Online Learning: An opportunity to transform public education in Georgia — from talkgwinnett.net by Michael Horn [via Ray Schroeder]
From DSC:
Below are some excerpts that caught my eye:
Nationwide, online learning is booming. A decade ago, fewer than 50,000 K-12 students took an online course; today more than 3 million students do, and the growth of online learning is accelerating. Twenty-seven percent of high school students report taking at least one online course in 2009.
Increasingly, students are enrolling in blended or hybrid arrangements, where they learn at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery.
Change in education is gradual, yet happening much faster than one might expect.
The final direction is still unknown, but one hypothesis is that there will be, broadly speaking, three different roles for teachers of the future:
- Master teachers who are content experts and can answer content-specific questions.
- Coaches whose job it is to mentor and motivate students to stay on task and work with them to find solutions for their individual problems when they are stuck.
- Case workers who work with children who have problems nonacademic in nature.
Expect many teachers to spend less day-to-day time on lesson planning, delivering one-size-fits-none lectures and classroom management.
Teachers already in online environments are reporting that, by and large, they get to know each student far better than they ever did or could in a traditional classroom environment.