As new learning models emerged throughout the pandemic, many experts have weighed in on which ones might stick, and which ones are likely to fall away. One model that has garnered considerable media attention is learning pods, which loosely defined means a collection of parents working together to educate their kids outside of a school environment, whether or not the pod is linked to a school. Despite the media attention, it’s unclear if pods will persist beyond the pandemic. For example, the Christensen Institute weighed in on pods, stating that neither pods nor microschools will disrupt the current education system.

Perhaps pods will not disrupt the system. However, there are clearly policymakers who are seeing value in offering and supporting learning pods, or at the very least trying to make them easier to establish.

We gather our Digital Learning Collaborative State Affiliates and Premium Members by video once per month. The discussions cover DLC directions and strategy, and we also use our time together to explore the themes and trends that our members are seeing. These members collectively can speak to activity in the majority of states, as well as representing a range of schools, districts, state agencies, and companies.

Last week we put to them this question: what are you seeing in digital learning, and in education more broadly, as the new school year gets underway? Three broad themes emerged.

Every so often we devote a post to items of interest that have come up recently but don’t merit an entire post, but are worth a quick review.Three of these are below.

Did Online School Drive Down Cyberbullying?
The opening to this article answers the question (according to one study, at least):
“When the pandemic first struck, many child well-being advocates worried that the massive shift to remote school would spur an uptick in a troubling behavior: online bullying.

While talking about race in schools, Matt Yglesias makes a point (paywall) that is too often overlooked regarding the size of the education system in the United States:

“This is a really big country. There are over 100,000 K-12 schools in the United States. If you assume optimistically that in any given year, one out of every 100 teachers say or do anything racist at any school in the United States, that still leaves you with 1,000 racist teacher incidents per year. You could do a dozen ‘racist teacher’ stories per week and still be leaving racist teachers on the table. But at the same time, some other outlet could be doing 1,000 ‘woke administrator out of control’ stories per week. And we’ll all be clicking and sharing and arguing about those stories nonstop.”

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.

Many previous blog posts have referenced the difference between emergency remote learning as implemented during the pandemic, compared to well-planned and implemented online and hybrid learning.

As more and more districts are starting their own online and hybrid schools, however, they are asking—what exactly is high quality online learning? What does it look like?

Trends are starting to reveal themselves in the data.

Going back more than a year, in the graphic below we predicted that adoption of online and hybrid programs in 2021 and beyond would be higher than pre-COVID.

A new study, by Thomas Arnett of the Christensen Institute, reports on the findings of a survey of teachers from mainstream districts. It contrasts emergency remote learning (my term, not his) with “online learning’s potential benefits for K–12 [that go] well beyond providing stop-gap solutions during school closures [and] offers an opportunity to transform school instruction to better serve the needs of all students.”

The report contains quite a bit of information to unpack, which I’ll present in three parts.

Previous posts have documented poor policy ideas in several states including Texas. Recently, 30 mainstream districts in Texas including Houston—one of the largest districts in the country—published a letter in support of online learning options for their students. The ideas in the letter are less important than the fact that this support is coming from mainstream districts in a state that has lagged the leading states in creating digital learning options for students.

As the school year comes to an end, and for many of our students, the first full school year attended virtually, we have been looking back and reflecting on a year unlike any other. As teachers, students, and parents adapted to a new way of life during the pandemic, we thought we were excluded from many of the challenges of adapting to remote learning, as our everyday experience for 20 years (for Leann) and five years (for Summer) has been teaching students online at Florida Virtual School (FLVS).

Poorly conceived articles on remote learning continue to be published in major media sources, but at least one opinion column, in Education Week, provides fodder for digital learning advocates.

Let’s start with a recent example of the media’s ongoing inability to distinguish emergency remote learning from well-planned and implemented online learning: “I Taught Online School This Year. It Was a Disgrace.” The title captures the gist of the column well, and there’s not much more to say in response than “No, you didn’t teach online school.”

We sometimes look to post-secondary education to inform our perspectives on digital learning in the K-12 landscape. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reminds us why this approach can be so valuable, and should be required reading for policymakers requiring that all students must be back to f2f learning in the fall. Although this article describes a Harvard professor’s experience with remote learning, much of it applies to K-12 teaching and learning as well. It also demonstrates why the shift to good online teaching and learning is often so hard for experienced teachers and professors.

Two weeks ago we wrote about how we were seeing quite a few “Poor policy ideas bubbling up.” At the time, we were hopeful that perhaps those ideas were a short-term anomaly. Instead, it now feels like some of these policy ideas are becoming more widespread. These policies, if implemented and/or continued, risk two negative effects:

The past 15 months may have created an inflection point for digital learning for two related reasons.

The first reason is the huge growth in awareness of online and hybrid learning created by the pandemic, which required essentially all schools to shift to remote learning. Even as we identify a distinction between true online/digital learning and remote emergency instruction, it is undeniably the case that tens of millions of teachers, students, and families now have far greater experience with online tools and resources than they did 15 months ago. Some of these experiences have been negative, but others have been positive. Even if, hypothetically, only a quarter of experiences were positive, that would still represent roughly a 10x increase in the number of students who have had a good experience with digital learning.

Our policy guru has written recently about how there have been relatively few digital learning laws passed in the current year’s legislative sessions. That doesn’t mean, however, that there is a lack of policy activity. New policies are being planned, debated, and in some cases implemented—and some of it is quite concerning.

The 2021 legislative session has been strange. Some states have met in person the entire session, some are hybrid, and some are completely remote. It sounds a lot like districts across the country. There were several bills introduced related to digital learning; however, many appeared to lose steam after the American Rescue Plan Act was enacted. The focus from state lawmakers turned to helping support the state education and local education agencies in their planning for the largest influx of federal education funds.

In March, and seemingly overnight, teachers added instructional designer to their list of job responsibilities; however, it is safe to say that many had little to no training regarding online instructional design in their teacher prep programs. Now that we are a year removed and learning what we didn’t know, it is time to reflect on the process for developing quality online learning. A few questions to consider:

The wholesale jump to remote learning in 2020 will be remembered for many reasons, some positive and some painful. On the upside, our nation’s teachers, students, and families gained valuable skills and experience using 21st century technologies to support learning. On the downside, no one in distance education would have recommended the shocking pivot to this entirely different way of learning without design, training, transition planning, and preparation. It was truly a worst-case scenario, and what passed as “online or virtual learning,” left many with an understandably bitter taste.

COVID-19 has caused many of us to pause, to reroute our lives in a variety of ways. With this has come the challenge of reconfiguring how we should best approach our work and our research. The balancing act has been difficult, pushing many of us to our limits.

A few items of interest have come up recently that don’t merit an entire post, but are worth a quick review.

Almost half of all US public school students were full-time remote in January
Education Week reports that the first large-scale federal government survey shows, as of January:

• 43 percent of 4th graders were learning full time from home

• 48 percent of 8th graders were learning full time from home

• 75 percent of schools offered at least some in-person instruction

Another way to look at these data is that 25% of schools were offering only remote instruction, but 43-48% of students were learning remotely. Therefore, a non-trivial percentage of families were choosing full-time remote learning even when they had a full-time onsite or hybrid learning opportunity available.