Education Week highlights online learning evolution

By:

Mar 26, 2009

In the Education Week article “Breaking Away From Tradition: E-Learning Opens New Doors to Raise Achievement,” the reporter, Michelle Davis quotes Innosight Institute Executive Director of Education Michael Horn about the evolving nature of online learning.

The article highlights the new Sloan Consortium report about online learning and talks about how online learning is increasingly being used in a hybrid environment and is moving beyond its original application in distance learning.

The article quotes Horn as saying: “Online education is absolutely moving beyond the distance-learning model into a whole other category unto itself,” says Michael B. Horn, a co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, a book published in 2008 that has stirred debate about the growing role of e-learning in K-12 schools. “This technology allows for a lot of creative arrangements.”

The article talks about initiatives from Florida Virtual School, Alabama, and Chicago, among others to increase the quality and access of the online learning experience, and also talks about a forum in Massachusetts where Virtual High School Global Consortium helped superintendents see how they could utilize online learning to do more with fewer resources.

As the article quoted Horn: “The economic situation and tight budgets are an opportunity to increase online and virtual learning,” Horn says. “The faltering economy may accelerate this process and force schools to change their assumptions about how classrooms typically work.”

Michael is a co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He currently serves as Chairman of the Clayton Christensen Institute and works as a senior strategist at Guild Education.