K-12 Students and Online Courses
We have not included specific comments about online education in our previous editions, but it is probably time to do so. Nearly 30% of college students have now taken at least one online course and this proportion is increasing at an accelerating rate (Allen & Seaman, 2010). Many of you may be using these resources as part of an online course. About 2% of K-12 experiences have had a similar experiences. This number of students, estimated at approximately 1,030,000, is also increasing (Picciano & Seamman, 2010). This number would exceed one and a half million if it included both online and blended courses (Wicks, 2010). Twenty-seven states have at least one full-time online school and these schools enroll a total of more than 200,000 students and 38 states have some type of online initiative or school offering courses for the state (Evergreen Education Group, 2010). What might you conclude from such a deluge of statistics? You might note that online learning experiences are growing at every level and recognize that as a K-12 educator the students you work with may take at least a course online. Perhaps there is a role for you in this growing industry.
Here is some additional information about online courses organized as responses to specific questions. While there is some level of activity at all grade levels more than 70% of K-12 participants in online courses are secondary students (Picciano & Seamman, 2009), so the descriptive information we provide in response to these questions should be interpreted accordingly.
What is considered an online course? We are describing online experiences here without accurately differentiating how use of the Internet as described in this section and involving a limited number of students might be different from those uses of the Internet we describe in our other resources. Elsewhere, we tend to describe Internet services and their use as tools that a teacher may encourage students to use within a traditional face to face classroom setting. In this section, the use of terms such as face-to-face, blended, and online refer to characteristics such as where the course originates and who controls the experiences offered within a course.
The Sloan Foundation guidelines (Allen, Seaman & Garrett, 2007) are used in several of the descriptive studies summarized here and these guidelines define a traditional course as having 0% of content or instruction delivered online, a web facilitated course as having 1-29% of content or instruction delivered online, a blended course as having 30-80% of content or instruction delivered online, and an online course as having 80%-100% of content or instruction delivered online. [See our note on these distinctions and the assumptions on which the distinctions are based.] These guidelines were originally developed to study online education at the college level, but were then used in surveys used to study K-12 courses. The data we included at the beginning of this segment to establish the involvement of K-12 students in online and blended courses were based on these definitions.
Why are students taking courses online? There can be many different reasons, but in general school administrators contend that online courses are valuable because these courses provide learning experiences that would not otherwise be available. So, typically, online courses are not competition for traditional offerings, but provide differentiated opportunities or unique courses that are not available locally. So, for example, the local district may be able to provide an instructor to teach Spanish, but may not be able to provide an instructor for those students interested in Mandarin. Advanced Placement courses may provide a similar challenge. The local district may not have an individual within the social studies department with the background to teach AP Psychology. The online option for advance placement is credible when no appropriate instructor is available or when too few students are available locally to justify a course assignment for an instructor.
The other major general need addressed by online courses is called credit recovery. These courses address the needs of students who have either failed or withdrawn from the traditional version of a course and for which the district has no meaningful alternative. The options making use of online instruction and content may be able to provide a more flexible time frame for completion, more flexible instructional methods, and be available when not practical for the local district. It appears that schools with the highest drop-out rates have made the greatest use of online courses for the purpose of credit recovery. In some ways this is logical because these schools would have the greatest need, but it is also fair to recognize that the practice of relying on online courses by these schools has also been criticized as a way to avoid more systemic problems that exist within the schools. This is an area in which research has yet to clearly indicate whether the focus on online courses for credit recovery is a productive solution or not. (Picciana & Seaman, 2010)
Who provides the online and blended courses taken by high school students? It turns out that the answer differs as a function of whether the course is online or blended (see previous explanation of the difference). Those secondary institutions which make use of online or blended courses access online courses provided by postsecondary schools (51%), state virtual schools (42%), for-profit vendors (36%), and the home district (25%). These same institutions access blended courses from postsecondary institutions (18%), the home district (18%), for-profit vendors (14%), and another district (9%) (Picciana & Seaman, 2010). Assuming you work in a traditional school setting, these data provide some indication of the likelihood someone in your position would be involved in online or blended instruction (local district or another district). Alternatively, you might be preparing for a position as an instructional designers or curriculum expert and such expertise is used in preparing the experiences provided by all of the sources we list here.