Clayton Christensen |

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?

Last week Innosight Institute published its second case study. This one profiled the rise of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), an online public school in Florida that, in the previous school year, served over 70,000 students up from a mere 77 in the first year of its operations just over a decade ago.

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.

According to an article in eSchool News, online programs are seeing a dramatic spike in teaching applications.

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.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is beginning to announce details of the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund that Jim Shelton is leading for the Department, and there are some promising signs including the wise decision to divide the fund up into three different buckets that focus on, at one end, scaling up proven innovations with larger grants to, at the other end, funding out of the box ideas that have not yet been proven with smaller grants.

This article in eSchool News has a good summary but also highlights something that excites us quite a bit for its focus on disruptive innovations in education. The below is all from the article:

“Duncan pointed to virtual schools as one tool that can help students succeed where they otherwise might have fallen behind.

‘Online courses and supplementation are catching on fast, but we’ve made only limited investments in understanding online instruction,’ he said.

Online courses can expand access to high-level courses, especially in rural areas where 21st-century learning opportunities might be limited owing to distance, lack of funds, or lack of qualified instructors to teach specialized subjects.

‘An effective teacher is the single biggest factor in determining student progress,’ Duncan said. Tools are available today that weren’t available just a decade ago, he added–including formative assessment and real-time data to inform instruction.

‘We want to provide powerful incentives to districts and nonprofits to build the next generation of education reform,’ Duncan said. ‘Successful innovations, we know, are disruptive–we not only understand that, we welcome it.’”

There’s a great story about the future of higher education out in Fast Company. I’m sure many have read it by now, but if not, I recommend it highly. The article by Anya Kamenetz is titled “How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education.”

The piece focuses on how the Internet has the potential to be an enabling technology for a massive disruption in higher education that challenges many of our conventional assumptions. The Internet has been at the heart of the disruptive online universities for some time, but this article takes it further. One of the biggest insights is this: it’s not simply the technology, it’s the model in which it is used that matters. That’s true of all disruptions—they are enabled by a simplifying technology, a business model innovation (and this is perhaps more important), and wrapped in a new value network.

Some highlights:

- From David Wiley, a leading light in this space: “The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom, he points out. The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all.”

- And also from Wiley: “‘A sufficient infrastructure of freely available content is step one in a much longer endgame that transforms everything we know about higher education. … If you didn’t need human interaction and someone to answer your questions, then the library would never have evolved into the university,’ Wiley says. ‘We all realize that content is just the first step.’”

- “‘Open courseware is hard for the self-learner,’ agrees Neeru Paharia, a PhD student at Harvard Business School. Building a social network to make it easier is the goal of her newest project, Peer2Peer University. … She wants to address ‘all the other things that a university does for you: It provides you a clear path from A to B, provides social infrastructure of teachers and other students, and accreditation so you actually get credit for what you do. So the question becomes, Is there a way of hacking something like this together?’”

(This is something I’ve been talking about on the stump in the K12 space as well for some time.)

- Ultimately what interests Paharia is proving the model, demonstrating that there’s a way to provide education cheaply or even for free to all who are qualified.

- From Bob Mendenhall, head of Western Governor’s University: “‘We said, ‘Let’s create a university that actually measures learning, … We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree.’ … Most students, though, do the full coursework, working at their own pace through online course modules, playlists of prerecorded lectures, readings, projects, and quizzes. For every 80 students, a PhD faculty member, certified in the discipline, serves as a full-time mentor. ‘Our faculty are there to guide, direct, counsel, coach, encourage, motivate, keep on track, and that’s their whole job,’ Mendenhall says. Multiple-choice tests are scored by computer, while essays and in-person evaluations are judged by a separate cadre of graders. What WGU is doing is using the Internet to disaggregate the various functions of teaching: the ‘sage on the stage’ conveyor of information, the cheerleader and helpmate, and the evaluator.”

- “Mendenhall is impatient with those who argue that what he’s doing with education and technology is unworkable. ‘Technology has changed the productivity equation of every industry except education,’ he says. ‘We’re simply trying to demonstrate that it can do it in education — if you change the way you do education as opposed to just adding technology on top.’”

* * *

In addition, subsequent to Kamenetz’s piece, Kevin Carey wrote a thought-provoking piece on higher education as well. Published in Washington Monthly, it talks about this same phenomenon by profiling the disruptive company StraighterLine. It’s called “College for $99 a month: The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.”

If you have not yet read Cathy Cavanaugh’s white paper titled Getting Students More Learning Time Online: Distance Education in Support of Expanded Learning Time in K-12 Schools, you must make the time to do so.

Published by the Center for American Progress and funded by the Broad Foundation, the report came out in May. I’ve been meaning to blog about it since but am only getting around to it now.

The report’s initial premise is on how online learning specifically can help to achieve policymakers’ desire to expand learning time to boost student achievement in a flexible, individualized, and affordable way.

What struck me in reading the report was the array of options and flexibility around what “online learning” means or how it is structured. There are so many different paths out there—different hybrid models, different distance models, and so forth—to really allow people to find things that make sense for their circumstance. The concept of moving from the micromanagement of time to macro-management—in which the student spends time where he or she needs it—is well articulated.

All of this hit a chord as what it really points to is that online learning is not a tool per se, but a new platform that allows for far more individualization than the old factory-model school system. This isn’t just a point-based solution inserted into the old classroom. This platform allows for lecturing for those for whom it makes sense; it allows for project-based learning for others in certain circumstances; it allows for robust simulations and games; it allows for work that is online but also—especially in younger grades—work that is offline and in the physical world. The degree of individualization achieved by shifting to an online platform that is flexible and modular is stunning.

The report addresses how an online strategy can help with the quality of teachers and the variety of models out there for teaching in an online world. It also offers snapshots of various models—from Florida Virtual School to the Chicago VOISE Academy. It talks about how this will change practice—from the teaching job to teacher retention to funding models to childcare to school leadership and management to data.

It’s breathtaking in its scope–and well worth the time to read.

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.

There are some notable developments and reports out there currently on online learning that are worth highlighting briefly and providing the information so people can learn more about them. I’ll try to do one a week over the next few weeks.

First, a report from Project Tomorrow and Blackboard, Inc. says that there is a growing divide between the demand among students in 6th through 12th grades for online courses (40 percent have researched or demonstrated an interest in taking an online course it says) and the supply, as only 10 percent have taken an online course through their school.

There are of course vested interests behind this report, but nevertheless, it does call attention to some notable and believable observations including the variety of reasons for the gap between supply and demand (these match in many cases my own observations and research). This mismatch in particular stems from many policy barriers that still exist for schools to open up this option for students. Additionally, according to the report, 14 percent of schools said that one reason they don’t offer online courses for students is that they don’t have the expertise to create online courses. To me, with the number of high-quality online course offerings in existence and improving constantly, why a school would feel the need to reinvent the wheel and create something from scratch is mystifying. This one should not be a barrier, but that it is cited as one is revealing.

Interestingly, this lack of supply for students clashes with the report showing that districts overwhelmingly offer more opportunities for professional development online for teachers than for students—and a third of teachers say they’ve taken an online course, which is a 57-percent increase from 2007 (a positive development). There are some other interesting findings as well so it’s worth reading the whole report—and the comments at the bottom of the eSchool News article are also fascinating.

A new study from the Department of Education, titled Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies, examined several studies comparing online learning to face-to-face learning and concluded that, “Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

Other studies have reached similar conclusions in recent years, and what is also interesting about this study is that it found that blended learning—in which a course combines elements of online and face-to-face learning—is the most effective. This is significant as blended or hybrid learning appears to be the fastest growing form of online learning out there, which, as we’ve said before, does not surprise us at all.

The study focused mostly at levels above K-12—undergraduate, graduate, military, and so on. The report is available online at http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf.

This study from the federal government is critical in its validation of the growing disruption of online learning. Online learning has proven itself by allowing people to access quality courses in places where they otherwise would not have had access to them—and in the post-secondary world by making education far more convenient and affordable for many people who otherwise would not be able to access it.

What’s important, however, is not to confuse the medium as the root cause for the results. Just because something is online does not automatically make it as good as or better than face-to-face. The medium and its accompanying new system do shift the platform of learning. This gives us the opportunity to give every student a quality experience and to customize for each individual in the way that he or she learns by making time variable and the learning constant; improving time on task as the report notes; offering students different paths; and so on. By doing this, we address some of the root causes of an individual’s struggles.

What we now need is better online programs that better customize to engage students by being intrinsically motivating and targeting specific needs—and thus take full advantage of this exciting medium.