Thomas Fulbright September 14th, 2010 Modern Approaches to Social Studies

Online versus Inline We have high hopes for our schools. While each of us might articulate these hopes differently, four seem common to many of us. We summarize these aspirations as: 1. Maximize human potential. 2. Facilitate a vibrant, participative democracy in which we have an informed electorate that is capable of not being spun by selfinterested leaders. 3. Hone the skills, capabilities, and attitudes that will help our economy remain prosperous and economically competitive. 4. Nurture the understanding that people can see things differently- and that those differences merit respect rather than persecution. Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W Johnson It would be hard to find a parent who would not send their child to, or a professional educator who would not work for, a school that had a mission statement like the one printed above. The fact is the this quote does not hang on a banner in some traditional school, it is the first block of text in the introduction to the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. The book, written by Christensen, Horn and Johnson, is one of the most popular books in the movement promoting online education. It is hard to find an article about the subject that does not reference it. In this paper I will be writing about and weighing in on the online

education debate. The question is should we stay in line with traditional educational techniques or should we brake ranks and put our schools and students on the web. I apologize for at times straddling the fence on some of the key issues, but for me the debate is especially difficult since the charter school that I work for was built upon the fence between the traditional school and online education. Proponents of an online approach to education are just one of the newest challengers to the traditional schooling methods that have been in place for generations. The online education movement follows home schooling, charter schools and alternative schools among a myriad of other competitors in a drive to change the face of education. But just like all those other challengers the online education debate is ripe with controversy. According to the report Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-YearOlds done by the Kaiser Family Foundation the average school age child spends 7.5 hours online each day. Why would anyone want to do anything to increase what already seems like an absurd statistic-especially their teachers? The issues that I will review in this paper are the ones most important to me and, not by coincidence, some of the most important arguments within the debate at large. The issues I will focus on include privatization within the school system, academic integrity and the future of teaching itself. But, most importantly this debate stokes the conversation about what the main goal of our educational system needs to be- should it be all about efficiency and quantitative results or should we focus on socialization and qualitative results. The online education movement is not a recent phenomenon within the school system by the standards of how often glitzy new teaching strategies come and go. The

Edutopia.org article The Virtual Classroom Redefines Education credits Concord Consortium in Concord, Massachusetts and Hudson Public Schools for creating the first online program. The Virtual High School (VHS) opened in 1996. Floridas online education program FLVS became the first State-wide online education program in the country in 1997. But, just like other fields of technology it is the speed and quality behind the online schools movement that makes it such a viable challenger to the traditional school. Bill Gates believes that online education is the frontier of education (he has put it on the top of his education priority list). This matters not just because Bill Gates was a forerunner in the technology world himself, but because the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a very important philanthropist to education and is worth ThirtyThree and a half billion dollars. Lets be honest - money talks. In her article Teachers Unions versus Online Education (Reason Journal v. 42 number 4 2010) Katherine Mangu-Ward points out that now there are now one million students participating in some form of online education program compared to just 80,000 a decade ago. And its not just the number of students that has been ballooning. Research from the International Association for Online Learning (iNACOL) citied within Susan Booths article At the Tipping Point: K-12 Online Learning (Independent School volume 69) shows that online education is worth Fifty Million dollars currently and is growing at a rate of thirty percent annually. If you add up the numbers both student enrollment numbers and the money it is evident that online education is headed somewhere, and it is going there quickly. So where is the controversy in the enrollment and the money? Many of the problems people in education have with online schooling are very similar to the funding

issues related to voucher schools. For most educators there is a great fear of privatization. Privatization refers to the transfer of control of the school out of the states hands into the hands of for-profit companies. Magu-Wards article quotes Senator John Lehman of Wisconsin as accusing various for-profit companies of profiteering off kids. People fear privatization for many different reasons. The easiest to recognize is the risk that these businesses will see students only as dollar signs. If the schools only requirement to receive State money is a required level of achievement for students on state standardized tests what methods of education will the school use and what type of students will the school produce? A second reason people worry about for-profit schools and their lack of state control would be what sort of restrictions, if any, would be placed on the schools curriculum. People do not want their tax dollars to support educational programs that go against their own values. A school not bound by any State Mandated curriculum could decide for itself what issues it wants to teach and how it wants to teach them, an easy example would be the creationist versus evolutionist approaches to science. While a school would have to teach the theory of evolution if the topic was on the State tests the school is required to pass, there is the chance that the school could go beyond the boundaries the State has mandated for its own public schools. My concern for the privatization argument is not focused on the controversial issues like those in science, I am fairly sure that State legislation (for better or worse) will be reflected in an online schools curriculum, I am more concerned with the money transferring hands. Michelle Davis article, District It Leaders Eye Benefits and Drawbacks of For-Profit Providers written for Education Week (Volume 29 no 36), has a relevant quote from Michael T Moe. Moe works for NeXT Advisors a Merchant Bank

that invests in Education. He said, overtime the distinction between for-profit and non for-profit can become irrelevant. Today if you go to a hospital you dont know if its forprofit or not for-profit. What you think about is track record and quality. We ought to ask ourselves shouldnt the same be true for schools? If we look back at this last election many Americans voted for President Barack Obama based on his promise to enact Health Care Reform. I will interpret that as a sign that not everyone is happy with what privatization has done with our healthcare system. True, privatization can bring about more efficiency but at what cost? Sometimes, especially when it comes to schools, the cost we should be most concerned about doesnt have anything to do with a money sign. The political pundits asked viewers if they would prefer to have a politician between themselves and their doctors or a CEO. I wonder what the consensus would be if we asked people who they would rather have in the mix with their teachers and students Politicians or CEOs? (The catch to this argument would be that we have the ability to vote Politicians out of office and hopefully have the option to enroll our students into different schools). The academic integrity issue is fairly straightforward. Will students who are using the internet for school and are going unmonitored for most of their work time be able to resist the urge to cheat? It is easy to assume that ones ability to cheat while going unmonitored is much greater than someone who is being monitored while taking a test. However, how does that impact their likelihood to cheat? The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration had a study done by George Watson and James Sottile of Marshall University titled Cheating in the Digital Age: Do Students Cheat More in Online Courses[?] to ask that question. They found that the social interaction in live

classes plays some part in whether students decide to cheat and results in a higher percentage of cheating in live classes than in online classes. The study does cite that online students are more likely to cheat on tests, so they suggest changing the assessment from objective measures (multiple choice and true-false) to more subjective (essays and research papers) that require more in-depth understanding of a topic and more personal expression. This study (and the others linked to it) may not do much to influence peoples perception of academic risk involved in online schoolwork, but much of the cheating has to do with my next and most important topic- the goal of education. Time and time again teachers, administrators and the writers of curricular instruction will say that the goal of education is to produce a good citizen. We all want the graduates of our countrys schools to be good, hard working, honest, up-standing, capable members of society. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact, if our goal was anything too far away from that the system is headed in the wrong direction. So the question is, can we obtain that end by means of online education? Look at our above example of academic integrity- will students learn to be more honest, and more hard working by being in a traditional school environment rather than online? The answer in my opinion is that it will not matter, but only if the courses are well designed. A student who is exposed to poorly taught live courses may be less likely to become one of our good citizens than a student who becomes engaged and interested while taking a class online. Schools will operate best when their students are engaged. According to the authors of Disrupting Class students not only in the United States, but in many developed countries are becoming disengaged. They observed that every country with recent

generations experience and reap the rewards of acting on extrinsic motivation to do well in school (good education, career and lifestyle) is having problems with their studentseven China. They argue that motivation is what our students lack- and they seem to be blaming the traditional monolithic style of education for leading to the end of their motivation. Their observations have led them to the conclusion that while we have many flaws in our educational system, motivation may be the easiest to tackle AND using an online approach to education may be the best shot we have at rekindling our students interest, recapturing their motivation and ultimately creating those better citizens. My stand on the issue is that if a refusal to accept and adapt to change has led to the downfall of some of this worlds greatest empires what hope does the United States Educational system have? So if our school system hopes to improve the first thing they need to do is open their minds to the debate. I understand the risk I run of loosing my job but the reason I went into education was because I thought (and still feel) that helping a student learn and become successful is one of the noblest things to do. So what happens if all of a sudden teachers (who should want what is best for the students) come to see a change in teaching methods (that could help the students) be a threat to their livelihood? Do they put up a fight, resist and try to prevent that change from happening? Have we now put ourselves before our students? ... I thought they were the reasons we took these jobs in the first place I do not, however, believe that online education will be the end of traditional schools or traditional teachers. I online education may be one of the many tools we need to help us engage more students in more customizable ways- but that cant be done only through a computer screen. Real teachers have to be present and a better curriculum

that will engage students needs to be used. Classes that allow the students to study things related to their interests need to be included. As a result those online courses may even give the schools and their teachers - the ability to use their time during the school day to have students work on projects that would really facilitate the development of a well rounded member of the community Habitat for Humanity for example. Hope Street Academy, where I teach, uses both online and live classrooms, I will not claim that it has changed the life of every student in the building, I would not dare to say that every student is engaged, but I will say that I see the potential in online education and it is not something that I would stand in the way of. Even though Christiansen, Horn and Johnson admit to being outsiders of the school system sometimes it is best to listen to others you just might learn something and isnt that the noblest thing of all?