High School Online

This past year has been interesting for me. During the day I serve as technology curriculum integration specialist for a small rural school district and by night (or rather late afternoon) I teach part-time for an online charter school. This was my first year with either job arrangement. Living for this short time in both educational realms I feel I have a bit of insight into this topic and a new perspective.

First, while these figures are staggering and really scary for the traditional brick and mortar institutions there has always been and always will be a need for their existence. Not every learner learns alike and no single institution no matter how large could ever serve every learner equally to their potential and/or needs. Many students simply learn better in a physical classroom with their peers with them and an adult with an understanding of the content directly supervising their learning. The problem is in funding and migration.

With declining enrollment that means less revenue which then means fewer programs. To answer your question I see three viable paths for the traditional school districts in the face of this new trend:

1. Schools could concede their enrollment to institutions that specialize in online instruction as part of an evolution of pedagogy or evolution of schooling. There certainly is precedent for this. Last summer when Minneapolis Public Schools closed a number of schools in the northern quadrant of their district the superintendent publically stated that the reason for the closure was that charter schools serving that area were doing a better job at education the population than these traditional schools were. For the sake of what he, and the board, felt was in the best interest of that population he encouraged residents to send their children to these charter schools. No doubt some of those were online.

2. Schools could form partnerships with online schools where students who enroll in a brick and mortar institution could take online courses from another school. In exchange teachers in those schools could also serve as teachers in the online school. This model is very similar to how many small school districts do ITV. However, for this to be successful we have to reconsider how we schedule courses. Online learning and online teaching do not fit that well into the same segmented blocks of time most traditional schools impose. Perhaps the teachers in these schools that teach the online courses could be wholly employed by the online institution and only serve the brick and mortar institution in a custodial fashion supervising students while they take online courses from other teachers in the online system. The online school would benefit by enrollment from the brick and mortar institution and from not needing to maintain an office space for the instructor. The brick and mortar school would benefit by having in their building one more teacher.

3. The third viable option is for brick and mortar schools to transition into online learning or hybrid institutions. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Typically students who take or whose families enroll them in online schools do so because they want them home or because the online learning style works well for them. Schools like the Cyber Village academy in Minneapolis saw declining enrollment last year just for this reason. Most students and their families want an either/or option. Either they want the brick and mortar institution full-time or they want the online school full-time. The other problem with this is that it takes an entirely different skill set to be a good teacher in the classroom than it does online. I have know many online teachers who were excellent teachers in that venue but were ineffective in the physical classroom. Likewise I know many excellent teachers in traditional settings who would flounder if asked to teach online. If this is the option you might as well close the traditional school down and build a virtual school from scratch.

More concretely, schools need to recognize distance learning as a disruptive technology in education. We need to look at how successful companies like IBM have managed to survive even when their original business model became obsolete. We need to encourage different teaching and learning models to emerge and celebrate teachers who experiment with new pedagogies. At the same time we need to recognize, accept, and expect that new models of teaching and learning may emerge that will replace what we have been doing for a very long time. The worst thing we can do is resist a trend like this.

one additional insight: online learning is growing so rapidly in part because an online learner has no choice but be an active participant in their class. Students are often allowed if not encouraged in the traditional classroom to be passive learners. Passive learning in an online setting is equivalent to truancy.

We are going to use an OLL system next year for recovery credits. We are in discussions about how we might transition other classes or partner with other districts for more options. The hard thing is successful teaching in an online setting looks a lot different from successful teaching in the classroom. Also, the asynchronous nature of online learning does not fit well with traditional school bell schedules. This is true for both students and teachers. It would be rather ineffective to have a teacher teach 6 hours in the classroom and then one hour online which is what we are looking at in the infancy of this. The same is true of students who are taking these courses.