“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.

Those who have been involved in online and hybrid learning for a while are accustomed to common types of implementation modes, which include online schools, hybrid schools, and supplemental online courses. These basic modalities serve a variety of use cases including credit recovery, increasing course options for students in rural areas, new school options for students who have not been successful in—or not enjoyed—conventional schools, and so on.

Have you ever had a moment where you just wanted to wave a magic wand and impart wisdom and knowledge to a mass audience for ease of conversation, comprehension, and widespread understanding? We have.   

Students with special healthcare needs often encounter unique challenges that can impede their access to traditional educational settings. These challenges may stem from physical disabilities, chronic illnesses, or mental health conditions, which require specialized care, frequent medical appointments, or extended periods of rest. Navigating these obstacles can disrupt their educational journey, leading to gaps in learning and limited opportunities for academic growth.

The outlook for young athletes being drafted and developed by professional teams are sometimes described in terms of ceilings and floors. The ceiling represents a player’s reasonable best case career trajectory. The floor represents the player’s reasonable worst. It’s a useful concept especially because certain skills have variable impacts on ceiling and floor values. In baseball a player with home run power may have a high ceiling because home runs are highly valued. A skilled defensive player may have a high floor because defense is easier to project and develop.

Since my last blog post on the subject, AI has become a seemingly ever-present topic of discussion in all corners of K-12 and higher ed. ChatGPT became one of the most quickly adopted technologies of all time, with nearly 100 million people using it within the first two months of release, and a recent survey showed that a large portion of both teachers and students are using the tool. OpenAI released GPT-4, which “performed” admirably on a host of standardized tests, including the Uniform Bar Exam, portions of the SAT and ACT, the GRE, and MBA examinations. Federal guidance has been developed, numerous school and classroom policies have been written and enforced (sometimes resulting in high-profile missteps), and educators at all levels have engaged in discussions about what changes need to be made in the teaching and learning process as a result of the ubiquity of this tech. I thought it might be worthwhile, as a follow-up to the previous post, to take a look at what kinds of applications and practices have recently developed and how they are changing the world of digital learning.

If you’ve attended DLAC even just once, you may have noticed that conference attendees do not reflect the diversity of people in education as a whole, let alone students—who increasingly represent an ever wider range of races, cultures, and ethnicities.

A recent DLC blog post—Is dual credit over-hyped?—sure struck a nerve. Quite a few people wrote in to explain why their dual credit programs didn’t exhibit the problems mentioned in the post, and we had a spirited discussion on our monthly Digital Learning Collaborative Executive Committee calls in which members made similar points.

“Remote” learning is sometimes equated with online learning. We often push back against that conflation. But in a different sense, digital learning educators may want to consider another way in which our field is “remote”—and address that issue as well. Because “remote” can mean “distant” in ways unrelated to geography, as in a “remote relative”—someone who is not well known, regardless of where they reside.

As explained in a recent post, New York City is expanding online learning.
 
Also as explained in that post, the New York City Department of Education did this in partnership with the United Federation of Teachers. This is a big deal. Unions have often worked against online learning in the United States, and if unions were to shift to be in support of digital learning options, that could bolster such options especially in urban districts and in some regions that have few such options.
 

The New York City public school system recently announced that it is expanding online learning options. This is potentially a major development for reasons I’ll explain below. First, the details:
 
“New York City plans to offer an expansive voluntary virtual learning program to all public high school students and some middle school students…

Although the media’s current tech obsession is AI, it wasn’t long ago that virtual reality (VR) was getting all the hype as the next big thing.
 
A recent post from the On EdTech newsletter by Phil Hill & Associates, referencing several articles about the use of VR at Arizona State University as well as his own visit, suggests that at least one implementation of VR seems to be working—but with a major twist. This is a post-secondary example, but the main point applies to K-12 as well.

Back in the very early days of the Trump administration, with Betsy Devos as Secretary of Education, Rick Hess wrote an opinion piece that turned out to be prescient. He wrote of his concern that the ways in which the administration was leaning into school choice was making school choice in general, and charter schools in particular, an even more partisan issue than it already was. His view was that this approach would backfire on education reform proponents, and I believe he was correct. (I’m unfortunately unable to find a link to his article.)

I’ve been a strong proponent of dual credit programs that allow high school students to receive college credits while they are still in high school. Although dual credit programs certainly don’t have to be online or hybrid, many online/hybrid high schools offer dual credit. Some are even located on community college campuses to further facilitate college credit accumulation.

According to an article in The Hechinger Report, which was picked up in USA Today and other sources, “School districts that created online academies to cater to families who preferred virtual education are struggling to keep them open as enrollment drops and costs rise.”
 

K-12 education in the US is so large, that for anyone thinking about state or national issues and trends, having some numbers in your working memory is imperative. The data points that follow are mostly from A primer on elementary and secondary education in the United States, published by Brookings, with a few from the National Center for Education Statistics. Quotes are from the Brookings primer. I’m rounding and simplifying the numbers below. The United States has:

Reports of pandemic learning loss around the globe are filled with doom and gloom statistics about all of the regression the data shows from K-12 learning over the last 2+ years. As usual, the reality of the learning loss is much more nuanced and less dire than mainstream media reports. 

Over the past 25 years that I have been in this field, one theme has consistently been raised: "Can all students be successful as online learners? If not, can we predict which students will be successful?”

This is such a salient topic, in fact, that our Digital Learning Collaborative Executive Committee dug into it during our monthly discussions last week. What follows is a combination of the DLC members’ views and my own experience in the field.