I am giving a presentation virtually tomorrow for the eLearning Special Interest Group of CUE, Computer Users in Education. It’s been a while since I have presented in Elluminate, so it should be interesting. I am going to talk about the current state of online high schools both in California and nationally. Still pulling together some of the pieces. I will try to come back in the next day or two and post about the experience, but also share some of it here.

In my local newspaper, I responded to the concern expressed in an editorial about the University of California’s use of online courses. Yes, I said that online courses are often better than traditional courses. My source: U.S. Department of Education.

You can read it here.

I have often wondered if we do ourselves a disservice by touting online learning’s ease of use. Bruce Friend of SAS Curriculum Pathways offers an article on that very topic over here.

Yes, I’ll take a thousand of these, please!

I just now reserved my room for iNACOL‘s Virtual School Symposium in November. This year it will be in Glendale, Arizona.

If you work in online learning, if your school district is considering online learning, if there is the remotest possibility that you need to learn more about online learning, this is the one conference that you should attend. No others even come close.

Have you reserved your room?

Have you registered for the conference?

Apple has been conducting an experiment this year at a number of colleges to see how well Kindles would work in that environment. The results have been less than stellar.

Reed College conducted one of those tests. They are now working to do the same test with the iPad. The hope is to have the same parameters, so that it is possible to compare them in any reasonable way.

For more about the experiment, take a look at the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Well, if you had asked me, I could have told you. There is an opinion piece in the Washington Post that asserts that traditional schools are not working and recommends that we move learning online. Here’s the first part:

Deep within America’s collective consciousness, there is a little red schoolhouse. Inside, obedient children sit in rows, eagerly absorbing lessons as a kind, wise teacher writes on the blackboard. Shiny apples are offered as tokens of respect and gratitude.

The reality of American education is often quite different. Beige classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education in the United States — and they’re right to, as test results confirm again and again.

That does about say it all. Ultimately, what we are doing in classrooms is not working. I’m not willing to give up on it, though. However, I think that online learning will be key in fixing what is going on in those classrooms. When people want to talk about the effect of the traditional classroom on online learning, they have it exactly backwards.

Online learning is what will fix the classroom. Interactivity is what makes or breaks instruction. As we begin to do more creative instruction online, that will spill over into the brick-and-mortar classrooms.