The percentage of post-secondary students taking one or more online courses has generally been higher than the percentage of K-12 students who are online, and accurate data are more available at the post-secondary level as well. Therefore, it’s worth checking in on post-secondary online learning enrollments from time to time. Fortunately, we have good federal data (IPEDS, from fall 2023, covering both two-year and four-year institutions, and including graduate programs) and an excellent blogger (Phil Hill) analyzing the data. Let’s jump in.

Buckle up, digital learning innovators because this year’s trends might just have us channeling our inner Indiana Jones. Discussions with DLAC’s Executive Committee have uncovered some interesting shifts to keep in mind as we dive into the new calendar year. Like Indy deciphering ancient maps and dodging rolling boulders, we’ll need to navigate challenges, adapt our strategies, and stay ahead of the curve. These trends aren’t just coming at us, they’re reshaping the landscape, and the key to success will be how we prepare for and respond to them. 

Robert Pondiscio’s admission earlier this fall that “there are serious questions about the validity” of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO’s) findings about online learning outcomes felt like a lifeline to online educators who have been treading water for almost a decade. Senior Fellow Pondiscio wrote a column for the Fordham Institute based on what he heard on a panel he hosted entitled “Is it Time for a Fresh Look at Online Education?” I recommend watching the whole 75-minute panel recording. One crucial point is that CREDO’s “virtual twin” methodology, which is at the core of several widely cited reports criticizing online school effectiveness, fails to acknowledge essential ways that online students differ from brick-and-mortar students.

K-12 Online Education Service Market Poised for Explosive Growth, reads the headline on the press release.
 
That headline does exactly what it’s meant to, which is to catch my eye and get me to click on the link.
 
But it didn’t get me to take the next step, which is to buy the report that is available for sale. Instead, I’m going to comment on the points being made in the press release.

Most Americans can’t remember when smoking was allowed on domestic flights in the United States, because it was banned in 1990.
 
But the Federal Aviation Administration just got around to updating a rule that had required that airplanes “No smoking” signs have an off switch, meaning the sign could be turned off to allow smoking. An off switch hasn’t been needed in 34 years.
 
Is this just an example of an outdated regulation that had no real impact? Not exactly. The New York Times reports that United Airlines had been unable to use some new planes because they didn’t have the off switch, causing some flight delays. In the larger picture maybe a few flight delays isn’t that big a deal, but if you can remember the last time you were inconvenienced by a flight delay, you can imagine that how much worse it might have felt if you’d known that the delay was due to the FAA’s inability to change a policy that has been outdated for three decades.

The last post had some fun with signs, and ended with this observation:
 
“…public agencies, including public schools, are constantly faced with outdated policies, requirements, and signals. And those policies are stifling innovation, undermining confidence in public education, and putting up roadblocks to new public schools, programs, and models of instruction.”

The gap between educational research and classroom practice has long been a concern in the field of education.  As a researcher in the field, I have often written that the practice of K-12 digital learning outpaces the availability of useful research.  However, the availability of research into K-12 digital learning is not the only reason why many teachers do not regularly incorporate research findings into their teaching practices.

A small but growing number of school districts, mostly rural, are implementing four day school weeks. As this phenomenon has been growing, I’ve been wondering—are some of these districts using online instruction to pick up some of the instructional gap? The short answer appears to be no. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the apparent lack of even considering some sort of hybrid approach that might meet the needs of schools, students, and teachers.

The New York Times ran a contest of sorts, between a writer and ChatGPT, to produce a 1,000-word short story “beach read” (the title might be surprising but the link is accurate!)  NYT readers sent in suggestions for themes, and the Times ran the author’s story and the one by ChatGPT, without initially showing which was which, and invited readers to guess which story was human-generated and which was AI-generated.

In our 2024 Snapshot, the Digital Learning Collaborative (DLC) noted that:

High-stakes testing for students in full-time virtual schools presents unique challenges, including issues of accessibility, integrity, and fairness. As more students enroll in full-time virtual schools, understanding and addressing these challenges becomes crucial, especially as evidence emerges following the pandemic that performance and participation increases when online schools are permitted to administer state tests to students in a virtual setting using remote proctoring, thus enabling online students — just like students in traditional schools — to take tests in the setting where they learn each day.

The scene:       A doctor’s office

Patient:           Doctor, my new medication doesn’t seem to be working

Doctor, looking at her chart: Hmm, the prescription is for one dose twice a day. Remind me when you started that? 

Patient:           Oh, I never did that. I just take it once a week

Doctor:            (Blank stare)

Patient:           I’m really frustrated that it doesn’t work.

That is the medical version of ed tech’s 95% problem, from the perspective of ed tech providers and advocates. Our stuff works when used as intended, they say; the problem is that it’s often not used correctly.

A few weeks ago, in a blog post about AI, I wrote “I have a strong sense that the traditional education system is not meeting this moment…” I was thinking about how traditional districts are slowed by bureaucracy, rules, and norms, such that they would not adopt AI as quickly as private schools and other non-education sectors, and that when they did adopt AI, they would be more likely to run into problems.

Are district’s online schools closing at significant rates? Based on a recent Education Week article and another from Ed Week’s Market Brief, the answer would appear to be yes. But the reality is more nuanced and in fact, K-12 online learning is growing.

Brian (name changed for privacy) was a star student in elementary school. He was engaged, and excelled. He read often on his own, fueled by his curiosity.

Then around age thirteen, before and as he was transitioning to high school, he lost interest in school. His lack of interest got to the point that he and his friends would compete to see who would do worst on assessments. When his school sent report cards home that his parents had to sign, he would forge their signatures.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly improving, which is creating a growing disconnect between the trajectory of AI advancement and the response from most (not all) school districts, state agencies, and associated organizations. The discourse around AI taking place in education publications, professional development, and school board meetings is mostly focused on near-term issues such as student academic integrity, and teachers’ use of AI for lesson planning. But the significant advancements in AI capabilities are outpacing these discussions, and this divergence is only going to get bigger over time.

The recent DLC blog post by Kim Loomis struck a chord for me, because I deeply believe that hybrid learning is THE path forward for education as it embraces the power and potential of both humans and our digital/AI partners. Over last the 14 years in building flexible learning environments powered by humans and multiplied by digital resources, I have found that people tend to vilify or deify the human element over the digital options, or vice-versa.

In November and December of 2022 when I started receiving some odd student submissions in my English 12 course I needed to figure out what was going on. At first I was annoyed, then intrigued, then annoyed again, maybe even a little angry. I made a lot of mistakes in those first two months with how I addressed students using ChatGPT. I dove in and did what I could to figure out what was happening, how the tools worked and how to address learners who were using them inappropriately. Within two more months I was facilitating table talks and sharing some of what I was learning at DLAC in 2023. That led to me writing some guides on how we might think about using them in education. Even after a year, I think they still hold up, but something is still bothering me.

“Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM” is an old tech phrase describing the idea that IBM and other established companies were safe bets when choosing technology and services providers. But perhaps that saying was tested recently, as several outlets reported on “NYC schools [being] ‘frustrated and angry’ by IBM’s fumble on remote learning snow day.”

Now that we’re a few weeks removed from DLAC, it seems like a good time to reflect on what we saw there. I’ll start with a key caveat, though—at a conference with hundreds of sessions and more than 1700 attendees, any person’s view is going to be incomplete. With that in mind, here are three key takeaways:

As this post is being published, the Evergreen/DigitalLearning Collaborative/DLAC team is putting the finishing touches on DLAC 2024 planning and getting ready to travel to Austin.

A few tips if you’ll be going to DLAC as well:

Two recent blog posts (here and here) looked at educational savings accounts and their links to digital learning, including in microschools. A comment from a reader, and a new article in Education Next, are worthy of a quick follow-up.

An earlier blog post discussed educational savings accounts in the context of other forms of educational choice. Those choice options intersect with digital learning in several ways:

• Many online schools and hybrid schools are charter schools. In fact, it’s nearly certain that in the United States, the growth of online learning would have been very different if charter school laws did not exist. Many of the earliest online and hybrid schools, in states as diverse as Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California, were charter schools.

Educational savings accounts went from being among the most overlooked education topics in early 2023, to one in which expectations have outpaced reality, at least currently. This blog post, and an upcoming second one, reviews what ESAs are, how they intersect with online and hybrid learning, their trajectory over the past year, and the outlook for 2024.

This last blog post of 2023 is covering four varied articles that I’ve found to be interesting recently, but never rose to the level of covering in a full post.
 
1. “Did You Like School? I Didn’t”
This post hit home for me because like the author (a university professor), I see the field of education as mostly made up of people who generally liked their own school experience. This makes sense, of course—why would you spend your life in a field that you disliked during formative years? But that effect is distorting for two reasons. First and obviously, it creates a situation, especially at the leadership and policy level, that favors the status quo because many of the people in a position to create change from within education have a lived experience of personally not having needed that change when they were students. Second—and this is much more speculative—I believe this helps bolster a “burn it down” mentality among some advocates for alternatives to traditional public schools that is also distorting, because these advocates have had a bad experience with mainstream public schools and don’t feel heard.

For two decades I’ve been skeptical of technology in education. Every time I’ve heard of a new technology that’s supposed to “transform” education, I’ve been skeptical.
 
A few readers are probably thinking…wait, what? You’re involved in online education, right?

At a recent summit put on by Arizona State University Prep, the moderator asked a panel of superintendents what they would do it they had a magic wand they could wave to make a single change to improve student outcomes.

The answers varied, but several touched on addressing broad societal issues linked to poverty and other factors that are outside of education, but predictive of student outcomes. (None of the superintendents were using these conditions to argue that they are not responsible for student outcomes.)

In post-secondary institutions, during the 2021-22 school year (the most recent data available):

"Overall, 33% of students in this period took only online courses, and a further 37% took a mix of online and face-to-face courses, totaling 70% of students taking at least some online courses."

This and other valuable data come from Phil Hill and his recent blog post looking at post-secondary online learning trends. The post has lots of additional valuable data that readers will find insightful.

Now let’s put this in K-12 terms and touch on why these data points are important.