Oklahoma Chief Janet Barresi points to Howe High School in Southeastern Oklahoma as a digital learning leader. Superintendent Scott Parks leads a 1:1 district that makes extensive use of online learning. "It is amazing what they are accomplishing," said Barresi. The state board will be visiting Howe this month. Read Full Post >
Districts across the country are starting to see the blended learning light. We're encouraged by the growing number of forward-thinking leaders who are past the point of needing to be convinced about the potential of blended learning; and are now ready to get serious about implementation. Read Full Post >
Last summer when Reynoldsburg City Schools connected with Udacity, the elite provider of free university-level education, it envisioned a new model for learning with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that would come to life during, not after high school. Read Full Post >
2012 is quickly drawing to a close. When the calendar page flips to 2013 in just a couple of weeks, we suspect that the 2014 implementation of the next generation of online assessments is suddenly going to feel much closer. That realization is sure to provoke a wave of high blood pressure fanning out across the land. But - have no fear - the new DLN Smart Series white paper is here! Read Full Post >
We've heard a lot about Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) -- the breakout trend of the year -- but it's still a fringe concept feeding what Clayton Christensen calls non-consumption. The real story is how the diverse web of nearly 5,000 institutions (broadly speaking) of higher learning in the U.S. are responding to cost pressure, calls for higher completion rates and better job preparation, and student demands for relevance. Read Full Post >
"I'm delighted that openness has gotten to some very closed institutions," said Sir John Daniel. As the former CEO of Commonwealth of Learning and Vice-Chancellor of Open University, he knows a lot about higher education, open education resources (OER), and online learning. Read Full Post >
Contributions to free post-secondary learning opportunities have been breathtaking this year. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been around for a while but the number and variety of courses, the investment, and aggregate enrollment exploded this year. Read Full Post >
You've probably seen William J. Baumol's book, The Cost Disease, or you've read an Inside HigherEd column about how education and health care are labor intensive and have not seen the same kind of productivity gains as other sectors. Perhaps you heard Paul Hill and Marguerite Rosa talk about Baumol's disease, "The combination of rising costs and stagnant productivity are major problems in an environment where many children are not learning the skills they need and education is now not likely to receive sustained increases in public funding." Read Full Post >
A policymaker at the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) Virtual School Symposium (VSS) said, "We want to advance competency-based learning, what kind of bill should we introduce?" Let's start by looking at the 10 design elements of a competency-based system (an update of a May blog). Read Full Post >
Virtual schools and online courses work better for some kids than others. Some of variance is provider based; some of it is student based. In most cases, there is not very good data on students or providers. A new report explained, "Most state accountability and data systems can't easily provide the information about individual student growth on mastery outcomes that is necessary to produce the answer." Read Full Post >
