Last week The New York Times published what can only be described as a “hit piece” against online learning and leading virtual education provider K12 Inc. Light on evidence and heavy on word count, author Stephanie Saul levels allegations of bloated class sizes, underpaid teachers, and unsupervised learning environments. Online learning meets a wide range of student learning needs, is customizable, and is unrestricted by geographic boundaries. But the Times’s piece overlooks these advantages, failing to interview, for example, the student with disabilities who can work at his own pace …
In an article entitled “Waiting for ‘Superman’, Spiderman, Batman and the Whole Education Justice League,” Sajan George outlines one of the major problems for one-size-fits-all public education: How exactly do we replicate the results of a few excellent teachers all over the nation? The real question is how do we create a scalable superhero-making machine? The simple answer is we can’t. George, who designs hybrid online learning schools, argues that virtual education is one potential solution to the problem of “scaling up” excellent education to fit the needs of each …
It’s 2010, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the American school system. Technological advances that we all take for granted in our homes, offices, and cars have yet to fully make their way into our children’s classrooms. But online education can open doors of opportunity to children around the nation. In a recent Baltimore Sun piece, author Dan Lips, a senior fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute and a former education analyst here at Heritage, writes: In school, most children are being taught in the same classrooms …
One component of education reform that often gets overlooked is online or virtual learning. In the August-September 2010 issue of Reason Magazine, Katherine Mangu-Ward notes the following: During the last 30 years, the per-student cost of K-12 education has more than doubled in real dollars, with no academic improvement to show for it. Meanwhile, everything the Internet touches gets better: listening to music on iTunes, shopping for shoes at Zappos, exchanging photos on Flickr. Education reformers across the nation are listening. In 2000, only 50,000 students were enrolled in online …
With over a week of in-class instruction lost to two blizzards and many Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland schools forced to contemplate longer school years, a few Maryland teachers found an effective, online alternative to letting snow drifts reduce student achievement. Even as record snowfalls threatened most lesson plans, online learning proved to be an efficient tool for academic instruction for the few students and teachers fortunate enough to participate. As The Washington Post reports, the accessibility of virtual chat rooms, whiteboards, and quizzes allowed some students to keep up …
Picture the world in 1960 and imagine how much has changed over the past half century. Now picture the average classroom in 1960 and today. In both, you’d probably see roughly the same thing—a teacher standing in front of a row of desks. Today, there might be a computer or two in the classroom. But the set-up and the teaching process are probably about the same. This mental experiment highlights how education is one of the areas of American life that has been most resistance to change over the last …
