Guest Commentary: Edcuation Reform? There's an App for That

Bryan Setser has virtual ed cred.
Setser is the executive director and chief executive of the North Carolina Virtual Public School, one of the nation's largest state-led virtual education programs.
His blog, "The Virtual Learning Consultant" is a must read in the virtual education movement. An advocate of blended learning, Setser believes that the school of the future might be might look more like an App Store.
"Such a vision does not disconnect students or learning. Rather, it provides a process by which students, educators, parents, and politicians have far more choices than they do now in terms of financing, reforming, and experiencing education," Setser writes.
Click here to read his complete post.

Christina Martin: Oregon's K-12 Future Must Include Online Education Options

According to the College Board, 75% of Oregon schools do not offer Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes in the four core courses: reading, math, science and social studies.
Many Oregon schools face budget cuts. How can Oregon increase opportunities for its students, allowing kids to reach their academic potential? By giving parents the power to choose programs beyond their local district school. This should extend to allowing kids to stay in their local public school while attending classes that aren’t offered locally.
Online education programs already make a wide array of courses available to students across the country while keeping costs low. Programs like Florida’s Virtual School allow thousands of kids attending regular public schools to access effective advanced courses, as well as rudimentary courses designed to help them catch up with their peers.
This session, Oregon’s legislature is considering how the state should move forward with online education. Legislators should continue to allow online public charter schools to provide full-time programs to Oregon’s kids. But legislators also should empower students across the state to benefit from high-quality individual online classes on a course-by-course basis.
Spread the word about the benefits online education and what it would mean for Oregon's future. Click here for an audio clip, suitable for broadcast, and click here to download a PDF of this "Quick Point."

Tom Vander Ark: Why I Went to Idaho to Support Tom Luna

I'm in Idaho supporting state schools chief Tom Luna and his "Students Come First" plan.
I was invited to the state by the Idaho Freedom Foundation and I have a full schedule: an early morning presentation to the Idaho House Education Committee, a luncheon speech before a group gathered in the Legislative Dining Room and an afternoon presentation to the state Senate Education Committee.
Why am I doing all of this? Well, as I told a reporter for the Idaho Statesman, "Tom Luna’s got a great plan and I certainly support what he’s trying to do.”
As you may or may not know, online learning is at the center of Luna's education reform proposals. What's more, the debate over his proposals, have in some instances, become nasty.
The ongoing debate in Idaho over online learning is not unique. As I told the Statesman reporter, "it’s happening in most states. "
Even with the hurdles, change is coming. “I’m obviously very bullish. Not only about online, but particularly about blended learning — creating new combinations of learning online with on-site support and a new kind of school that’s very engaging, highly personalized and more productive."
Click here to read the entire Q&A.

Michael B. Horn: With Tight Budgets, Rethink Extended Learning Time

Not all students need more time in class; many benefit from the extracurricular activities and opportunities they have access to outside of school. A one-size-fits-all solution penalizes many students and may further stifle their creativity. For those who don’t have these options or who need more learning time, more school (with effective time spent for learning) often makes complete sense.
So how to accommodate these differences? Look to online learning to solve these problems. With online learning, there is no need to mandate that all students have extra time learning.
Click here to read my complete post and learn about the Washington Post article that got me thinking about these issues. You will also find links to important reports on how the use of online learning and its flexibility can be far more affordable than extended the school year.

Guest Commentary: Breaking Down the Digital Divide--The View from Idaho

Briana Leclaire of the Idaho Freedom Foundation states the facts bluntly: "Online school isn’t coming - it’s already here. So why are Idaho’s policymakers even slightly reluctant to offer kids more choices from among the thousands of course offerings provided by states, universities, for-profit and non-profit companies? Are we going to ride the online learning tidal wave, or is it going to crush us?"
She's right. With all of the ups and downs the virtual education movement has experienced in Idaho, the state still is among the nation's leaders in virtual education.
That said, the fight over virtual education continues and is as fresh as this morning's headlines.
Leclaire is worried. She believes the ongoing battles over online education could hurt Idaho."We could continue to let states embracing educational choice pass us by," she writes. "Stop letting the schoolhouse door be the digital divide."
Click here to read the entire post.

Tom Vander Ark: 10 Strategies to Improve the Quality of Online Education

Most of the 100 advisers that contributed to the 10 Digital Learning Now recommendations mentioned an interest in quality education and actively debated measures to ensure it as online learning continues to expand.
However, creating the ideal policy set that encourages both innovation and quality is no small feat. Neither likely state policy environment is attractive—a free-for-all or a web of bureaucratic barriers. It will be hard to strike the right balance between encouraging innovation and ensuring quality. “Without rigorous oversight, a thousand flowers blooming will also yield a lot of weeds,” warned Erin Dillon and Bill Tucker in Education Next.
Let’s start by acknowledging that we currently have a system with highly variable quality and with lack accountability despite a decade of federal efforts to crank up the heat and bring up the rear. Online learning makes it an additional challenge with innovative instructional strategies, multiple providers, and new staffing patterns.
Statewide online learning providers can cost effectively add full and part-time options for students but the expanded and unique demands of approving statewide online providers requires states to add capacity and expertise. Quality standards, in the process of being updated, from International Association for K-12 Online Learning provide specific recommendations for states reviewing program proposals.
As online learning continues to double every two or three years, the majority will be provided in and through public school districts. As a result, quality and accountability measures should apply to the whole system rather than treating online learning as an interloper
Click here to read my complete post and my list of the 10 points to create a quality online and blended learning agenda

Lisa Graham Keegan: My Testismony Before the House Committee on Education and Workforce

On Feb. 10, I was one of four witnesses who appeared before the Education and Workforce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Interestingly, all of us--in some shape or form--came down on the side of expanding virtual education opportunities.
I told the committee about a newspaper article from my home state of Arizona that spotlighted the shift from schools of assignment to schools of parental choice. In one Phoeniz school district highlighted in the article, 75% of students opt out of their assigned school into another school. Instead of their assigned school, parents are a public charter, a private school, an online school, or simply home school.
Bottom line: School choice has gone mainstream.
I also told the committee that our states are welcoming new learning technologies and online schools, with fully half of the states now offering full-time online schooling. And online instruction has in turn led to the creation of "hybrid" schools, where technology and traditonal blend to create some of the fastest pace achievement we have seen to date.
Click here to read the written transcript of my testimony.
Click here for a link to a video of the hearing.

Guest Commentary: Aug. 14, 2012--Deadline for Change.

Therese Mageau is the editor of T.H.E. (Technology Horizons in Education ) Journal, an education technology news magazine for K-12 district leaders, IT personnel, and administrators, and she's frustrated.
"It seems to me that we are still having the same conversation we were having a quarter century ago ...We're still talking about the role of technology in changing education from a 19th century to a 21st century institution... Students still need digital literacy skills ... Teachers still do not use technology as an integral part of their instruction ... Teachers and students still don't have access to the right kinds of learning technologies," she wrote.
After 25 years of hearing the same complaints and the same problems, Mageau writes that she has set a deadline--Aug. 14, 2012 to be exact--for change.
Click here to read her post on why education can no longer wait for change.

Tom Vander Ark: Utah Poised to Lead in Online Learning

A few weeks ago, some Digital Learning Now members made a stop in Utah.
At a breakfast sponsored by the Sutherland Institute and Parents for Choice in Education, I spoke, along with Michael B. Horn, a fellow LibLearn blog contributor and the co-author of "Disrupting Class."
Mickey Revenaugh, a Digital Learning Now member whose Utah Connections Academy is already at work helping children learn virtually, was also there.
Here's a little of what's happening in Utah.
The Utah legislature is considering a bill, SB 65, to greatly expand the blended learning opportunities for Utah students. The bill moved out of committee earlier in the week and is aligned to many of the DLN Elements.
Utah already leads the nation with its innovative Open High School, which uses and creates open educational sources for its state virtual school.
Click here to read more on why I believe Utah is about to become one of the nation's leaders when it comes to online learning.

Guest Commentary: Strategy for Realizing the Potential of 'Digital'

EducationEvolving says its mission is to persuade people that "the effort to improve American education should focus on motivating students and teachers, by creating radically different ways for young people to learn and for teachers to work."
It has taken a large step in reaching that goal with the publication of its report "Strategy for Realizing the Potential of Digital."
The report states that in today's world "digital enters school mainly to automate current processes." That's the wrong strategy.
Instead, educators should ask be asking how to "introduce digital technology know it will radically change traditional processes ... Enabling legislation clearing away barriers might be insufficient. It might be better to get the decisions about adopting digital into the hands of the parties who will use it creatively; to its potential."
Who are those parties?
According to the report, "The answer is to re-arrange K-12 so that decisions about the take-up and use of technology are made by the people in the schools."
Click here to read all of this ground-breaking study.

Tom Vander Ark: How Blended Learning Will Change the World

With the whole world watching the events in Egypt, it is time to take a global view of the potential impact of blended learning.
Online learning, cheap access devices, open content, and broadband will son provide low cost universal access to quality high school learning and building a bridge to post secondary and job opportunities for the next billion youth.
Facebook and Twitter may help topple autocratic regimes, but it will be blended learning that empowers hundreds of million of youths to lead healthy and more productive lives.
Click here to read my post on why I believe blended learning will change the world.

Guest Commentary: Gov. Jerry Brown, Push Delete Button on Calif. Regs Hindering Growth of Virtual Education

Lance Izumi is the Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. In a recent op-ed article for the Orange County Register, Izumi issued a challenge to California's newly-elected governor Jerry Brown: Remove the hurdles to virtual education that are stalling a education-changing movement in the Golden State.
"One key regulation prevents students from enrolling in virtual charter schools, where instruction takes place through the Internet, if students don't live in the county in which the school is chartered or in a contiguous county – as if the Internet somehow changes from San Francisco to Los Angeles," Izumi wrties.
"Jerry Brown could click the delete button on these regulations, which would increase individualized learning for students and savings for California's depleted treasury."
Click here to read Izumi's essay.
Click here to learn more about Izumi's new book "Short-Circuited: The Challenges Facing the Online Revoluntion in California."

Tom Vander Ark: 10 Ways to Hack Education

According to Wikipedia (a hack of encyclopedias), "hacking" refers to the re-configuring or re-programming of a system to function in ways not facilitated by the owner, administrator or designer.
Two years ago, the VC firm Union Square Ventures hosted a conference on "Hacking Education." Fred Wilson, a principal with Union Square Ventures, provided the high level rationale, "the public school system in this country is badly broken. And it's not just the public school system in the U.S. It's the entire education system that's stuck in the past ... I've come to believe that we need to completely reinvent the way we educate ourselves. And, of course, I believe that the Internet is the tool we can us to do that.
Click here to read my complete post on 10 ways edupreneurs are hacking U.S. education.

Guest Commentary from Oregon: Let Our Virtual Schools Flourish

Jerry Wilks is executive director of Oregon Connections Academy, the largest virtual charter school in his state.
Wilks recently took time to write an opinion piece published in the Scio, Oregon Democrat Herald that outline the hurdles virtual education faces in the state.
"These schools are currently hampered by enrollment caps and other restrictions which limit a student’s ability to pursue their education through online courses," Wilks wrote.
He then went on to challenge state legislators, who launched the 2011 legislative session on Feb. 1, to take action to liberate Oregon's virtual education movement.
"Virtual education is at a crossroads in Oregon. The legislature should bring people together to look for innovative tools to help our students succeed in the classroom. Virtual schools are one of those innovative tools. It’s time to stop debating the merits of virtual schools and choose the right path for our children," Wilks concluded.
Click here to read the entire essay.

Guest Commentary: Why Snow Days for Schools Should Become Obsolete

The historic winter storms whipping across the Midwest, East Coast and parts of the southern United States have made many institutions take a second look at their use of technology.
For instance, for the first time since it was founded in 1905, the Tulsa World did not go to press. "Historic snow accumulation" prevented the print edition from publishing.
But thanks to technology, the Tulsa World did get the news out to its readers--through tulsaworld.com"and on the iPhone and smartphone applications."
Editorial writers at the Grand Rapids Press say that local schools should follow the Tulsa World's tech lead.
"It’s worth wondering whether we need snow days at all anymore," according to an editorial.
"Increasingly sophisticated technology could well consign forced days off to the history books. In fact, old models of education — students in seats in school — have been continually challenged in the rolling digital revolution."
Click here to read more on why the Grand Rapids Press editorial writers believe "school districts will have to continue to search for creative, high-tech ways to educate students--including on snow days."