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.

Can AI be both under-hyped and over-hyped?

Some key elements of the hype cycle:

• Expectations inflate quickly and rapidly outstrip reality; the new technology is expected to transform the world

• When people realize that expectations were inflated, the countervailing pressure creates a sense that the new technology is close to worthless

• Eventually a balance is reached, somewhere in between the two. Often this represents the integration of the technology into existing human and organizational systems and processes.

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.

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.

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:

Way back in the pre-covid times (December 2019), the DLC published a report titled eLearning Days: A scan of policy and guidance. As the study noted:
 
“eLearning days are used to maintain instruction during unplanned school closures most commonly due to weather (snow, ice, and extreme temperatures), natural disasters, or for other reasons including widespread illness. Some districts are using eLearning days for parent conferences and educator professional development days as well. eLearning days provide districts and their stakeholders an opportunity to continue the learning process and eliminate the need for adding extra days during or at the end of the school year for instructional and/or funding purposes.”

Earlier posts (here, here, here) discussed whether online/hybrid/digital learning could be transformative, and how. Those posts concluded that digital learning could be transformative, and that there are compelling reasons that it should be, and ended with this question:
 
Why has education not been transformed even after two plus decades of online learning, and a disruptive pandemic?

A post three weeks ago asked
 
“Will digital learning, in the form of online and hybrid schools and courses, “transform” education?
 
Is “transforming” education even a viable goal?”

Last week’s post asked
 
“Will digital learning, in the form of online and hybrid schools and courses, “transform” education?
 
Is “transforming” education even a viable goal?”
 
The post used as a starting point Larry Cuban’s skeptical questions about transformation in education. Cuban’s post argues that transformation is an over-hyped word and concept, used too often and with too little thought.