Today’s post was written by guest author Sara Frank Bristow.

As of March 2013, eligible Louisiana students now have the opportunity to select their own online and face-to-face courses from a wide range of private providers through the Course Choice program. Act 2(2012), presents a shift in direction for virtual schooling in Louisiana, whose Department of Education (LDE) has offered supplemental online courses through its Louisiana Virtual School (LVS), which is expected to close at the end of this school year.

Forty-two course providers in 92 locations are approved to offer about 1,500 online, blended, and face-to-face courses through the Course Choice program including K12 Inc., Florida Virtual School, Sylvan, five public school districts and every public college and university in Louisiana. Course Choice offers opportunities for tailored learning pathways to students, especially those in poorly performing schools or whose schools do not offer the desired courses. All course providers are required to support state content standards, common core state standards, and career and technical education (CTE) course guidelines, among other requirements. It relies on a performance-based funding model where 50% of course costs are paid to the provider upon student enrollment and 50% paid upon course completion according to the published course length; providers may still receive 40% if a student eventually completes and receives credit for the course (e.g. prior to leaving the school or graduating).

The student course-level choice model has been implemented in states like Utah and Florida with funding following the student. The Louisiana Course Choice program will remain under scrutiny for some time, as there is as yet no example of a state replacing its state virtual school with such a system, which has then resulted in improved student outcomes.

The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) has authorized each provider for three years, and will monitor and evaluate each one “in a manner in which student achievement is the predominant criterion” – student success on exams and in subsequent career achievement are cited, as are logical course pathways. Providers must show positive student academic gain with proven assessment methods for each course offering as well. Whether the right performance metrics are available, and how they are then applied, will be of great interest to K-12 online learning advocates in the coming years.

Teachers unions challenged the constitutionality of the law, and specifically around the funding. A judge ruled the program unconstitutional, saying that the funding method unconstitutionally diverts public funding to private enterprises. The BESE is moving forward, and registration for school year 2013-14 opened in March.

Rhode Island may be small, but the state is taking big strides towards expanding online learning and transforming the education system for its students. In 2012, Rhode Island laid the groundwork to open its first fully online schools through the Statewide Virtual Education Act (S2276) and the ensuing Regulations of the Board of Regents Governing Virtual Learning Education. The first statewide blended charter school has been approved to open in September 2013. 

The Village Green Virtual Public Charter High School is promoting a blended learning model for 9th and 10th graders, with the intention of expanding to include grades 11 and 12 over a three-year period. One of the missions of Village Green is to use the students’ time as productively and creatively as possible. The goal is to give students a more realistic idea of managing time in a career-based setting. For instance, if it takes 1.5 hours for a student to get through an English lesson and 30 minutes for science, then that time will be used as needed instead of splitting it evenly. This allows each student to take the time he or she needs to truly understand each lesson, instead of being controlled by the clock or the pace of a full class. Village Green estimates that most students will use 40% of their time working with the teachers, and the other 60% will be online or in small groups.

A key question that has begun to recently emerge is, “What is the best school design for a blended learning format?” Many programs give their students access to a computer or have BYOD policies, but continue with a traditional classroom and school layout. Village Green sees an opportunity to embrace the blended learning model throughout the school, down to the building design. The school has purchased and is renovating a historical building in Providence. The layout consists of 136 workstations, creating a 1:1 ratio of computers for the 136 students they expect to attend in SY 2013-14. There are two large Learning Centers made up of pods of 6-8 stations with about 65 stations in each center. There are also several conference-style classrooms with space for 10 students that are available for more traditional teaching methods. Finally, there is a Design Space available for students, ideal for unique tasks, group work, and projects. With this unique building design Village Green is transforming the teaching style, and the entire educational experience for the students.

Rhode Island is not the only state taking steps towards expanding online and blended learning options. As of the publication of Keeping Pace 2012 in October, 31 states allowed virtual charter schools. Since then, North Carolina has also approved its first virtual charter schools, and legislation has laid the groundwork for expanding virtual school options in Massachusetts (although as of April 2013 there are no new online options available for Massachusetts students for 2012-13).

Today’s post was written by one of our Keeping Pace researchers, Lauren Vashaw.

The K-12 online and blended learning field is changing a great deal this year; we’ll have our work cut out for us with Keeping Pace 2013 research! Among the policies that have changed in a few states are online learning requirements. These changes have rendered parts of the Keeping Pace 2012 report outdated.

The section detailing state-level online learning requirements (p. 41) lists five states with varying types of requirements, notes some districts that have policies, and identifies other states that have considered requirements. There are two updates to this section.

1)      The final Minnesota legislation (SF1528, 2012) did not include language encouraging all students to take an online class.

2)      Idaho repealed its online learning requirement (see our blog post  about many changes to Idaho’s online learning landscape for more details).

Thus far this year, no other states have passed an online learning requirement. If your district or school has a policy, please comment below.

Among the most rewarding tasks that we are fortunate to take on from time to time is interviewing students about their experience in blended courses or schools. We find that students are remarkably open with us, likely more so than they would be with their teachers or school administrators. As with the annual Project Tomorrow Speak Up reports, what we hear from students in surveys and focus groups is sometimes surprising, often invigorating, and occasionally amusing.

An Evergreen colleague and I were reminded of all this when we spent a recent day conducting focus groups with high school students who have been taking the first blended courses being offered by their school. I had also sat in on a focus group being conducted by another school about a month prior, and the two experiences reminded me that the move to blended learning can be highly rewarding and often successful for students, but it’s not usually easy.

Educators often talk about how online course content allows students to move at their own pace and to make sure they understand a concept before they move on. It’s such a basic tenet of online instruction that we may sometimes forget just how critical this can be for students. While I was listening to a focus group a student said that in the previous year, when her courses were not online, she had missed a concept in math early in the year. If I remember correctly, the topic was factoring binomials. The frustration was clearly evident in her voice as she said “I never got it, all year.” Then she said that one of the reasons that she likes her new blended courses is that she keeps watching the instructional presentations until she gets it, or she asks her teacher in small group sessions, in ways that she didn’t feel comfortable doing in front of the whole class.

Other students recounted how the switch to blended learning in that school was a bit rough. At first they were working online in a very large room with dozens of students, and it was loud enough that they had trouble concentrating. The school is in the process of changing the configuration, and the students are seeing the improvement. Administrators realized that the room wasn’t ideal, but to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, sometimes you move to blended learning with the school you have, not the school you want.

In the more recent student focus groups, we asked students what they liked and disliked the most about their blended courses. The most common “likes” volunteered by the students were not having to carry textbooks, the ability to be more “organized” and the access to constantly updated grades and course information. Surveys revealed that the students are accessing instructional materials outside of the school building and outside of school hours in ways that appear to go beyond what they could do with traditional homework assignments.

One of the focus groups surprised us by volunteering information about how easy it is to cheat in their blended courses. None of the students in the focus group were cheating, of course, but they all knew lots of students who were. When I suggested that if I was their teacher I would know how to stop it by walking around during tests, or randomly asking them to stop what they were doing and stand up and away from their computers, they seemed to take it as a challenge and explained all the keystrokes that they knew to close windows and tabs, minimize them, hide them, etc. They also discussed how to use Skype or other chat programs to share test answers. Apparently their cheating friends were very open to sharing such information.

Aside from the cheating—which students seemed to recognize would likely be addressed—and despite some issues with Internet access, the students were highly supportive of the expansion of blended courses beyond the initial pilot. In fact, it appears that the school has created such an expectation among these students that it would be difficult to not follow through with expanding the pilot to more courses and more students. Unlike many school and district programs, these blended courses are not just for honors or Advanced Placement students, nor just for at-risk students or credit recovery. The district has made a commitment to providing blended courses to the full range of students. It is an ambitious effort, sometimes daunting, and school leaders are seeing the challenges and successes along the way.

The reasons given for the increase in online and blended learning often include improving access to a wide range of courses and high-quality teachers, meeting the needs of a wide range of students, and personalizing learning. Another reason for the move to blended learning, which appears to be gaining momentum, is the recognition that courses and schools with an online component are much better situated to generate, report on, and use student data.

The data issue is, of course, closely tied to individualization. Personalization happens because the teacher gets data about student progression and achievement much more often, and data that are higher quality, than the data that would be generated in a traditional classroom. The investments that Khan Academy is making in data generation and back-end systems—building on the ubiquitous videos of Sal Khan explaining seemingly everything—are symptomatic of the emerging focus on data generation. Khan Academy version 1.0 was focused on providing instructional materials that students could access from anywhere if they had an Internet connection. Khan Academy 2.0 is transitioning to creating the data that tracks student progression.

Data generation and usage can work well in places like Khan Academy, closed systems like math programs such as Dreambox and ALEKS, and blended schools that use a single learning management system, such as those run by Connections or K12 Inc. It’s a much harder transition for schools that are using existing student information systems, and that often have to tie those systems to the state data repository. At the state level, the challenge is even harder. While states have invested in data systems in the last decade or so, and those systems are better than ever, the ability of educators and policymakers to use the data in effective ways to improve student learning still seems to be years away.

This last point is made exceptionally well by a November 2012 report from the Data Quality Campaign:

“States are making progress in supporting effective data use, but the hardest work remains. Although states collect quality data and have enacted policy changes, they have not yet focused on meeting people’s needs.

• States have laid the foundation to link P–20/workforce (P–20W) data systems but lack governance structures with the authority necessary to share appropriate and limited critical data. This deficiency impedes their efforts to empower stakeholders with critical information to ensure that students stay on track for success in college and careers.
• States are producing reports and dashboards using longitudinal data but are lagging in ensuring data access by stakeholders such as parents; there is more work to do to meet all stakeholders’ needs.
• States are increasingly providing training to help stakeholders use data but have not done enough to build the capacity of all education stakeholders to effectively use data.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly: “Building data systems is easier than changing how people value and use education data. Creating a culture that supports data use for continuous improvement takes policymaker leadership.”

The DQC report focuses on the need for leadership among policymakers. We believe that same leadership is necessary at the district and school level as well. The culture of data use has not yet extended to most classrooms. Until that happens, one part of the promise of blended learning will remain unmet.