Current president of the Parent Association of the EPGY Online High School at Stanford University (whew! that's a long name) posting here. The tricky thing about school reform is trade-offs. That's the tricky issue in any matter of public policy.
I thought the experience of occasional EPGY distance learning classes
(never more than one at a time) when my oldest son was younger was very positive. He was mostly homeschooled, saw a lot of friends regularly in joint classes organized by our homeschooling support group,
(b) a lot of face time with this local friends from the homeschooling group (because his school schedule no longer allowed seeing them when they had free time), and
(c) a lot of opportunity to be self-directed and interactive with adults in his learning environment.
A botched online school is probably worse that a typical brick-and-mortar traditional school. A good online school might be very good indeed, and I think the article mentions some online schools that do well, but always the parent must shop.
A friend from the school (a parent) kindly asked me by personal email in what capacity I wrote the parent comment here. I should make clear that I was (and am) writing in my individual capacity as one parent among a few hundred in a start-up school community. My opinions are my own, and are surely not shared by all other parents of students at the school. I see from the several typos in the parent post that I was in vent mode, typing rapidly to express disagreement with the article that opened the thread.
That said, I have been puzzled by the lack of pan-school online community for the parents and for the students at the EPGY Online High School, because there are numerous examples of thriving communities of that kind elsewhere in cyberspace. Evidently (according to personal accounts I have heard from other students and news reports I have read) it is quite routine at most online high schools to subscribe all students to a pan-school online community as soon as they enroll. The asynchronous online community allows students with varied schedules to make friends and share interests--just as Hacker News does. An asynchronous online community is an especially important social help for a school in which school classes are conducted by synchronous video links just a few hours per week, and all the more so if the school has students from all over the world living in every which time zone.
I am a big proponent of online interaction even for communities who regularly interact face-to-face. For example, I am a Yahoo Groups listowner for groups that link my local homeschooling support group since 2003 (more than 100 members) and our statewide gifted education parent advocacy group since 2005 (about 500 members). The online groups massively increase the helpfulness of the face-to-face interaction the families in each organization have, and of course tend to promote more face-to-face meet-ups as opportunities arise. They facilitate sharing information and encouragement and guarantee that official communications from each group will be understood and mutually discussed right away.
Similarly, my son is in dual-enrollment classes at our state flagship university, and thus inherently meets some classmates face-to-face each day (especially in his foreign language classes). Yet the overall dual-enrollment program makes mandatory for students and optional (highly encouraged) for parents to sign up for an email list through which to receive official program announcements. Most of my son's individual classes also make very effective use of email and announcements posted on websites (our state flagship university has numerous ongoing human-computer interaction studies) and some of his hardest classes make formal use of web forums for student discussion of the content of the class. This deepens both the intellectual life and community spirit of those classes. I need not mention here that HN is fun even for hackers who know one another in person in offline life. I expected such a vital online community when we signed up for the founding class of the online high school we know from its inception, but that community has yet to be formed.
I suppose most parents make most such comparisons based on locally available resources. Certainly other parents think that EPGY Online High School is their best current bundle of trade-offs for their children's education. I think my town has both better homeschooling support groups and better public and private high schools than most places in the United States--better by test, as can be confirmed in quite a few cases. College admission for homeschoolers is a solved problem,
as I have known since my oldest son was an infant, so I was never the least bit worried about college admission prospects for a "purist" homeschooled child. We sought out the new online high school from Stanford because of previous good experiences using à la carte distance learning courses
to supplement his homeschooling, and because he and I both have a spirit of risk-taking and a willingness to try something new with little track record. But with the benefit of hindsight, for us in our local environment, it would have better to have him enrolled at Brand X local high school through our state's open enrollment statute, and to continue to do just one or two distance learning classes on the side, before going full-time for university dual-enrollment for eleventh and twelfth grade. Reasonable minds can differ, because different families live in different communities, but my disagreement with the author of the interesting submitted article is that I don't think all online high schools have yet figured out how to be significantly better (in social aspects as well as intellectual aspects) than locally available public or private schools in most parts of the United States. I like to support the school that my family participates in by urging it to be the best that it can be.
Like so many of us know the real learning begins with the work, not the lesson. This is why so many "learn by doing" schools are so popular. Most online classes I've taken are assignment based and have sparse video lectures. While this is great, it's no cure-all replacement for traditional human-to-human interaction. The future will need to transform its libraries into the work hubs they actually are, not just for quiet time studying. I think a lot of PG/Joel/Fried's writings on the "modern workplace" can transfer to the "modern school," where you keep the students close but with controlled interaction (less paper airplanes, more small, private meeting/study rooms with wifi access and decent seats.) Also I see token economies/karma pts and automated skill-set intersecting programs connecting students in such a way they could teach each other. Students would have traditional lectures for their specializations and trickle that knowledge down to other students who only just need the 123's of it. This approach could even eliminate budget costs (very few paid staff members and classrooms) and increase retention (1-on-1 focused tutoring sessions).
No doubt there are a lot of opportunities for better electronic teaching tools, but I just don't think that gets at the heart of the matter.
First and foremost you have a culture that doesn't value education. This trickles down the lowest level, where doing good in school just isn't cool. I did one year of junior high in a Minnesota school and one year in Brazil (which is not exactly known for its great education), and the difference in student attitude was night and day. I realize there are some places where parents really care about grades and that trickles down to students to some degree, but I believe those are isolated suburban communities that don't reflect the general disdain for education that I remember from public school.
Why the disdain for education? My theory is it's a crippling mix of entitlement fueled by the anomalous post-war prosperity of the US and easy credit, along with a growing disparity in wealth leading to a general sense that getting ahead is based purely on who you know.
Hmm, now that I think about it, those problems are all hopelessly intractable... e-learning systems it is!
Yes, yes it is. Homo sapiens is a pack animal. You interact with people on daily basis, from buying milk to job interviews and parties. And that is not a skill you are born with.
School systems throw you in a group of people usually far larger than you are used to, and that group never consists of only people you like. It's a seemingly hostile environment, and you are forced to adapt to it, so that later on politely asking a stranger to move a bit to let you pass doesn't turn into unmanageable task.
Oh, and I fear for a generation growing up with ability to block/ignore interactions with people they dislike being a mere click away and never really having to reconsider their words for fear of getting their face punched in.
As someone with some experience in both education (I went to school once) and online (I have installed my own internet), I really don't think this will help.
One of the keys to education is motivation, something not imparted by any online learning scheme I've seen yet. It normally comes from interest in a subject, but from other factors too, all not far removed from personal relationships.
I hate, with a passion, the thought of subjecting kids to "education" via screen after screen of sterile click-through slides, or even their slightly fancier cousins, "interactive" lessons. ugh!
But kids are lacking motivation for a number of things. One of which is the mandatory, boring subject matter and the way it's taught. It's also common society's mindset to think of "learning" as bad. Or at least that's what a lot of kids think. Some figure it out, but many remain with the attitude that learning is bad. These students also get so accustomed to being given every piece of info, they don't know or care how to find and learn on their own.
Is slides really worse than lugging a ten-pound book around all day and reciting emotionless, boring, seemingly irrelevant information? Perhaps the slides will be no different.
If any benefit of online education, it's the saving of our next generations backs. Most backpacks average 30 pounds. Is their a reason to carry such large amount of weight on our back through out the day, for 3/4ths of the year?
> Is slides really worse than lugging a ten-pound book around all day and reciting emotionless, boring, seemingly irrelevant information?
Yes, a thousand times worse.
Because it's not fixing the problem that the subjects are boring :)
I do a lot of work with kids and education; you simply cannot, from my observation, teach from a screen - unless the participant is highly capable of research it doesn't work.
We need to fix the physical teaching - not replace it with a worse unfixed method!
ErrantX, I don't think slides are a problem. They are simply one more medium teachers may use to communicate knowledge. Now, they are certainly not a replacement for actual textbooks, but they do have their uses.
I do think you hit on a very important topic, although indirectly. You state that the subjects are boring. I've had my share of bad teachers in all different levels of school (I'm a graduate student right now). The problem is not that the subjects are boring. The problem is that you have teachers that either have no interest in teaching the subject, or you have teachers that don't know how to teach the subject. I spend most of my time studying financial mathematics, but the most interesting class I ever took was one on American History in high school. Everyday was a brand new story, something intensely interesting. I certainly learned my American History, as I got a 5 on the AP test way back in the day. I also have to give credit to the same teacher for giving me a deep respect for all of history.
The problem is a shift to straight online education is too much of a leap. Parents will be opposed because people tend to resist new things while Teachers and Administrators will be opposed because they'll be out of a job.
That said I have some experience in this area (I'm in charge of the IT for an agency that includes a K-12 school). My opinion is that changing education in the near term involves one important fact: Most teachers already get their lesson plans online (we use EdHelper.com)
So the key to making education more interactive right now, IMHO, is to use that fact to provide teachers with more interactive material. Almost all classrooms have computers and projectors these days (we are given funds for them and we're the lowest of the low income because our kids come from our on campus group home and hence have no household income). Meaning a company could provide video, audio and other interactive elements along with lesson plans and almost every school could use it.
So if anyone's looking to create a startup that improves education I'd certainly look in that direction. You'd get a lot further than trying to move the entire education system online
Man. I having some serious thoughts about online College startup ideas for the last few weeks or so. You know sometimes who like an idea so much you think about every single details of the project down to pro and cons and organizational structure and potential number of employees and potential amount of investment of such a project, legal problems, accreditation, on-premise exams, cost per course as opposed to cost per credit, on-promise lab classes for applicable courses (Chemistry, biology, physics, electronics), potential design of the website, free course materials, free study materials, free video complementary with each courses.
I am so engrossed with the idea, I have thought of almost every single aspect of such a potential institution and how much I might need to get started. Approx ~$20million and 2 years to get most traditional, on-demand courses available for everyone to study for free, charging only for each course exams - regardless of the credit - same amount.
Only problem. No money.
I think this has enormous potential, both within USA and outside USA. Imagine anyone, anywhere can get a college degree that is as good as getting a college degree in USA (accreditation by CHEA) similar to what British Council does with O'Level/A'Level exams.
I think there are some great opportunities for online instruction of special needs children in post secondary education, and too a lesser extent special coursework for motivated students. It does take a certain amount of self-discipline to do online study that I'm not sure most kids have. I also have fears about the type of society we create online not being as intimate and having a tendency to create too many thin relationships.
I co-founded Elgg (http://elgg.org/), which was started as a social environment for education. It's got a wider remit now, but is nonetheless used in a very large number of schools and universities (NB: I left the project last year to move onto other things).
One thing I said publicly, and other members of the team were aware of: if I thought anyone was using Elgg to replace face-to-face education, I would stop developing it immediately. I still think this kind of thinking is dangerous.
As another commenter has said, humans are social animals. Learning how to behave socially is a hugely important part of education. There's certainly an important place for elearning too, but they're complementary - all part of a nutritious breakfast - rather than an either/or.
More generally speaking, online social communications should augment, not replace, face-to-face communications.
Kids need to be able to work at their own speed. If a kid can and has the will to complete high school in one year, then he should have the choice. School need to stop being mandatory in the sense of actual school time.
When the teacher unions are causing halts of online schooling, you gotta think... Who really cares about us students anymore?
If people want to change the world, start where everyone begins, in the school system.
I can't comment on the US, but here in the UK it is pretty clear to me that there are some schools that do work - and work very well. The problem is that these aren't the majority - not by any means.
I thought the experience of occasional EPGY distance learning classes
http://epgy.stanford.edu/courses/
(never more than one at a time) when my oldest son was younger was very positive. He was mostly homeschooled, saw a lot of friends regularly in joint classes organized by our homeschooling support group,
http://www.mcgt.net/homeschoolers/index.html
and generally had a lot of flexibility in his education. But then he enrolled in the formal high school program of EPGY
http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/index.html
as part of the inaugural class, and lost
(a) a lot of flexibility in planning his studies,
(b) a lot of face time with this local friends from the homeschooling group (because his school schedule no longer allowed seeing them when they had free time), and
(c) a lot of opportunity to be self-directed and interactive with adults in his learning environment.
A botched online school is probably worse that a typical brick-and-mortar traditional school. A good online school might be very good indeed, and I think the article mentions some online schools that do well, but always the parent must shop.