I’m pleased to get back to my blog posts and happy to have a reason to…
I was recently accepted into the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate study program called VOLT, and I understand our instructors will be using blog posts as a method of assessing us. Having already established a WordPress account two years ago, I’m set up to begin assignments.
I am tasked with responding to the prompt: How I see online education changing the way schools work over the next 10 years. So here we go…
One only needs to look at the last 10 years to see what the next 10 might look like. Having been an online educator for the past 10, I know that online education is going to be the norm as opposed to the exception (or the unfortunate redheaded stepchild, to use a bad phrase). The demand for online components in regular brick-and-mortar schools is becoming louder, and I see regular public schools struggling with getting their programs up and running.
I go to the iNACOL conference every year and listen to the conversations of my peers, and I listen especially carefully to regular public school teachers/admins in brick-and-mortar schools who are either considering creating online options or already have them in place. What I have heard is that it is no easy task, and that programs can fail easily without the right mix of expertise and design. Online education is no joke, and it takes so much work (possibly more than in any other setting) to be successful. I look back at my own experience with being cyber teacher in a 100% fully online K-12 school, and I marvel at how far we have come. This is a dynamic and ever-changing environment, and we have to remain current with technology, curriculum, standards, software, tools, mindset, and communication, or else we are dead in the water. Today’s online classroom is far different from the distance-learning classes of the 1990s, and we can’t use antiquated methods to teach 21st-century students.
Within the next 10 years, I foresee every typical public school with an online component, and I see a threat to my own cyber charter school. I know that I will be equipped to educate in any situation, having had experience both as a school building teacher and an online classroom instructor and curriculum designer. While the idea of my school being obsolete doesn’t settle well with me, I know that we do this online thing better than anyone will be able to within the next 10 years. We have charted the path for online education, and we have provided a viable alternative to traditional methods of schooling. We have innovated and have had tested trials, realizing what works and what doesn’t with online teaching and learning. If someone were to ask me if a child can get a fully online education from grade K to 12 without missing out on any benefits of a traditional brick-and-mortar education, I would immediately say yes. Do I think it is going to replace the brick-and-mortar school? At this point, I can’t say that it will. Parents have always relied on school buildings to take care of their children while they work. Many parents would not feel comfortable being an integral part of their child’s education the same way that our parent partners do at my cyber school. I do think; however,that most public schools within 10 years will have an online component, where kids will go to a room, log on to a laptop, and engage in instruction delivered from as close as the next room to as far as Australia. What that looks like is wholly dependent upon the designers of the program.
I recently had the opportunity to see Alan November speak and to speak with him personally. His ideas and message lead me to believe that a change is going to be sweeping education and taking it by storm. The lecture and rote memorization of traditional classroom is not meeting the demands of our current and future workforce. The skills students are learning and the methods with which they are taught often do not jive with what is required to propel progress forward. We no longer live in an emerging industrial nation. Assembly lines and the Ford model are out of date, and we no longer need to train automatons to do menial tasks. We need thinkers and doers who are fluent in various technology languages and platforms, people who are able to move from conception to application with ease, people who are able to evaluate a situation and intuitively know what is available and what the strategies are to execute a plan. This can’t be learned in a traditional classroom, and so I see classrooms within the next 10 years looking more like labs with screens on the walls onto which guest speakers from all over the world will be teaching. I see a collaborative global community where a kid in Erie is working on a geometry problem with a kid from Zimbabwe. I see online education as the gateway through which this change will take place.
Inspiration and Perspiration 