In the 18 months since the publication of Disrupting Class, we have learned much from traveling around and talking to the people actually out in the field doing the innovating. As a result, our knowledge of the areas of nonconsumption in the U.S. PreK-12 educational market has broadened considerably. Below is a list of these opportunities where there often is no “market” currently. Please feel free to chime in with others we have not noticed or give us your thoughts so that we can continue to learn together. The items on this list are by no means mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive.

Home-schoolers
Homebound students
AP and other advanced courses (25 percent of high schools don’t offer an advanced course)
Credit-recovery
Drop-outs/alternative schools
Small, rural, and urban schools are disproportionately affected by resource constraints and therefore have more areas of nonconsumption within them
Scheduling conflicts create areas of nonconsumption
Unit recovery
Disaster preparedness (for H1N1 and the like)
Tutoring
Professional development
Pre-K
After school
In the home
Incarcerated youth/juvenile detention centers/juvenile justice facilities
In-school suspension
School bus commute
Summer school
Teacher absenteeism

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?

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.

According to THE Journal, Ambient Insight’s Chief Research Officer says that about 450,000 K-12 students attend virtual school full time and another 1.75 million take some of their classes online. If true, those numbers—particularly the first—represent higher estimates than I had been seeing.

You can download the executive summary of the report here; unfortunately the full report is out of my price range, although if people have read it, please comment here for our other readers.

One interesting thing that emerges from this is that this market is a reasonably robust private sector one at the moment. This is a bit of a rare phenomenon in K-12 education, but these signs of investment activity are positive ones. This suggests that the government’s role may be first and foremost one of providing the context for this to grow in an efficacious way, but also to be careful not to crowd out the private investment with its own competing investment dollars or to create too much process-focused regulation such that it stifles the potential innovation that comes from this. If we manage this correctly, we will hopefully see not just the boom of online learning, but also the boom of a student-centric system that provides every student—regardless of geography, income, or learning preferences—a rich set of choices.

Judging from the article, one thing I think the report may miss is that the growth of online learning is increasingly less of a distance phenomenon and more of a hybrid one. I want to be careful about concluding that, however, because I know our own book was misinterpreted by many in this regard.

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.

I’m sure many people out there have way more expertise than do I on this topic, but a few things have caught my eye in recent days.

First, an eCampus News article discusses Yale Law School’s Information Society Project’s teaming up with University of the People, which is pioneering a tuition-free online university, to study “how online higher education is perceived worldwide and document what it takes for Internet-based institutions to achieve accreditation.”

Given the potential of innovations like University of the People to make an impact for those who do not have access to or cannot afford higher education in the developing world, the findings could be very interesting. Equally interesting might be how do innovations like this get around the regulations until the regulations ultimately cave to them and the new reality.

Second, there is a start-up learning organization in Mexico that reportedly is booming. Called the Learning and Innovation Network, it runs hybrid centers with computers and in-person facilitators to offer learning for users in the community in a variety of topics at affordable prices. The first centers opened in May, and they already have around 30,000 people from all age groups using them. The leadership team expects to reach 80,000 people by the end of year one with only 500 computers in 10 centers. Apparently there is a high demand for English courses; LIN bought Rosetta Stone licenses to incorporate into its model as a result, which has been well received thus far.

I would bet that many of the models that target these huge pockets of nonconsumption ultimately will be the most successful in figuring out the next generation of learning models. I’d love to have a discussion here with others about what else is out there to inform us all.

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?

This stunning rise shows that being an education reform (or transformation) and having scale are not mutually exclusive—contrary to the opinion of many. There are many interesting aspects of the case to dissect. This week and next I’ll chronicle a few of the thoughts that I had when reading it.

What’s notable for starters is how FLVS got its start—from a small $200,000 grant. There was no multi-million dollar investment here until FLVS proved that it had developed a viable model that was successfully educating children who the existing system was not reaching.

FLVS’s leadership team also had a blank slate with which to rethink what education should look like. The team was not bound by tradition. FLVS put the student in the center and wondered how to best serve her. The outcome? Among other things a solution that does not follow the old agrarian calendar and is not tied to seat time.

The school was also free to experiment. As it used a totally new medium for delivering education, no one knew what FLVS should look like. It tried all sorts of things. And it made lots of mistakes—including the 2-year chemistry course we write about in the case. But what was important was that FLVS tested things out, received rapid results—and then changed course accordingly and promptly. This is a necessary component of any start up—and not something we allow that often in education. Indeed, from The Innovator’s Solution, “research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success. Entrepreneurs rarely get their strategies exactly right the first time. The successful ones make it because they have money left over to try again after they learn that their initial strategy was flawed whereas the failed ones typically have spent their resources implementing a deliberate strategy before its viability could be known.” Ultimately, from FLVS’s rapid experimentation, a viable solution and strategy emerged.

In keeping with the above, FLVS also confronted an initial puzzle—who would use this? The answer? Nonconsumers. Why? Because the solution for them was better than their alternative, which was nothing at all. And it didn’t invite push back from the existing districts and interests. In fact, it helped the existing schools better serve their students, which was a new value proposition. Classic disruption.

Specifically, K12, Inc. and Connections Academy are reporting massive spikes in applications, and the article theorizes that it’s because of the layoffs in the traditional brick-and-mortar schools. There are some other contributors as well—such as specialists like mathematicians wanting to share their knowledge and teachers who are seeking a change.

I can’t say I’m all that surprised. As online learning continues to grow rapidly even as there is contraction in the traditional system, there will be more jobs available in online, and for certain people—although certainly not all—online teaching presents a more attractive career path for a variety of reasons (the ones cited above, flexibility, etc.).

Additionally, there is an interesting piece in Education Week that is an interview with Chris Dede, a professor of learning technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When Professor Dede speaks, I make it a matter of habit to try and listen (or read in this case!), and this interview doesn’t disappoint as he talks about both the current state of and the future of online professional development in a short piece.

As I’ve noted before, professional development is in fact a big area of nonconsumption in many districts and presents an exciting place to provide potentially much more useful, just-in-time training to teachers that matches with the need they have in a format that will be most effective for them.

Professor Dede paints a richer, more nuanced picture—from the current challenges facing online professional development and why simply converting face-to-face professional development to an online format doesn’t make sense to the types of customization, interaction, and reflection that are possible in this world. In addition, he sees that, in this case, the market seems to be working and pushing online professional development to improve. He also believes that two factors—the need for scale in professional development and the need for fundamentally more affordable models—as a big drive for why online professional development will evolve and grow rapidly in the years ahead.

Also, one note — watch the video of Professor Dede where he talks about our book. I actually don’t see this as a disagreement at all, as readers of this blog will know. We don’t say in the book that schools will go out of business in the book as Professor Dede asserts. That’s why it’s called Disrupting Class–not Disrupting Schools.