Beyond the Internet.

Online education may be the catalyst for fundamental reform in the view of futurists

In 1992, the total number of instructional computers in American elementary and secondary public schools was approximately 2.7 million. Seven years later, it was 8 million, or roughly one for every six students.

Perhaps more relevant is this: At least 63 percent of public school classrooms in 1999 were connected to the Internet, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, with the rest likely to be wired within the next few years. Which would be right about now.

These days, it is difficult to find a school in America without access to the Internet, arguably the single most powerful technological force of our times. But if virtually every school in the country is now wired to the Web, the question becomes now what? If schools and classrooms can claim online access to a near-infinite source of information and an expanding array of courses, what happens next?

In other words, what's in line after you're online?

A Powerful Catalyst

Here's one vision:

In the not-too-distant future, the American education system, long based on what computer scientist Roger C. Schank calls a "pedagogically invalid factory model" will be fundamentally reformed.

In particular, the ability to deliver full-length courses and class work online will upend traditional and long-enduring notions of school. Teachers will no longer be expected to be experts in academic subjects. Instead, they will serve as guides to learning, facilitators to help students discover what they need to know rather than serve as original sources of information.

Along similar lines, the school campus of the future will cease to be the place where you go to specifically learn academics. Rather, students will attend campus to counterbalance "the social isolation and alienation that will come from the increasing amount of time they will spend in front of computer and TV screens. The role of school will change to become more of a social and activity center where students learn social skills through participation in group activities."

Or at least that's what Schank and colleague Kemi Jona predicted in a paper several years ago when both worked at the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

"It will happen," says Schank, now a professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a consultant on creating online courses at the university level. "People are pretty dissatisfied with schools right now, in part because the basic structure of American education hasn't changed in more than a century. Online education will be the catalyst."

Equity Questions

This probably won't occur anytime soon. Despite statistics that show an ever-increasing penetration of technology into schools, some experts suggest American education isn't anywhere near ready to fully embrace the future and potential of online learning.

The reason begins with three fundamental issues of equity, says Christopher Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

"The first is access and literacy. Do students or the population at large have the appropriate devices at hand and the basic knowledge to use them? You can't do much of anything until people have access," Dede says.

"Second, what do you have access to? Materials available on the Web right now are not designed for a wide range of learning styles or backgrounds. The orientation is mainstream culture, middle of the road. If a textbook took this approach, it would be roundly criticized as one-dimensional.

"And third, there is the question of the nature of the Internet. Who owns it? Who feels empowered to create material for it, to find their voice on it?"

Dede says the problem of access likely will be resolved outside education, probably through the same social and market forces that popularized technologies like television and the telephone.

More problematic, Dede says, is "the strange dichotomy of education technology. In the traditional classroom, learning is still done mostly face-to-face. But other kinds of teaching, such as distance or online, use technologies that link people who may never be in the same room.

"Some people present education as an either-or situation, but to my thinking, it's a continuum and the best place to be is somewhere in the middle. Sometimes you learn face-to-face, sometimes you learn across space and time and different media."

Not surprisingly, online learning means different things to different people. Definitions abound. But generally speaking, online learning means education achieved through evolving computer technologies like e-mail, the Internet, multimedia and virtual reality. Online learning has origins in distance learning (which began as correspondence courses), but its scope and versatility are enormously more powerful and transcendent.

"You use a sledgehammer technology like virtual reality when you really do need something powerful to accomplish the kind of learning that nothing else seems able to produce," Dede says in one paper on the subject.

Electronic Delivery

A few years ago, Douglas Barnard, an assistant superintendent for curriculum in Mesa Public Schools, the largest school district in Arizona, was preparing to retire.

He did not, however, leave education. Upon official retirement, Barnard began developing an Internet-based program to assist home-schooling families and others with children not attending regular classes. The idea was to provide home-based students (and their parents) with curriculum recommendations, new courses and testing so that they measured up to state education goals and standards.

"When we started, we made some assumptions," says Barnard, executive director of the Mesa Distance Learning Program, part of the Mesa school district. "We thought everybody had a computer or access to one and that they knew how to use it. We found that very often these computers were hand-me-downs. Some were slow or not connected to the Internet or they were used only for games. Students didn't know how to really operate them, to receive email or send attachments. We ended up doing a lot of computer instruction first and then redesigning the system to automate it as much as possible. Instead of doing several steps on the computer to do something, you just have to push one button."

These days, the Mesa Distance Learning Program is quite successful, one of four pilot projects supported by the state. After initially relying on materials purchased elsewhere, Barnard said the program has steadily developed its own courseware. He expects the program to be 100 percent homegrown by next year. Certified teachers, paid on an hourly basis, handle instruction via emailed courses. Most of the 300 or so students in the program are home-schooled, but some are the children of seasonal workers or others who for varying reasons cannot live within district boundaries.

"Some people think that kids who are distance learners are somehow lesser students, but it's not true. It takes a motivated student to do distance learning," Barnard says. "But one of the surprising facts, I've found, is that students who are in the mid- to lower-third of achievement tend to do well with this technology if they are motivated because distance learning gives them more time. They're not constrained to the classroom."

Barnard's program relies greatly on the Internet as a vehicle for delivering courses and as a source of information, but he is eager to present courses via satellite in real-time. Students and teachers, each sitting in front of a computer, would be able to see and talk with one another. The technology is already available, he says, but it's still too expensive.

"But it's coming," Barnard says. "I think it will be available in a few years, once the costs drop. I tell everyone that distance learning or online learning, whatever you want to call it, is not the perfect option. First and foremost, the best place for students to learn is in school interacting with teachers and other students. But if that's impossible, this is a viable alternative.

"And in some ways, it can be an option where currently there is none, In small, rural school districts with limited resources, you often can't find teachers to handle the more advanced courses, such as calculus or physics. But if the district had something like this, if it was hooked up to the Web or a satellite system, it could tap into courses designed and offered elsewhere."

The idea of offering, say, a chemistry course created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is already a reality, says F. Robert Walczak, executive director of Computer-Using Educators Inc., a nonprofit California corporation that promotes and supports the use of computers in the classroom.

"There are already gifted teachers around the country creating curricula that work everywhere," Walczak says.

That does not mean, Walczak cautions, that "there aren't a lot of issues and problems to be worked out. For example, let's say there's a really great Advanced Placement course at a Florida school that a student in California wants to take. First question: Does the course meet California's education standards or national standards? Second, where do the course credits apply--to the California school or the one in Florida? Which school gets the ADA (average daily attendance) money?

"I think you'll see more and more of these classes come online but there are going to be complicated issues to resolve along the way, many of them financial and political," Walczak says. "States are going to be fiercely independent. It's hardly a given that a school in Mississippi is going to accept, for example, curricula taught in California."

Omnipresent Learning

One of the biggest attractions of an online education, its proponents say, is the ability to learn at any time. Most schools, they say, have yet to fully appreciate this fact.

"Technology has not yet had a real impact on K-12," says Gary Nadeau, an education consultant and former chief technology officer at the Massachusetts Department of Education. "Technology has impacted administrative systems, but not teaching and learning. I think if you went into a classroom and asked a teacher if taking away all of the computers would make test scores go down, they would say no. Right now, computers are motivators, peripheral to the bulk of real instruction, which is done by a teacher during class."

Nadeau wants to change that by offering his own vision, one that involves something called "virtual education space." In it, he says, every student would have the ability to learn at any time, anywhere through the Internet and their own password-guarded account.

Such accounts would be a student's personal workspace in cyberspace. All of their schoolwork could be done there: homework, essays, tests. Teachers would have accounts of their own from which to disseminate lessons, offer instruction and advice and receive student work.

Nadeau says the appeal is simple: freedom.

"Kids are mobile. At home, at the library, they walk by a lot of computers," says Nadeau. "If they can access what they need at any of them, they don't need their own computer. Every single device they pass is their personal computer. Every application they want is there."

In Nadeau's vision, virtually all of education could be online. Classes could be conducted online. Test scores could be posted online, whether individual, district or state. Later this year, a pilot project involving eight Massachusetts school districts will test Nadeau's idea in the real world.

Nadeau is confident. In 10 years, he says, every state will be offering something similar.

Schank, the professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon, believes online learning will transform education in ways nothing else has.

"Most online learning at the moment is terrible," Schank says. "People don't understand the potential, where it can go. Right now, it's endless quizzing. But the future is superb. Think about flight simulators. They're an example of technological excellence. Inside, you really feel like you're flying a plane. You're learning how to do the real thing. Creating similar programs for schools will happen, but first people have to get away from trying to do it cheaply."

Creative Courses

It is possible to find cases-in-point for what Schank envisions. For example, Dede at Harvard has served as co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded project to study the effectiveness of virtual reality in schools.

As part of the effort, he and colleagues created learning programs to tackle some of a school's toughest subjects. In "Newton World," for example, middle-schoolers can explore Sir Isaac Newton's famous laws of motion by venturing inside a virtual, three-dimensional world where gravity and friction do not exist. In "Maxwell-World," high school students similarly deal with the mysteries of electrostatic fields. And in another program, a small number of test schools shared a virtual environment (a program that operates simultaneously on a network of school computers) in which 7th-graders explore and investigate the health and environmental conditions and problems of a city in 1890. Their job: to gather data on water quality and stop the spread of disease.

Such creativity is not uncommon in educational programming. It is just not common enough. "My worry is that we need to be careful that we don't simply turn online learning into looking at page 52 in a textbook," says Greg Kearsley, an instructional designer at Walden Institute in Bonita Springs, Fla., where he develops online courses for universities. "This is a really complicated tool. We've got to figure out how to take what we know and make it work well online."

No one thinks a future of 100 percent digital schools looms in the near term. "Learning online means and requires a lot more flexibility for students," Kearsley says. "But schools are and have always been highly structured entities. There isn't a lot of freedom to do your own thing in school, which is good and bad. I don't know if most school systems at the moment could handle that idea."

Maybe not, says Laurie Arizumi, an instructor and course developer at the Center for Communication and Educational Technology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, but they better start thinking about it.

Arizumi, who teaches Japanese online to students throughout the United States, still sees school campuses as "central locations" where kids go for art, music, athletics and learning social skills, but a good chunk of their academic life would be online, on a computer somewhere else.

It is part of the shift Schank describes in his vision of the future. Evolving and emerging information technologies empower individuals more than groups or institutions. Students have a greater ability to learn for themselves, by themselves. You can see it already in today's kids, who handle with seeming ease the chaos of multimedia, instant messaging and 800 million Web sites.

"What I see, to use a buzz phrase, is a shift from teachers being 'the sage on stage' to 'the guide on the side,'" Arizumi says. "That's a hard thing to accept for a lot of educators. But it's time we all started to transition, to make students more responsible for their own learning."

Because the future is already here.

Scott LaFee covers science and health at The Union-Tribune and is a free-lance education writer in San Diego, Calif.

Q&A with Xerox's John Seely Brown 

John Seely Brown is chief scientist and a corporate vice president of the Xerox Corp. But more than that, he is a man who considers a lot about the nature and process of thinking, with particular interests in digital culture, ubiquitous computing, user-centered design and individual learning.

The School Administrator asked him to share some of his thoughts about education and the future of online learning.

Q: What is the future of online learning, particularly at the K-12 level?

Brown: It's good, but you're talking about an incredible spectrum of people, demographics, needs. I think we're just beginning to scratch the surface of how the Internet is going to transform how we learn. I think we're entering an interesting set of experiments, what I call the ecology of experience.

Q: What do you mean?

Brown: Let's say you want to educate your kid at home, which is becoming more popular. The Web provides an incredible amount of information that facilitates parents teaching at home. And the role of the Web as a resource is a very interesting question.

One of the things that I find most interesting is the way the Web enables kids to engage in a new apprenticeship type of learning. Look at the open source movement called Linux. It's a computer operating code that is openly written in scattered communities around the world and freely shared to produce incredibly complex, evolving software. You learn to write code that is meant to be read by others, who then tinker with it and share the results.

Apprenticeship learning resembles the open source evolution. One of the most powerful ways to learn is to pick up knowledge on the periphery by seeing what others have done, then do something yourself.

Q: This doesn't happen ordinarily in school?

Brown: The whole notion of apprenticeship in public schools is pretty hard to do. The traditional classroom is very limited by its structure. You don't necessarily have access to brilliant minds outside of it. That's where the Internet comes in. It can link you to just about anybody or everybody.

Q: What else do you like about online learning?

Brown: The Web is one of the first mediums to truly honor multiple forms of intelligence, not just textual but abstract, musical, social, kinesthetic.

In the past, you were literate if you could understand and manipulate written words. But in the future, it will take a lot more. Text will continue to be important, but the ability to work in multiple media will be increasingly important. There's nothing that says the only way students can be tested and assessed is through writing essays or answering multiple-choice questions. Maybe the portfolio of future students will include films or music or other work that displays their talent and intelligence. People who can communicate in the most ways will have an advantage.

Q: What will be the role of the educator in the future?

Brown: First, I think we'll need to look for and encourage kids who can express themselves, who are not afraid of new things, who can make a coherent argument or pursue a critical thought. Children are usually naturally good at this. We just need to foster it.

In a modern classroom, a good teacher breaks up his or her students into groups, they choose roles, make decisions. The students are doing the work, but the teacher is crucial because he or she is setting the context, creating the means to foster deliberate inquiry.

Online learning will require even more of this kind of teaching. Teachers will let kids go off to discover knowledge, but they will still be needed to push them in the right directions and challenge their findings. The irony of the information revolution is that what we're doing is really just dramatically amplifying what happens in a good classroom.