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Ever wonder how students feel about learning online? At the recent iNacol Virtual Schools Symposium participants were treated to an experience that is surprisingly is rarely available at education conferences. We had the opportunity to hear directly from a panel of students who explained why they preferred learning online. Here are some of the reasons shared by these students and others I heard from explaining why students preferred this method of learning.

10 Reasons Students Prefer Learning Online

1. I can sleep in
While this may sound indulgent to the over-30 crowd who is often of the mindset that students need to be prepared for the 9 – 5 world into which they will graduate, the reality is this.
Adolescents need more sleep.
Adolescents often function best late at night and do not function well early in the morning.
The jobs today’s adolescents will have quite likely will not fit the traditional 9 -5 mold.

It makes sense that students enjoy the opportunity to learn when they are well-rested and most alert. Research studies indicate that students enjoy learning on a schedule aligned to their circadian rhythms rather than the schedule that in many districts was created to enable bus companies to operate most efficiently. As a result traditional school has classes full of students who every day feel the kind of tired that is akin to being jet lagged.

2. I can pursue my passions
A flaw with the American education system is that there is little to no focus on pursuit of our dreams and passions which is often driven by a system that rewards rote memorization and mediocrity. Several students who learn online are doing so because they are pursuing a passion that does not allow them to fit in to the traditional school system. How wonderful it is that students are able to begin exploring and developing their passions while they are in school. We heard from a student who competes in horse competitions, for others it might be music, writing, acting, or filmmaking. We must stop teaching subjects and start teaching students who can be writers, scientists, singers, dancers, and historians today.

3. I can focus on my work without distractions from my classmates
For many students school is a huge distraction, especially in high school where the focus in often more on socializing and fitting in then on learning.  Students shared that in online classes, many of the regular distractions from socializing, to intercom announcements, to disruptive students, no longer existed and they could place their attention on learning.

4. I can move at my own pace
A tremendous benefit of learning online is that, when done right, students can learn at their own pace. For some, this might mean they can demonstrate competency upfront and get credit for the class. For others this may mean moving at a slower pace and receiving additional supports if necessary.

5. I don’t have to compete to share my thoughts and ideas
Students in online environments enjoy the equity in the ability to share thoughts and ideas. No longer is it just the student in the front of the room or the one with the loudest voice who is heard. When learning online the playing field is leveled and opportunities are in place such as commenting on posts, videos, and student work or participating in discussion forums. These environments provide students with varied opportunities to share their thoughts and ideas.

6. I can take more interesting classes
Providing online opportunities for students means providing more choice. Students can more easily pursue study in areas of interest. They are no longer dependent on the staffing limitations of their particular school or community.

7. I can learn with a schedule that meets my needs
There are a number of reasons that students might not be able to participate in the traditional classroom environment. These students have often been left behind. One might be caring for a sick relative; another required to watch a sibling, for some pregnancy or incarceration has interfered with education attainment. These students no longer need to be left behind if online options are provided.

8. I can learn despite health issues that might get in the way of a traditional class setting
Students who haven’t found success in the traditional environment due to health issues can thrive in online environments. While this might include a student who is hospitalized, has certain disabilities, or is suffering from a terminal illness, many students have less obvious issues that have made success in traditional school settings difficult. Perhaps a student suffers from a sleeping disorder, social disorder, or from an intestinal condition that just doesn’t fit with the bell schedule. These are just a few examples that in the traditional school setting result in students who end up leaving the system due to excessive absences/tardiness, or labeled as just not paying attention…because they are sleeping in class and miss the material covered.

9. I can easily communicate with my teacher when I need to
Students participating in online environments often share that they appreciate the ease and opportunities available to communicate with their teacher. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to get your teacher’s attention in a traditional 45-minute period and if you do, you may not want to have your discussion heard by the entire class. Online environments typically have structures in place where students can easily send private instant messages or emails to their teacher leaving them feeling much more supported by and connected to their teacher.

10. I can easily communicate with my classmates when I want to
A traditional classroom setting often discourages students from communicating with one another. It can be considered disruptive to instruction or limited by the physical placement of students. The online environment makes it much easier for students to connect with one another on topics of interest in both synchronous and asynchronous environments.

Though the technology exists to provide these environments for students, sadly, few students have, or know they have, such opportunities available to them. For most students, they exist, or are unable to exist, in an educational system stuck in the past that has not introduced them to such options. Why? There are several reasons which include being in a system that requires us to follow outdated policies that may have worked for yesterday’s students, but do not work today. Changing these policies in a bureaucratic, slow-moving, political climate can be a tremendous task. Additionally, many of the customers (students and their parents) don’t even know this option exists. And, another reason of course, is because schools (and parents) are used to doing things the way they’ve always done them. However, doing things they way they’ve always been done hasn’t proven effective for most industries and it shouldn’t be accepted for our students any longer either.

This is a repost of  Jeff Dunn on January 31, 2012@edudemic

Check out our collection to find a wealth of Twitter chats that are great for all kinds of educators.

General

These Twitter chats cover anything and everything in education, and represent a great jumping off point for those just getting started in Twitter education chats.

1. #edchat – Talk to a variety of educators around the world through #edchat, Tuesdays at noon and 7 p.m. EST.
2. #lrnchat – Every Thursday night from 8:30-10 p.m. EST, you can connect with other educators and discuss learning.
3. #edbkchat – On Wednesdays at 4 p.m. EST, you can discuss educational books and topics in learning and pedagogy.
4. #spnchat – Find out about successful practices in education and education reform through #spnchat Tuesdays at 9 p.m..
5. #ptchat – Wednesdays at 9 p.m. EST, parents and educators around the world can open the lines of communication on #ptchat.
6. #urbaned – This Twitter chat for educators discusses topics relevant to urban education and beyond, every first and third Sunday of the month at 9 p.m. EST.
7. #teachchat – Connect with other teachers and find out what they’re doing in their classrooms on #teachchat Wednesdays at 9 p.m. EST.
8. #teaching2030 – Discuss big picture education issues, strategies, and reform through the #teaching2030 chat, every third Thursday at 8:30 p.m..
9. #smedu – Wednesdays at noon and 9 p.m. EST social media professionals, students, educators, and more can discuss using social media in education in this chat.
10. #ntchat – New teachers can learn more about their profession with ideas, collaboration, and more for getting starting through #ntchat on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. EST.
11. #educoach – Wednesdays at 10 p.m. EST, you can find instructional coaching for improving education.
12. #gtchat – Fridays at noon and 7 p.m. EST, gifted and talented educators, administrators, parents, and students can discuss new developments in developing gifted and talented programs around the world.
13. #spedchat – Follow this weekly discussion on issues for students and teachers in special education Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. EST.

Administration and Behavior

Check out these Twitter chats to get connected and discuss topics concerning school administrators.

14. #AcAdv – Tuesdays from 8-9 p.m. EST, you can talk to academic advisors and other colleagues about advising.
15. #SAChat – Discuss student affairs with other professionals in the industry Thursdays from 12-1 p.m. CST and 6-7 p.m. CST.
16. #isedchat – Talk about independent schools Thursdays at 9 p.m. on #isedchat.
17. #CUAD – At 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, you can discuss college unions and activities with higher education student affairs professionals and educators.
18. #cpchat – Connect with other principals in this always-open chat.

Subject Chats

English teachers, librarians, and other educators in special subjects can check out these chats for great information and resources.

19. #engchat – At 7 p.m. each Monday, you can come together with other English teachers to discuss improving English instruction.
20. #DUedchat – Chat with educators Down Under in this chat each Thursday 9 p.m. New Zealand time.

But a pervasive narrative in the mainstream media is that Americans are a people beset by near-continuous crisis, whether it’s the fake crisis of a looming “fiscal cliff” or a real crisis like Frankenstorm Sandy that still has many Northeasterners inexplicably living in the dark in unheated homes.

Arguably no sector of American society has been cast with the narrative of crisis as much as public education. And the fever pitch is about to go higher.

Something’s Rotten In The State Of Kentucky

Just prior to the November election, an article in the education trade journal Education Week broke that Kentucky had gotten bad news back from its most recent round of school tests. The results were that the percent of students scoring “proficient” or better in reading and math had dropped by roughly a third or more in both elementary and middle schools.

Disappointing results from a state test is not usually an occasion to stop the presses. But, in this case it was, because these were Very Special Tests.

The tests Kentucky children took were brand-new and aligned to new standards promoted by the federal government called Common Core Standards. Kentucky is the very first state to implement the new standards-based assessments, which will be rolled-out in over 40 other states over the next two school years.

Kentucky school officials, who were already bracing for the bad results, tried putting a happy face on it, calling results “better than we thought they’d be.”

But local media outlets were quick to claim that lower scores were proof positive that Kentucky public schools are “in need of improvement.”

Now imagine the scenario when what happened in Kentucky begins rolling out across the country — as state after state implements the bright, shiny new tests and watches in horror as scores drop off “The Proficiency Cliff.” How tempting it will be for major media outlets across the country to cast this as a “crisis” in education?

In fact, some people are betting good money on that happening.

Business Loves A Crisis

This past summer, about 100 private equity investors gathered at the posh University Club in New York City to hear about big money-making opportunities on the horizon.

As reported in Huffington Post, Rob Lytle of The Parthenon Group, a “strategic advisor of choice for CEOs and business leaders worldwide” according to its website, was there to reveal the ripening profit potentials in the public education arena — a $500+ billion market –due to the roll-out of new assessments aligned to the Common Core.

According to the reporter, Lytle told the audience, if the tests are “as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They’ll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it.”

Recall that states were strongly urged to adopt the new standards when they applied for the US Department of Education’s Race to the Top grant program and for waivers to the onerous No Child Left Behind mandates. Now 46 states are implementing the standards and at least one form or another of the tests that are aligned to the standards. The intent of the standards and tests is to ensure that students are on a pathway to becoming “career and college ready” (CCR) by the time they graduate high school.

So how is this a business opportunity?

Lytle regaled his investor friends with how the new tests would identify the “performance gaps” in student achievement where results fall far below what’s considered “proficient.” And once the Performance Gaps are unveiled to the world, the resulting pressure will force school officials into hiring outside product and service providers to bring up the scores.

As reported in Education Week, he accompanied his remarks with a Powerpoint (available at the link) with a graph showing which states are more apt to have the Performance Gaps. On his graph were a lot of states that he anticipated would be in “high need” of closing the Gap, including Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Ed Week’s reporter explained, “Simplifying the picture as Mr. Lytle did gave investors hope that a sector they see as traditionally fickle and recently bearish might not be so bad.”

Interestingly, Kentucky was one of the few “low-need” states where the Performance Gap was not evident. So with a low-need state like Kentucky experiencing a 30 percent drop in test scores, does that mean states with high-need will experience even steeper drops?

Crisis material for sure.

Going From Crisis To Crisis

Education historian Diane Ravitch has long observed that a persistent narrative in the media is that American schools are “in crisis.”

A year ago, writing in The New York Review of Books, Ravitch traced the education crisis narrative back to a century ago, “when urban schools were overcrowded, swamped with students from Eastern and Southern Europe who didn’t speak English.” Again, in the 1950s, crisis broke out when the Soviets launched Sputnik into orbit, and critics blamed our public schools for not cranking out enough scientists.

The late Gerald Bracey noted this as well and coined the term “Sputnick Effect” to describe the perpetual state of crisis that has characterized the media narrative about the nation’s public schools. Bracey wrote:

The schools never recovered from Sputnik. Sputnik wounded their reputation and, as the scab formed, something else always came along to reopen the lesion: In the 1960s, schools were blamed for the urban riots (but were not credited for putting a man on the moon). In the 1970s, they were seen as “grim and joyless”. . . In the 1980s, A Nation at Risk blamed them for allowing the Germans, the South Koreans, and the Japanese to race ahead of us competitively (yet did not credit them for the longest sustained economic expansion in the nation’s history).

Indeed, what will keep politicians and the media from picking at the scab again?

Who Wants A Crisis?

Is an education crisis good for business? As the Ed Week reporter cited above pointed out, “There are market trends that support that theory. The commercial education market grew significantly in the past four years, but no segment grew faster than instruction and services. Companies like the virtual learning providers K12 Inc. and Connections Academy, or the publishers-turned-service-providers Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, fit that bill.”

In fact, the Obama administration originally framed the Common Core standards, and all the trappings that would come along with them, as a great business opportunity.

Writing at the blog site of the Harvard Business Review, Joanne Weiss, the Chief of Staff to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and leader of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, said

The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.

That “national market” has in fact come to pass. And educator Michael Moore has connected the dots. Writing at the Savannah Morning News, he explained (hat-tip Maureen Dowd)

The testing business is a $2.3 billion business. But testing is not where the real money is made. If you want to pass the test, you’re going to need preparation materials.

If your child brings home a text from Glencoe, Macmillan, SRA, Open Court or The Grow Network, among others, then your child is using a McGraw-Hill text. The test preparation materials business surely dwarfs the testing business.

This is still small beer compared with what’s to come. This week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Pearson Foundation (a non-profit organization owned by, well, the for-profit version of the Pearson company) announced that the two were working together to create complete online curricula for the new common core standards in math and English language arts for elementary through high school.

This off-the-shelf curricula includes the materials, the teacher preparation, teacher development and, of course, the assessments.

Interestingly, Phil Daro and Sally Hampton from America’s Choice, who helped draft the common core standards, are heading up this development.

Confused? Did I forget to mention that Pearson bought America’s Choice last summer?

There are, of course, other theories about the “what’s behind the Common Core” phenomenon. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute had a particularly interesting one last week when he spilled the beans on what’s going on among The Very Serious People in Washington, DC. “When I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning,” he divulged, “I’m mostly told that it’s going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action.”

Apparently, this Shock Doctrine for the suburbs will play out so:

First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes . . . Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace “reform.”

Whether the coming Education Crisis is a business conspiracy or a Beltway scheme, none of this is to argue that the Common Core and its accompanying tests and instructional materials aren’t without merit. That’s a whole other subject.

But since when did a crisis-driven directive, steered by business interests and bureaucrats who aren’t being exactly transparent about their intentions, ever end up achieving widespread public good?

Good Intentions Gone Awry?

No doubt there are some good intentions driving the new standards and tests.

But some of those intentions seem extraordinarily naïve. In an article from this week’s US News, chief architect of the Common Core David Coleman maintained that the new tests are so much better than the ones we’ve been using that, even if they demoralize teachers and frustrate parents, they will “redeem assessment” in their “hearts and minds.”

So, let’s see how that plays out:

Dear High School Parent,

For years, we’ve been telling you your child is bright and successful in school. But those tests sucked. Now, we’ve got new and better tests, and they have determined that your child is a failure. Enjoy the rest of your day!

Good intentions are not always what matter. In fact, they often blind.

When the last Great Big Education Innovation called No Child Left Behind descending on America’s beleaguered schools, the intention was to address a Crisis as well. That Crisis also had its very own Gap — not the Performance Gap, but the Achievement Gap.

NCLB was supposed to close the Achievement Gap, but it’s now widely understood that the whole enterprise was an utter failure. The best that NCLB proponents can offer is that it “woke the country” to the stark differences between the academic attainment of African American and Hispanic school children and their white and Asian peers.

But years of results from the National Assessment of Education Progress had already revealed those differences, and anyone who needed “awakening” then has doubtless fallen back into slumbers as the country has drifted further and further into a vast sea of segregated schools and education inequality.

So now one crisis-prompted experiment on the nation’s school children is leading to another.

One wonders, when will Americans — after being shocked into concern about an Achievement Gap and cattle-prodded to address a Performance Gap — tire of crisis language and notice that the real problem is that political leaders and “experts” in charge of education policy have a Credibility Gap?