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.

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.

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.

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.