"Disruptive Class:" "Online learning is sweeping across America"

On Monday, 2/14/11, a breath of fresh air blew into the stale discussion of online education in the Oregon House Education Committee. I was not at the hearing, but listened to the audio file online (here). Michael Horn, author of “Disruptive Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns,” (here)  testified. He was not given enough time and his testimony was rushed, but he did leave behind a submitted document “The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning” (here) which begins:

Online learning is sweeping across America. In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K-12 students did. What was originally a distance-learning phenomenon no longer is. Most of the growth is occurring in blended-learning environments, in which students learn online in an adult-supervisd environment at least part of the time. As this happens, online learning has the potential to transform America’s education system by serving as the backbone of a system that offers more personalized learning approaches for all students.

And then the submitted document says:

Bleak budget coupled with looming teacher shortage amidst an increasing demand for results are accelerating the growth of online learning into blended environments. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently described a “new normal,” where schools would have to do more with less. Blended learning is playing a vital role, as school operators begin to rethink the structure and delivery of education with the new realities of public funding.

The growth of online learning in brick-and-mortar schools carries with it a bigger opportunity that has not existed in the past with education technology, which has been treated as an add-on to the current education system and conventional classroom structure. Online learning has the potential to be a disruptive force that will transform the factory-like, monolithic structure that has dominate America’s schools into a new model that is student-centric, highly personalized for each learner, and more productive, as it delivers dramatically better results at the same or lower cost,

 It’s so sad, and really unfair to all our students, that Oregon is so far behind in online education.