The virtual revolution: understanding online schools

Education Next, Spring, 2006 by Randall Greenway, Gregg Vanourek

No doubt the Internet has had a profound effect on our lives, our work and play, our politics, and our business. But in the middle of a revolution that seems so profound, no one is yet quite certain what the landscape will look like when the electronic dust settles. Some believe that schools have come late to the revolution; some would say late is good. For better or worse, though, the Internet is beginning to liberate education from the confines of traditional time and space.

According to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), during the 2002-03 school year (the last data available), 36 percent of U.S. school districts (5,500 out of 15,040) had students enrolled in distance-education programs, and 38 percent of public high schools offered distance-education courses. The DOE study had 328,000 students in 8,200 public schools enrolled in distance-education courses. As of November 2005, the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) listed 157 unique online learning programs in 42 states in its database, including 32 virtual charter schools, 3 online home-school programs, and 53 public, non-charter virtual schools that offer programs. The DOE's 2004 National Education Technology Plan predicted that with the "explosive growth in the availability of online instruction and virtual schools ... we may well be on our way to a new golden age in American education." Virtual schools have arrived--and with them, a host of challenges to our notions about school and schooling.

What will the new landscape look like? Will it be one without class periods, grade levels, six-hour school days, or 180-day school years? Will it even need school buildings, classrooms, or district boundaries?

Those questions are no longer the stuff of education science fiction.

Our Virtual Ancestors

Most accounts of the history of schooling take us from fee-based schools in ancient Athens, to the first tax-funded public schools in our land in Boston in 1635, to the compulsory education of Horace Mann's "common school" in the mid-19th century.

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The modern mail-based "correspondence school" is said to have been invented at the University of Chicago in 1891. The delivery mechanism subsequently evolved from mail-based correspondence courses and radio programs to television and satellite broadcasts to today's Internet-based virtual schools, which were launched in the 1990s. There were a couple of important precursors. The federal Star Schools program began in 1988, with a focus on serving small rural schools through grants to advance distance-education technologies via telecommunications partnerships. In August 1993, Horizon Instructional Systems established a charter school in Lincoln, California, offering a range of innovative programs, including an "electronically assisted student teaching" program that blended home-based computers with distance learning and satellite technology.

The first incarnation of what we think of as a K-12 virtual school appears to have been launched in the summer of 1995, with the CyberSchool Project in Eugene, Oregon. Started by nine district teachers, it offered supplemental online high-school courses. By 1996 the virtual fire was beginning to blaze: an experimental WebSchool in Orange County, Florida (a precursor to the Florida Online High School), offered online courses to local students; Federal Way School District in Washington State founded the CyberSchool Academy with nearly 50 students (both elementary and secondary); the Concord Virtual High School (later to be called Virtual High School) was awarded a $7.5 million federal Technology Innovation Challenge Grant; and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was awarded a combination of grants to research and develop Internet-based high-school courses (later marketed by a for-profit enterprise called Class.com). The growth of large, multi-state programs such as Florida Virtual School and Virtual High School was especially important in putting K-12 virtual schools on the map.

Virtual schools are growing so quickly that a good count of them remains elusive. But the excitement is palpable, even if hyped. Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of U.S. News & World Report, has opined that, with distance learning and its accompanying "digital revolution ... [w]e are on the threshold of the most radical change in American education in over a century.... Here with the Web is the way for America to use the marvels it created to end the regression in our competitive and academic performance."

Mapping the Frontier

It is too early to know with much certainty how, or how well, the latest version of distance learning will serve the education needs of our children, but we can begin to map the territory in anticipation of studies to come. First, however, a note about terms. In Alaska and Pennsylvania, the programs are called "cyber" schools; in Minnesota and Colorado they are "online" schools; and Ohio prefers "e-schools." They are essentially the same: education delivered primarily over the Internet.