Keeping Pace Blog

The Keeping Pace blog has been quiet recently as we are working on a project that will provide a new hub for digital news and resources. We will share additional information on that in the coming months, and in the meantime we are posting only occasional timely items.

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During the summer of 2017, the Foundation for Blended and Online Learning (FBOL) approached Evergreen about creating a study looking at the ways in which digital learning can help schools tackle rural education needs.

My initial response was that the topic didn’t strike me as all that interesting. Weren’t most rural education advocates aware of online and blended learning, and was there much to add to the conversation?  

But after digging a bit further I realized that the folks at FBOL were right, that there would be value in such a study. There is, in fact, a surprising lack of knowledge about digital learning among many rural education organizations and resources. We felt that a study would address this gap.

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Post-secondary institutions and their students tend to be ahead of K-12 schools in their adoption of online and blended learning, so it’s useful to keep an eye on the college digital learning landscape for clues about the directions that K-12 digital learning may take. Fortunately, the federal government tracks post-secondary distance learning (the large majority of which is online) with data tables and a summary report, and e-Literate reports on and interprets the latest government numbers (which are from fall 2016) here and here. In addition the Babson Survey Research Group, which used to conduct its own survey, reports on the numbers as well. Babson provides a useful summary:

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Some variation of the question “Does it work?” is the most common question that I get from policymakers and reporters regarding online learning, blended learning, and other innovative instructional strategies using technology.

In some cases, the question is easy to answer. These are cases in which, to borrow (and alter) a phrase from the Christensen Institute, online learning is filling a non-consumption gap. When a student takes an online Advanced Placement course that was not available at her school, and gets a five on the exam, then that course has clearly “worked.” Similarly, when a student in a blended early college high school like Innovations in Salt Lake City, or Oasis in California, graduates high school with several college credits accumulated, that is another fairly clear instance of a successful outcome.

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“Personalized learning” is among the current buzzwords in K-12 education. Many buzzwords lack clear definitions, are used to describe a wide range of practices, and are linked to unsubstantiated hype, and “personalized learning” is no exception. For one example see this NPR article in which a CEO refers to his company’s software as “a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile.”

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From time to time we are asked the extent to which schools can use online learning to continue instruction during snow days or other school closings. The overall answer seems to be:

• Yes it happens occasionally
• Not very much, though, because…
• In order to shift instruction to online at that level, a school must have a program in place that is more robust than most have.

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The best sentence I read in 2017 was this:

“Policy turns out to be a pretty lousy tool for improving education because policy can make people do things, but it can’t make them do them well.”

That’s from Rick Hess, via Larry Cuban’s blog (where I first saw it), and the journal of the American Federation of Teachers. As he explains further:

“Policy is a blunt tool, one that works best when simply making people do things is enough. In schooling, it’s most likely to work as intended when it comes to straightforward directives—like mandating testing or the length of a school year. Policy tends to stumble when it comes to more complex questions—when how things are done matters more than whether they’re done.

Here’s what I mean: Say a governor wants to mandate that all schools offer teacher induction based on a terrific program she’s seen. Her concern is that if the directive is too flexible, some schools will do it enthusiastically and well, but those she’s most concerned about will not. So, she wants to require schools to assign a mentor to each new teacher. But then she worries that the “problem schools” will treat the mentoring as busywork. So, she also wants to require that mentors meet weekly with their charges and document that they’ve addressed 11 key topics in each session. But this still can’t ensure that mentors will treat their duties as more than box-checking, so she wants to require…” (The dot-dot-dot is in the original.)

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A recent post highlighted concerns about recent media attention on virtual reality and over-hyped state initiatives to individualize learning. In this context, it’s worth reviewing a couple of recent articles that explore the downsizing of expectations related to massively open online courses (MOOCs).

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While we were taking a break from blogging earlier this year, the hype that accompanies K-12 educational technology continued apace. This has left us a bit backlogged in pointing out stories that create unrealistic expectations about the current extent, and future promise, of technology in K-12 schools. In the interest of catching up we’ll note two such stories in this post.

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Online and blended learning are being embraced by many schools and states, as discussed in Evergreen’s recent reports, commissioned by the Foundation for Blended and Online Learning, titled “Why do students choose blended and online schools” and Teaching with Technology: Educators’ Perspectives and Recommendations for Successful Blended Instructional Strategies. Despite the growth of online and blended learning, and even though digital learning has been offered in schools for decades, several myths surrounding its benefits and challenges persist. Most of these myths are understood as being incorrect by educators experienced with digital learning, but the myths persist in the media, and among both advocates and critics. This post attempts to dispel six of the most common misconceptions, adding a dose of reality to each. Read on to see if you’ve heard (or have bought into) any of the following ideas, or feel free to share your own in the comments section below.

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For those of us who have been in the K-12 digital learning field for a while, it’s especially useful to get out of the bubble and hear what others think about online and blended learning. Reports from the Brooking Institution are especially valuable because Brookings is centrist, non-partisan, and evidence-based. Although the recent study Online schooling: Who is harmed and who is helped? reviewed literature mostly about post-secondary education, it makes a particularly valuable distinction in the K-12 realm that should be required reading for people who believe that research should drive all policy.

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An earlier post reported on the discussion over on the e-Literate blog (LINK) regarding ways in which a US Department of Education audit of Western Governors University showed the auditors to be hyper-focused on an overly literal interpretation of rules, at the expense of a university’s innovative practices.

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When we began working on our first Keeping Pace report back in 2004, our focus was on exploring the ways in which existing policy and accountability systems in K-12 education were not keeping up with online learning. State funding and accountability mechanisms were out of tune with new schools, creating instances in which good innovative schools were hindered, and other cases in which schools took advantage of loopholes and grey areas in education policy to game the system.

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According to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics:

• During the 2015-16 school year, about 21% of public schools in the United States offered at least one course entirely online.
• Far more high schools (58%) offered online courses than did middle schools (13%) or elementary schools (3%).
• A higher percentage of charter schools than traditional public schools offered online courses (29% to 20%).
• About 45% of very small schools with fewer than 100 students offered online courses, as did a very similar percentage of large schools (enrolling 1,000 students or more). Schools with between 200 and 1,000 students all had lower rates of offering online courses, at about 15%.

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A main goal of our Teaching with Technology study was to ensure that the authentic voices of teachers came through clearly and accurately. We compiled nearly 2,000 text responses to open-ended survey questions, and spoke with just over 50 teachers and administrators. Their stories give life to the promise, successes, and challenges of implementing technology in the classroom.

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Among the main findings from our Teaching with Technology report is that teachers are most successful when they have time to become comfortable with new instructional strategies, and have the backing of their school in terms of providing professional development and other supports.

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When planning our recent report, Teaching with Technology: Educators’ perspectives and recommendations for successful blended instructional strategies, we debated how much to use the terms “blended learning” and “blended teaching” in the survey, interviews, and report.

The argument for using those terms was that the Foundation for Blended and Online Learning, which commissioned the study, is explicitly interested in blended learning and the most innovative uses of technology in education.

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For our study, Teaching with Technology: Educators’ perspectives and recommendations for successful blended instructional strategies, we surveyed 664 teachers and spoke with more than 50 teachers and administrators, in focus groups at schools, at conferences, and by phone. Teachers represented a range of grade levels and subjects taught, and most were from traditional public schools.

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