Readers add to “indicators of high quality digital learning”

Last week’s blog post, The indicators of high quality digital learning, ended with an invitation to readers to weigh in on what they saw as indicators that the post hadn’t included. And weigh in they did, mostly regarding two main points. The first point was about teachers and instruction, and the second about mastery learning.
 
The original post put teachers and teaching first on the list of quality indicators:

• “An active role for teachers, whether they are online, f2f in a hybrid school, or both. This is the easiest indicator conceptually, because in 20+ years of studying the US K-12 online learning field, we have found that literally every successful school or program places a premium on teachers. (This shouldn’t be a surprise because it applies to all physical schools as well.)

• “A premium on teachers” manifests as strong hiring practices, professional development, and ongoing teacher support. Professional development is combined with ongoing support that is embedded and offered consistently throughout the year.”

The main point that readers wished to add was regarding the ways that teachers in online and hybrid modalities could “identify and provide intervention/remediation/enrichment to personalize instruction.” I agree, and would add that using student feedback and data to personalize instruction should be a main element of professional development and support from the school and district.

A second comment addressed this part of the original post:

“Established online and hybrid schools also have indicators of success based on outcomes. As digital learning programs often serve students who are highly mobile, and/or arrive at the school behind on credit accumulation, measures such as test scores on state assessments, and graduation rates, may or may not describe outcomes accurately.”

This reader, from a state virtual school, made the point that providers of supplemental online courses have relied on course completion rates as a main outcomes-based indicator, but he felt that course completion rates “aren’t good enough,” particularly given that it’s hard as a state virtual school to connect with student assessments or other data that would link course completion with some indication of learning beyond the course grade, such as state assessments. This is even more true for private online course providers who are almost entirely reliant on district satisfaction as their indicator of success.

What can a state virtual school do to address this issue? This particular organization is leaning into competency/mastery-based learning:

“This certainly isn’t going to give us the silver bullet in terms of comparison data to online learning versus learning in a traditional classroom. But, it gives us great information about what kids are learning as they come to our organization so we can put resources in areas where kids need the most support.”

Yet another reader, who has spent considerable time thinking about mastery-based learning, suggests that the key elements of mastery should be indicators of high quality online/hybrid learning. He defines the main steps as:
 
“1. Define what we want students to learn. This can be Common Core, state standards, etc. But we need to be clear what the list of learning objectives actually is, and we need to write it down.
 
2. Define what success means. For each learning objective, we need to be clear what it means for a student to successfully complete the learning process.
 
3. Implement some way to track and monitor student learning process. Somehow students and teachers need to be able to see where students are in their learning.
 
4. Use this data to drive the teaching and learning process. This information should be the starting point:  what do we want the students to learn, where are they now, and what are we going to do next to help them learn?”

Mastery-based learning is a topic that may deserve its own post. We are hearing of renewed interest among some educators and organizations, but major barriers remain to widespread implementation.

We appreciate comments from readers—whether we ask for them in a blog post or not!