Online Learning: An Opportunity to Transform Public Education in Georgia

Written by Michael Horn

Nationwide, online learning is booming. A decade ago, fewer than 50,000 K-12 students took an online course; today more than 3 million students do, and the growth of online learning is accelerating. Twenty-seven percent of high school students report taking at least one online course in 2009.[1]

Some students enroll in full-time online programs, in which they do their schooling from home and access highly qualified teachers and content via the Internet. Even more take just one or two online courses and take the rest of their courses in the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom arrangement. Increasingly, students are enrolling in blended or hybrid arrangements, where they learn at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery.

The state of Georgia is no stranger to online learning. According to the Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning report, 13,000-15,000 Georgia students took online courses in 2008-09. The Georgia Virtual School, a state-run entity under the auspices of the state Department of Education, boasted 9,793 enrollments[2] in the 2008-09 school year. Georgia has full-time online charter schools as well, including the Georgia Virtual Academy, a K-8 school operated by the online learning company K12 Inc. that served 4,400 full-time students in 2008-09.

Many districts have programs as well. Gwinnett County Public Schools, for example, operates the Gwinnett Online Campus, which serves students with various online classes. In general, Georgia's programs serve home-school students, those needing credit recovery options, students who have dropped out and students in schools where advanced courses are not accessible.

Even with this growth of online learning in Georgia, many continue to see it as merely a small part of education that adds choices that may better fit a student's needs. That is certainly true, but online learning is much more than that. It is a disruptive innovation that has the potential to help transform the present-day monolithic, factory-model education system into a student-centric and far more affordable fit for the 21st century.

As a result, there are still significant opportunities for Georgia to do much more with online learning. If the state plays its cards right, it has the potential to provide many more students and families with quality choices for their education and transform public education in the process.

Today's Schools, Yesterday's Needs

The education system we have today was created in the early 1900s to serve a different time with different needs. In 1900, about 200,000 one-room schoolhouses graced the countryside. Only 50 percent of 5- to 19-year-olds were enrolled in school. One third of children enrolled in first grade made it to high school and of those, only one third graduated.[3]

A mini-crisis with a fast-rising industrial Germany changed that environment. Americans asked public education to prepare everyone for a vocation in the industrial age of factories and Frederick Taylor's time-and-motion studies. To do this, the school system changed gears and began extending high school to everyone. In just one generation, America built a comprehensive high school system that enrolled 75 percent of the students who had started in first grade and graduated 45 percent of them. That number continued to rise throughout most of the 20th century in a remarkable story of success.

How did the country accomplish this? With the most economical model it knew: the factory. Educators borrowed the concept of uniformity and processed students in batches. To cope with the burgeoning student population in the early 20th century, a fixed time was spent in each stage of the process of assembling an educated person, from the concept of batch processing in industry. By instituting grades and having a teacher focus on just one set of students of the same academic proficiency, the theory went, teachers could teach "the same subjects, in the same way, and at the same pace" to all children in the classroom. Progressive thinkers of that era encouraged the practice, and the school system built during that period is still in place today.[4]

Need for transformation

This unbridled success has come at a price. As the United States shifted from an industrial economy to a knowledge-based one, society is increasingly asking schools to do something very different; something for which they were not built.

Today's school system was built upon standardized student treatment. When most students would grow up to work in a factory or an industrial job of some sort, this standardization worked just fine. In 1900 only 17 percent of all jobs required so-called knowledge workers; over 60 percent do today. Now that we ask increasingly more students to master higher-order knowledge and skills, this arrangement falls short.[5]

The reason, to put it simply, is that everyone has different learning needs. Academic research increasingly supports this and most of us know it intuitively. We all enter classes with different experiences, background knowledge and aptitudes. We remember being in school and struggling to master a concept while a friend grasped it immediately. When a parent or a teacher would explain the same concept in a different way, however, we understood. We had friends who excelled in certain classes, but struggled in others.

Just as it is intuitive to us that we learn differently from one another, it is also intuitive that because of this, we each need a different, customized learning approach to maximize our potential. When an educational approach is well aligned with one's learning needs, understanding can come more easily and with greater enthusiasm.

This clashes directly with today's factory-model school system that was built to standardize. When a class is ready to move on to a new concept, all students move on, regardless of how many have mastered the previous concept (even if it is a prerequisite for learning what is next). On the other hand, if some students are able to master a course in just a few weeks, they remain in the class for the whole semester. And when a teacher teaches long division in the manner that corresponds with how she best learned and understood it, it does not matter whether a student grasps the idea and grows bored with the repeated explanations, or sinks deeper into bewilderment, unable to grasp the logic. The student sits in the class for the duration. Both the bored and the bewildered see their opportunity to achieve shredded by the system.

Customization in today's system is prohibitively expensive. Consider the cost to design an individualized learning plan for a special-needs student in the system. The result is that over the last three decades special education has required more and more funds and rendered the overall system more and more unaffordable without the overall results to show for it. In many districts, special education now accounts for over a third of the spending.[6]

If the goal is to educate every student to the highest potential, the education system needs to be transformed from the present-day model where time is fixed and learning is variable into a student-centric model with a modular design that enables affordable mass customization so that time becomes the variable and learning can be the constant.

How can education transform?

In a time of budget cuts and the need to do better with fewer resources, is transformation something that can even be contemplated?  If so, how can it be accomplished?

The first answer is yes, and the way to accomplish it lies in the power of disruptive innovation.

The process of disruption is the one by which fundamental transformation in a sector occurs. Disruptive innovations transform sectors characterized by expensive, complicated and inaccessible products and services into ones where simplicity, affordability and accessibility reign.

At the outset, the transforming innovations tend to be not as good as the existing products and services as judged by the historical measures of performance. As such, to be successful, a disruptive innovation must not compete initially against the existing paradigm and serve existing users. Instead, it targets those not being served; people called non-consumers. That way, all the new approach has to do is be better than the alternative – which is nothing at all. Little by little, disruptions improve predictably. At some point they become good enough to handle more complicated problems and then – armed with their new value proposition around simplicity, affordability and accessibility – they take over and supplant the old way of doing things.

It happens in all sectors, from computing – where personal computers transformed a sector by disrupting mainframe and minicomputers – to accounting, where many taxpayers now use TurboTax instead of accountants. It has even happened in post-secondary education, where community colleges and online universities have progressively made education more convenient and affordable.

The online learning disruption

This is where online learning enters the equation.  It appears to be a classic disruptive innovation, with the potential not just to help reform education but to transform it. From its meager beginnings over a decade ago as mere PowerPoint presentations online with a connection to a teacher remotely, it is improving along many dimensions as it gains share. And it has gained traction by targeting classic areas of nonconsumption.

First, it served students in rural schools who did not have access to courses at the brick-and-mortar school and students in urban schools who did not have access to certain courses because of scheduling conflicts and overcrowded classrooms. It continues to serve areas of nonconsumption as it has advanced. To name just a few, it is serving home-schooled students, students who did not have access to advanced courses and students who had previously failed a course and did not have a way to retake it.

The growth of online learning is following a classic disruptive pattern. An estimated 45,000 enrollments in 2000 grew to about 1 million enrollments by 2007. It is growing nationally at over 30 percent a year in K-12 education. It is projected that in fewer than 10 years, 50 percent of all high school courses taken nationwide will be online.

Can online learning bring about a student-centric system?

Change in education is gradual, yet happening much faster than one might expect. The potential for online learning to help bring about a more student-centric system is certainly there, but whether that, too, happens depends on the actions taken in the coming years.

Consider Georgia's neighbor. When the Florida Virtual School began in 1997, its founder, Julie Young, saw an unprecedented opportunity to redo education from the beginning and address one of the fundamental problems in the present system: the "time constant and learning variable" problem identified in the U.S. Department of Education's 1994 "Prisoners of Time" report.[7] With a blank slate, among the many key insights in the creation of the Florida Virtual School was the realization that online learning need not be confined to regular school hours or even an academic calendar. With education taking place online, students could learn "any time, any place, any path, any pace." Confining it to a brick-and-mortar classroom with seat-time restrictions and the like would, in fact, ruin the strength of the new format.

In 2003, the Florida Legislature enacted a provision that has proved to be more far-sighted than anyone could have imagined at the time. Its vote to include the Florida Virtual School in the state funding formula for K-12 education accomplished two crucial things. First, it gave the legally autonomous school a self-sustaining funding model by which the school could grow organically and according to student demand, as dollars would follow students. Second, it approved this funding change with a performance-based provision by which the school would receive per-pupil funds only for those students who successfully completed and passed their courses.

A performance-based funding system made the Florida Virtual School more accountable than brick-and-mortar schools along output measures, and it enabled the school to escape the seat-time restrictions, which preserved the flexibility so key to online learning.

This move spurred the growth of the Florida Virtual School and pushed education toward a mastery-based model where the state does not pay unless the student is actually successful. Not only was this helpful to students, it established a more affordable model than the existing school system. When an apples-to-apples comparison is made between the per-pupil instructional costs of the Florida Virtual School and the traditional brick-and-mortar schools, Florida Virtual School is less expensive.

These same conditions have not existed in Georgia at a statewide level. The Georgia Virtual School is funded through a year-by-year state appropriation, which in effect imposes a cap on the number of students it can serve. It does not receive funding only if a student successfully completes a course. The school is not an autonomous entity that could re-envision education; it sits under the auspices of the Georgia Department of Education. Caps also exist on the growth of Georgia's various full-time, statewide virtual schools, not to mention the recent debate over how to fund them appropriately.

Some districts have circumvented this by starting programs of their own. In many cases, they simply pay an outside provider. This means that online learning has grown more organically, although not necessarily according to student demand. Affordability has driven some of this adoption. As discussed earlier, online learning has gained traction in classic areas of nonconsumption. For districts and their schools unable to afford to offer certain classes or with insufficient student demand to justify hiring a full-time teacher, online learning has been a welcome solution.

For example, Georgia has about 440 high schools yet fewer than 90 certified physics teachers. Without online learning, most schools could not offer physics. By allowing districts to spread costs across different school sites – inside and outside the district – online learning offers a far more affordable way to offer certain courses. Amid budget cuts, online learning has been a welcome way for districts to continue to offer certain classes. There is also early evidence that the absolute cost of an online course is lower from many other providers and that they use human resources and teachers in novel ways from the current education system. The online medium allows for redefinitions of teachers' roles so that they may work with students one-on-one far more than is presently possible.

Georgia's opportunity

The opportunity before Georgia is to take these early steps and use them to create a true student-centric environment where each student has access to a market of options. True choice not limited by a student's geographic boundaries will drive better quality.

Disruption offers the possibility of true choice. Students need not be limited by options only within driving distance or family circumstance. Over time, students will be able to find content and teacher options that match their unique learning needs and appeal to their deepest passions. It would be an escape from schooling as we know it. By gradually opening up online learning to new providers and allowing different, trusted people in any position or location to create modules of content, teach online and so forth, Georgia can play an instrumental role in making this happen.

There is danger, of course. Without appropriate policies, as students and districts flock to online learning solutions, there could be a race to the bottom based only on price and not on quality. This would not create a student-centric system. These are the circumstances that largely exist today. Georgia policy-makers must help to create the proper environment that does not encourage this.

Key in this is not imposing old metrics on this emerging system, because disruption competes on new metrics. For example, Georgia policy-makers must shift the focus from input metrics to outcomes. No longer should regulations around required seat time govern the granting of credit and funds; instead, in what is maybe the most important policy of all, credit and funding should be tied to mastery to hold the time variable and the learning constant and realize the full promise of online learning.

Policies that cap student-teacher ratios, as in the traditional classroom, should not apply, either.  That would restrict what innovative learning models may appear in the future, from those that may incorporate novel team-teaching concepts to new, differentiated and specialized roles for teachers, to cognitive tutor innovations, etc. Policy-makers should encourage learning innovations that can help students reach true mastery faster and for less money.

The future roles of teachers

What of the future roles for teachers as online learning gains traction? Stripping away regulations and processes that govern the assumptions around the "proper" staffing arrangements is likely to lead to a flowering of engaging and robust roles that increase the power teachers have to influence students' lives positively.

The final direction is still unknown, but one hypothesis is that there will be, broadly speaking, three different roles for teachers of the future:

• Master teachers who are content experts and can answer content-specific questions.

• Coaches whose job it is to mentor and motivate students to stay on task and work with them to find solutions for their individual problems when they are stuck.

• Case workers who work with children who have problems nonacademic in nature.

Some of these roles will be performed virtually; many will be performed in person. This may mean that teachers who do not live in Georgia will do some of the work in the future, which should help alleviate teacher shortages in the state (for example, in physics) and allow all children to have access to a top-flight education and highly qualified teachers no matter where they live. Equally so, adults in Georgia will continue to fulfill many more of these roles. There is likely to be a hybrid of many of these and an increase in experimentation on how best to serve students if funding is tied at least in part to outcomes.

Expect many teachers to spend less day-to-day time on lesson planning, delivering one-size-fits-none lectures and classroom management. This will occur if the learning is truly engaging and intrinsically motivating as teachers meet each student where he or she is. More teacher time will be spent working one-on-one with students and with small groups of students to help them with whatever they need when they need it. Teachers already in online environments are reporting that, by and large, they get to know each student far better than they ever did or could in a traditional classroom environment.

Connection to national policy and beyond

Moving in this direction will also fulfill many of the other objectives that are focuses of other movements in education right now. Instead of seeing online, student-centric learning as a bit part in that, policy-makers should recognize that it is in fact a holistic strategy for accomplishing many of the goals in Race to the Top, the federal grant competition around education reform for which Georgia was one of 12 winners.

With Race to the Top, President Obama's administration identified four broad goals for reforming education:

• Develop common, internationally benchmarked standards and assessments

• Improve the effectiveness of teachers and principals

• Use data to inform decisions

• Turn around the lowest-performing schools.

Online learning has a role to play in each. Adopting common, internationally benchmarked standards and assessments can help in moving online learning toward an efficacious mastery-based system. Where students live in Georgia needs no longer dictate their access to a highly effective teacher. Georgia should use data systems to measure competence; to inform what a student needs and to determine, on an ongoing basis, when to craft an individualized path toward competency for each student. Additionally, online learning can be a powerful tool at low-performing schools to help students with credit- and unit recovery.

It is also a strategy for the extended learning time movement. As many have observed, online learning is an affordable way to extend the time for a student's education. Despite evidence that what many students need is more time learning, not less, budget cuts are leading many districts toward a four-day school week. Online learning can play a big role in making sure that we don't sacrifice students' futures.

As online learning continues to gain share in the coming years, Georgia policy-makers have an exciting opportunity to become a leader in using it to transform the schooling system into one that can better serve every child affordably. For this to happen, policy-makers must craft the right policies for it now. Not only must it continue to grow, it must avoid simply replicating the factory-model system online. This must be the creation of a wholly new education system that is affordable for the future, based on a mastery of competencies, and is student-centric so that each child can reach his or her fullest potential.

Michael Horn is co-founder of the Innosight Institute, a not-for-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector. He is co–author of the award-winning book, "Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns," and an Adjunct Scholar with the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, an independent think tank that proposes practical, market-oriented approaches to public policy to improve the lives of Georgians.