The Next Step

In his recent book, author Clayton M. Christensen states that half of all high school students will be attending class online by 2019. As an online teacher, I’m excited at the possibility of a new type of student moving into our courses and hopefully for a different reason than they take online classes now. But half, wow, what a number.

The Author:
Christensen says kids will move towards online education because it aligns with the “Disruptive Innovation” theory. He believes that while education has spent a lot of money bringing technology into the classroom, teachers are using that technology to teach virtually the same way they always have. So it hasn’t made much of an impact in student learning or test scores. He thinks that online education provides students a new way of learning that personally fits and adapts to their individual needs.

We’ll See:
The students that attend online schools typically do so because they: want to sleep more, have time restraints that won’t allow them to go to school full-time (career, sports, family issues), have had bad social experiences in a traditional school, and/or have failed academically and are looking for an alternative method of education.

For Christensen’s numbers to hold true, a new generation of kids needs to move into the online environment. Kids that are self-starters, motivated, organized and looking for a challenge. Students who have good parental support at home. Students who want a variety of courses that traditional school can’t/don’t offer. Right now, online schools aren’t attracting a significant number of these students.

Furthermore:
For online schools to be disruptive, they actually need to be more than traditional schools on a computer. They need to utilize the unbelievable learning tools available and move away from the top-down transmission model that they currently share in common with a “regular” school.

So, do you think there is anyway his estimate will come true?