Eleven years ago, the book Disrupting Class predicted that in 2019 half of all high school courses would be online. It’s 2019, the disruption hasn’t happened, and I’m surprised that it’s taken a third of the year for me to see a reference to the failed prediction.

There’s been quite the media backlash against Summit Learning, with articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, and smaller media outlets.

A large part of my job is working with school districts to build their capacity to support personalized and digital learning for all students. In discussing this transition with a parent group, one concerned mother brought up an intriguing question, “If the entire school is ‘going digital’, how much screen time is my child going to get every day? My pediatrician only recommends two hours a day.”

The inaugural Digital Learning Annual Conference (DLAC) took place on April 1-3, 2019, and one of the highlights of the event for me was the prominent and focused conversation around research and evidence. In fact, DLAC kicked off with a research community meeting, which attracted almost 50 attendees representing roles from across the digital learning sector. Teachers, administrators, policy makers, service providers, developers, and, of course, researchers attended the meeting to learn more about the existing evidence, as well as how to better connect research and practice.

In her keynote speech at Edgenuity’s 2019 Partner Summit, CEO Sari Factor remarked that other industries have seen dramatic changes in the day-to-day of how they do business based on their innovative uses of technology. Across the country, there are promising school models that are breaking down the traditional structures of our learning system and creating high-quality effective personalized learning programs to better meet student needs, but unfortunately, this shift remains the exception rather than the norm. The transformational promise of online, blended, and digital learning is far from realized in the vast majority of our classrooms, schools, and districts - and consequently, for our students as well. So what is holding us back from truly revolutionizing teaching and learning across our country?

We are excited to share that, as mentioned at the inaugural Digital Learning Annual Conference last week, we have published two new reports - the first of which is the new Keeping Pace report called Snapshot 2019. Snapshot 2019 presents research on policy and practice in K-12 digital learning.

As a child, did you ever play the game telephone? It starts when one person whispers something into another person’s ear and then the message is passed on from person to person. At the end, the message is completely different from what was first whispered. We see this a lot in real life. Unless a person experiences something for themselves, they typically align themselves with what they’ve heard from others!

Major advances in technology over the last three decades have significantly changed how we communicate with each other, especially through the Internet. Today, children are surrounded by technology. From a young age, most learn about how to use the Internet and end up more tech-savvy than many of the adults in their lives. However, being tech-savvy and knowing how to use the Internet doesn’t always mean that children understand how to stay safe online.

Blended learning is helping to unshackle schools from the one-teacher one-classroom model and usher in more creative and diverse instructional approaches. Beyond just restructuring the classroom, blended-learning models are starting to open up new connections and diversify students’ networks. This has huge potential to address not just achievement gaps, but opportunity gaps.