Education Week August 29, 2012 - A Special Report on E-Learning - S12

EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 29, 2012 Schools Open Doors to New E-Learning Rules, Ideas
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Illustration by Chris Whetzel

Virtual Ed. Faces Challenges In Building Quality Controls
States trying to figure out the best approaches for evaluating online learning

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By Ian Quillen

s online learning has entered the mainstream— with roughly a third of the nation’s high school students enrolled in at least one online course, according to a report released in June 2011—more states have created policies, procedures, and even organizations for evaluating the quality of such courses and other online content available to students. But instituting those quality-control measures is not without challenges. For starters, the creation of such systems often requires legislation, which must be crafted by lawmakers who aren’t always familiar with online learning’s nuances and may not be eager to launch new programs in tight budget times. Further, the peculiarities of individual states’ education policies—especially on standards and materials approval—mean the kind of oversight that might work effectively in one state might not function well in another. “There’s no state we could look at and say they’ve got it all figured out,” said John Watson, the founder of the Evergreen Education Group, the Durango, Colo.-based

research firm that puts out the annual “Keeping Pace” reports measuring growth and changes in K-12 online learning. Taking a functional system in one state and applying it to the policy realities of another would be “fairly difficult,” Mr. Watson added. Even the California Learning Resource Network, or clrn, and the Texas Virtual School Network, or txvsn, which partnered to write a second edition of the inacol National Standards for Quality Online Courses, released last October, have considerably different authority, responsibilities, and procedures. (The Vienna, Va.-based International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or inacol, is a leading advocacy group for proponents of online and blended learning for students.) The Houston-based txvsn, for example, must approve all courses offered to regular public or charter school students in Texas, whether the classes are a supplement to brick-and-mortar coursework or part of a full-time virtual program. By contrast, the Modesto-based clrn acts in a more advisory role to districts and charter schools seeking to ensure that they purchase high-quality content, said clrn Director Brian Bridges. The organization can’t deny districts or charters the right to use their online courses of choice. However, clrn was set this month to announce a new partnership with the University of California sys-

tem in which only clrn-approved online courses will be accepted as valid when state universities evaluate high school students’ transcripts. Further, school districts and state universities are the main creators of the content reviewed by the txvsn, while clrn can review content created by districts, universities, or private companies. And unlike clrn, the Texas group takes ownership of the courses it reviews and acts as the vendor for interested districts or charter schools. Even the organizations’ roots are different; legislators in 2007 created the txvsn explicitly for reviewing and approving online-course content. By contrast, the California group has morphed into an organization focused primarily on reviewing online-course content from its previous role analyzing and reviewing a larger variety of supplemental digital-content items, a role it played for more than a decade. “Along the way, we saw the transition from supplemental resources that were relatively small, meeting maybe 15 or 20 standards, to monsters—we called them tanks—meeting hundreds of standards,” Mr. Bridges said. “That was the big ‘aha!’ moment for us where we saw that’s what is happening in this industry.” Yet despite their differences, the two groups were among the first such organizations with the foresight
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Education Week August 29, 2012 - A Special Report on E-Learning

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