematics and English), Being, Space and Place (English and social studies), The Way Things Work (maths and science) and Sports for the Mind (game design and digital literacy). Each domain concludes with a two-week examination called a ‘Boss Level’—a common phrase in video-game parlance.” Because the school is public, its students will still have to take the normal subject-matter tests.

Now it’s true that we wouldn’t call Q2L a disruptive innovation (although perhaps some of its components may prove to be just that). It is also true that this dramatic re-envisioning of the fundamental architecture of a school reveals the power of utilizing heavyweight teams (which we wrote about in Chapter 9 of Disrupting Class) when rethinking the architecture—what components are needed, how they fit together—of a product or service is the goal. This use of games—that fundamentally rethinks schooling—could likely only come about in a new school like Q2L. As the Economist concludes,  “In education, as in other fields of activity, it is not enough just to apply new technologies to existing processes—for maximum effect you have to apply them in new and imaginative ways.”

This blog picks up from where I left off in my previous blog.

Once a viable strategy and solution had emerged for the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), several other policies fell into place that helped it grow and evolve.

In 2000 it snapped its emergent strategy into a deliberate and codified one when it was established as an independent educational entity—the legal equivalent of a school district. With its independent status, FLVS received the freedom to create its rules and procedures and enter into agreements with providers, hold patents, and so forth in order to fulfill its mission. In essence, Florida created an autonomous division—the equivalent of a Target to Dayton-Hudson—that could disrupt the old order.

The state in essence first sheltered FLVS with line-item funding, which made sense in FLVS’s early years as it was still proving itself. It also did not compete for funding from the existing districts as a result initially. In 2003, however, because of changes in the broader Florida educational landscape, FLVS was forced to find a new funding model. What it settled on proved with hindsight to be a move filled with great foresight. The funding model it adopted was a self-sustaining one; no longer was FLVS dependent on the year-to-year whims of the legislature. It could grow organically. And rather than just get money for serving students, FLVS chose to receive the majority of funds only if the students were successful and passed the course. This funding based on outcome is a sea change in education—and represents a dramatic departure from holding schools to account through old input-based metrics like seat time, student-teacher ratios, and the like.

One other last thought. When FLVS started up, the team looked around and saw that there was really no online content out there. If FLVS hoped to offer an online school for students, that meant that, unlike a brick-and-mortar school, it would have to build online content and courses itself. Integrating to do this step as well was key to its success. Of course, for online schools starting up today, doing this really is not necessary as there is lots of online content—from FLVS’s to K12, Inc.’s to open-source content and on and on. Making full courses from scratch (often of questionable quality) doesn’t make much sense. Instead, in many cases, acting as a portal—from which students can choose which content makes the most sense for them—would be much more logical. But we haven’t seen this emerge fully yet.

What lessons or insights do you draw from this? What would you do if you were starting from scratch today and what wouldn’t you do?

I am excited to write today about Innosight Institute’s first published case study. You can read the executive summary here and download the full version here.

Leland Anderson, a visiting research fellow at Innosight Institute, is the primary author of the case, which revolves around Utah’s Alpine School District’s launching of an online school with K12, Inc., to reach nonconsumers in its district—namely home-schooled students. Alpine is one of the 100 largest school districts in the United States.

The case on this school, Alpine Online, sheds light on a number of interesting things around the disruptive phenomenon of online learning and how it works. Some tidbits:

- From the economic perspective, Alpine was able to pick and choose among offerings from K12, Inc. and assemble other district resources in an affordable way so that it could fund the full school with just the allotted per-pupil funds from the state itself (roughly $2,500 per pupil per year!).

- Students only move on to the next objective once they have mastered at least 80 percent of the material in front of them—which means the learning opportunities are more tailored to their individual pace and needs. Interestingly, there is a minimum time requirement—students are still required to spend 990 hours engaged in learning activities per year—although since this is not restricted by course, there is flexibility in a student’s learning activities. Some students take multiple math courses in a given year, for example, if they are able to accelerate. Others can devote more time to just one math course; if the social studies curriculum is easier for them, they could spend less time there, for example.

- Many of the learning activities still occur offline with physical objects and books and so forth—not on the computer. The computer is merely the platform.

- Alpine Online also contracted with the disruptive innovator Rosetta Stone to provide 14 foreign language offerings at a “whopping” $13 per license!

Read the case and let us know what you think. What have they done that makes sense to you? What doesn’t make sense? What have they done that is circumstance-specific and would not apply to your situation? Are there other elements that are more universal?

One of the chief purposes of these case studies is description to gain a clear understanding of the phenomenon. This is a core piece to any body of rigorous research. These case studies will allow us to better understand education disruptions—from their promise to their current shortfalls to how they work in the trenches. We hope that this will give policymakers and other stakeholders a clearer understanding of how these disruptions work and what they actually are.

Stay tuned for our next case study as well about the origins, the policies, and the workings of a state-launched disruption—the Florida Virtual School—which we will publish in early October.

In my last blog, one of the reasons schools cited that they did not offer online courses for their students is that they don’t have the expertise to create online courses. To this point, there is a good article in EducationWeek that talks about the factors involved in building vs. buying online courses for professional development. You can read it here.

Some takeaways are that building high-quality online professional development courses is often quite difficult, so it’s actually more cost effective to buy a ready-made product, the director of EdTech Leaders Online, Barbara Treacy, says. The cases where building one’s own course makes more sense and is indeed cheaper occur generally when the need is so local or customized that an off-the-shelf option just wouldn’t exist. There are more nuances, however, so read the article in full.

In my own travels, I am constantly amazed over how many people want to reinvent the wheel in a way that isn’t really that different and thus there really is no need to do so. Florida Virtual School created its courses at a time when there were really no other content options out there. For online schools and districts seeking online options today, that’s just no longer the case.

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!

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.