Reply to comment

Here's another shift that only adds to my last three posts about tipping points in the instructional materials industry. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has announced the results of a new massive meta-study here. The gist of it is that online learning works better than face-to-face instruction.

Admittedly, the study shows that online instruction works best in combination with face-to-face classroom instruction, but alone, it still fares slightly better than face-to-face. (Policy wonks can reference the full study for the details.)

Here's a small piece of Arne Duncan's commentary on the study, from the press release referenced above:

“This new report reinforces that effective teachers need to incorporate
digital content into everyday classes and consider open-source learning
management systems, which have proven cost effective in school
districts and colleges nationwide,” said U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan.

Obviously, there are some really effective face-to-face teachers, and there's some really lame online learning experiences. (I expect those who are not-quite-ready-to-embrace-tech to point that out rapidly.) And the study carefully notes its own flaws--for one, its meta-analysis found very few K-12 studies to work with. (Hence, the traditional "call for more research" in the final part of the study.) In addition, the studies do not conclusively prove whether the perceived advantages of online instruction are intrisnic to the medium, or the result of a confounding variables that could be applied just as easily to face-to-face teaching, such as providing more flexibility for deadlines, more time on task, etc.

In fact, in the last lines of the Executive Summary (p. 19 of the pdf, for those keeping score) the study cautions that "Without new random assignment or controlled quasi-experimental studies...policy makers will lack scientific evidence of the effectiveness of these alternatives to face-to-face instruction."

Secretary Duncan, however, is much more sanguine. He's clearly hanging his hat on this peg anyway, hinting broadly that the economic stimulus money will be raining down a little more heavily on those who incorporate aspects of tech into their face-to-face teaching as well.

But the big development here is that instead of online/tech being seen as a poor substitue for when you can't get face-to-face, now it's seen as just as good, maybe better.

So, for those of you keeping scores on tipping point issues, that puts California, Texas, and the funding authority of the U.S. Department of Education (along with many other districts around the country) firmly in the open-source/digital content side of the instructional materials tipping point.