From its humble beginnings with 400 students in 2001, Connections Academy offered a complete, full-time education online for kindergarten through 12th grade students who wanted or needed to learn in more of a home-school setting. The academy’s students included athletes and actors whose demanding training or work schedules required that they be able to learn whenever and wherever they could fit it in. There were students with health issues unable to attend a traditional school, high achievers and struggling students, all of whom took their classes online, under the supervision of a parent or another adult “learning coach.”
Fast forward to 2011. Connections Academy operates in more than 20 states and serves more than 30,000 students. And it’s not alone. In just one decade, virtual learning has exploded, with two massive statewide full-time virtual schools in Florida and North Carolina, and more on the way.
But just as online learning is taking off, new research is finding that it may not be the most effective way to teach children, and virtual companies have begun to see that a purely virtual approach has its limits.
A key report put out by the U.S. Department of Education in September 2010 demonstrated that a blend of face-to-face instruction and online learning produced the greatest academic gains. Now, not only are traditional schools looking for more online options, but virtual schools in turn are adding bits of brick and mortar to their offerings.
“Both ends of the bridge are meeting in the middle,” says Mickey Revenaugh, executive vice president of Connections Learning. “Folks who started out purely online are having more demand for their services in school buildings. And people in buildings are looking for more online resources that they can bring into play. The drive is not toward one direction or the other, but making the whole spectrum available to students.”
Michael Horn, cofounder and executive director of education for the Innosight Institute—which studies virtual, blended, and face-to-face learning—says the move by virtual schools to add buildings and in-person teacher time is booming as these schools move to add students.
“Our studies show that, at most, 10 percent of the student population will be able to be educated in a virtual setting,” Horn says. “So virtual companies know that if they want to grow in this market, they’ve got to figure out how to be blended. I honestly think that’s the number one driver of this trend. They’re starting to see the limits to their growth.”
Further, Horn says, “Full-time virtual education is not a panacea.”
Once purely virtual schools—sometimes referred to as 'clicks'—are adding bricks in a variety of ways, Horn says. Some, like GOAL Academy in Colorado, have added check-in centers where students can come by once a week to meet with peers and teachers. Others are moving to a type of hybrid model, with some online instruction with virtual teachers coupled with mentors and in-person teachers who rotate through a building, pulling students out for small group instruction, remediation, or acceleration.
Indeed, Revenaugh herself is testament to the rapidly changing world of virtual and so-called “blended” or hybrid learning. The cofounder and former senior vice president at Connections Academy took on a new role heading up an entirely new division at Connections called Connections Learning, which was created solely for the purpose of extending the academy’s online school options into a bricks-and-mortar setting.
Connections Academy’s first foray into offering a physical setting came in 2005, Revenaugh says, when virtual home-schooling parents in Pennsylvania wanted a more structured place for students to come together to do activities and homework. This way, students could also have face-to-face time with teachers to promote growth in social skills, get more intensive instruction one on one, or encourage enriching discussion and debate in small groups. In 2009, the academy created a partnership with an all-boys Texas charter middle school that wanted to expand into high school education but didn’t have the resources to expand the building and the teaching staff. Connections outfitted a special learning lab where the high school students could take their online courses. They continued to have PE, lunch, urban gardening, and face-to-face time with teachers on the charter school campus.
Since then, Connections has opened a learning center in Prince George’s County, Maryland, for high school students who dropped or failed previous courses, or had trouble fitting required courses into their schedules. In addition to the online Connections teacher, the center also has a teacher on site to provide small group face-to-face instruction and supervise activities.
And now, Connections Learning is setting up their own blended or hybrid schools, and is applying for a hybrid charter in Prince George’s County, and submitting bids to take over low-performing traditional schools and supplant them with this cutting-edge hybrid model.
Fast forward to 2011. Connections Academy operates in more than 20 states and serves more than 30,000 students. And it’s not alone. In just one decade, virtual learning has exploded, with two massive statewide full-time virtual schools in Florida and North Carolina, and more on the way.
But just as online learning is taking off, new research is finding that it may not be the most effective way to teach children, and virtual companies have begun to see that a purely virtual approach has its limits.
A key report put out by the U.S. Department of Education in September 2010 demonstrated that a blend of face-to-face instruction and online learning produced the greatest academic gains. Now, not only are traditional schools looking for more online options, but virtual schools in turn are adding bits of brick and mortar to their offerings.
“Both ends of the bridge are meeting in the middle,” says Mickey Revenaugh, executive vice president of Connections Learning. “Folks who started out purely online are having more demand for their services in school buildings. And people in buildings are looking for more online resources that they can bring into play. The drive is not toward one direction or the other, but making the whole spectrum available to students.”
Michael Horn, cofounder and executive director of education for the Innosight Institute—which studies virtual, blended, and face-to-face learning—says the move by virtual schools to add buildings and in-person teacher time is booming as these schools move to add students.
“Our studies show that, at most, 10 percent of the student population will be able to be educated in a virtual setting,” Horn says. “So virtual companies know that if they want to grow in this market, they’ve got to figure out how to be blended. I honestly think that’s the number one driver of this trend. They’re starting to see the limits to their growth.”
Further, Horn says, “Full-time virtual education is not a panacea.”
Once purely virtual schools—sometimes referred to as 'clicks'—are adding bricks in a variety of ways, Horn says. Some, like GOAL Academy in Colorado, have added check-in centers where students can come by once a week to meet with peers and teachers. Others are moving to a type of hybrid model, with some online instruction with virtual teachers coupled with mentors and in-person teachers who rotate through a building, pulling students out for small group instruction, remediation, or acceleration.
Indeed, Revenaugh herself is testament to the rapidly changing world of virtual and so-called “blended” or hybrid learning. The cofounder and former senior vice president at Connections Academy took on a new role heading up an entirely new division at Connections called Connections Learning, which was created solely for the purpose of extending the academy’s online school options into a bricks-and-mortar setting.
Connections Academy’s first foray into offering a physical setting came in 2005, Revenaugh says, when virtual home-schooling parents in Pennsylvania wanted a more structured place for students to come together to do activities and homework. This way, students could also have face-to-face time with teachers to promote growth in social skills, get more intensive instruction one on one, or encourage enriching discussion and debate in small groups. In 2009, the academy created a partnership with an all-boys Texas charter middle school that wanted to expand into high school education but didn’t have the resources to expand the building and the teaching staff. Connections outfitted a special learning lab where the high school students could take their online courses. They continued to have PE, lunch, urban gardening, and face-to-face time with teachers on the charter school campus.
Since then, Connections has opened a learning center in Prince George’s County, Maryland, for high school students who dropped or failed previous courses, or had trouble fitting required courses into their schedules. In addition to the online Connections teacher, the center also has a teacher on site to provide small group face-to-face instruction and supervise activities.
And now, Connections Learning is setting up their own blended or hybrid schools, and is applying for a hybrid charter in Prince George’s County, and submitting bids to take over low-performing traditional schools and supplant them with this cutting-edge hybrid model.
“We want to bring the flexibility of online learning to a site with some face-to-face instructional resources so students have the best of both worlds,” Revenaugh says. “This whole movement on our part came because I was constantly, constantly getting calls from school districts. They’d say, ‘Gosh, your full-time virtual school seems to have done really well. Can we buy your curriculum? Can we bring your resources into our building? We set this entire division up just to deal with those requests.”
Even Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the largest statewide virtual school system in the country—it serves nearly 100,000 students in 67 Florida districts, 49 states, and 46 countries—has begun to move into buildings, and last school year FLVS opened bricks-and-mortar Virtual Learning Labs in 56 Miami-Dade County schools, which serve nearly 8,000 students and more than 240 elsewhere in the state. In addition to the one-on-one access by e-mail, text, or phone with the virtual subject-matter teacher, the labs are staffed with a facilitator, or certified “learning coach,” who monitors student progress, clarifies directions, and provides technical support, explains Julie Young, president and chief executive officer of Florida Virtual School. The students usually come to the lab, take the same class online at the same time, and meet with FLVS teachers on-site once a week.
“We also have e-learning centers out in the schools, which are also labs, but smaller,” Young says. “They may be a lab that’s in the school and are monitored by a facilitator. Kids will drift in and out throughout the day, taking a variety of courses from us, usually kids who may not have the technology or access from home.”
Officials at bricks-and-mortar schools, who have been struggling for years with high per-pupil costs, crowded classrooms, and flagging achievement, have been taking notice of some promising studies of virtual learning.
“Louisiana funded a statewide Algebra I study and found students taking it online got better results. Likewise, schools in West Virginia had similar findings for students taking Spanish I and II online,” says Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning, which funded many of the studies in recent years. “And in Florida, we found a much higher success rate on end-of-course exams in online learning classes than in the traditional classroom, as well as a higher rate of students getting a 3 or higher on their Advanced Placement exams. And Florida Virtual Schools are serving a higher number of minority and low-income students than the general population. So they’re having better results in a more difficult population.”
At the same time that bricks-and-mortar schools began to take notice of the virtual world, full-time virtual schools began to see the limits of their market. “It’s a model that doesn’t work for two working-parent families,” says Connection’s Executive Vice President Steven Guttentag. “There are 53 million K–12 students in this country. Virtual schools are a real lifesaver for a couple million. We’ve got 30,000, but that’s a drop in the bucket. But blended learning is a model that the other 50 million students in this country can benefit from.”
Both Connection’s Revenaugh and Julie Young say their expansions into the brick-and-mortar schools are just that, expansions. Both are quick to defend the need for full-time virtual learning. Young says it is important not to forget that some students who struggle in a traditional setting often excel in the virtual one, where they are allowed the flexibility of going their own pace and learning on their own time.
“There’s a great value for all these models,” she continues. “And what we’ve got to do is focus on the students’ needs first.”
And that, Revenaugh says, also means that virtual schools need to be willing to branch out into the more traditional classroom setting. “I think the Department of Education report on hybrid learning having more power than either face-to-face or online learning itself is why the interest in this is growing exponentially,” Revenaugh says. “And for an awful lot of students, school is a lot more than just a place where they get their instruction. So what we’re seeing is a blossoming of a lot of different hybrid models and resources. Which is exactly where we need to go in education to make sure we’re meeting the diverse and changing needs of students.”
Brigid Schulte is a reporter for the Washington Post.
Even Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the largest statewide virtual school system in the country—it serves nearly 100,000 students in 67 Florida districts, 49 states, and 46 countries—has begun to move into buildings, and last school year FLVS opened bricks-and-mortar Virtual Learning Labs in 56 Miami-Dade County schools, which serve nearly 8,000 students and more than 240 elsewhere in the state. In addition to the one-on-one access by e-mail, text, or phone with the virtual subject-matter teacher, the labs are staffed with a facilitator, or certified “learning coach,” who monitors student progress, clarifies directions, and provides technical support, explains Julie Young, president and chief executive officer of Florida Virtual School. The students usually come to the lab, take the same class online at the same time, and meet with FLVS teachers on-site once a week.
“We also have e-learning centers out in the schools, which are also labs, but smaller,” Young says. “They may be a lab that’s in the school and are monitored by a facilitator. Kids will drift in and out throughout the day, taking a variety of courses from us, usually kids who may not have the technology or access from home.”
Officials at bricks-and-mortar schools, who have been struggling for years with high per-pupil costs, crowded classrooms, and flagging achievement, have been taking notice of some promising studies of virtual learning.
“Louisiana funded a statewide Algebra I study and found students taking it online got better results. Likewise, schools in West Virginia had similar findings for students taking Spanish I and II online,” says Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning, which funded many of the studies in recent years. “And in Florida, we found a much higher success rate on end-of-course exams in online learning classes than in the traditional classroom, as well as a higher rate of students getting a 3 or higher on their Advanced Placement exams. And Florida Virtual Schools are serving a higher number of minority and low-income students than the general population. So they’re having better results in a more difficult population.”
At the same time that bricks-and-mortar schools began to take notice of the virtual world, full-time virtual schools began to see the limits of their market. “It’s a model that doesn’t work for two working-parent families,” says Connection’s Executive Vice President Steven Guttentag. “There are 53 million K–12 students in this country. Virtual schools are a real lifesaver for a couple million. We’ve got 30,000, but that’s a drop in the bucket. But blended learning is a model that the other 50 million students in this country can benefit from.”
Both Connection’s Revenaugh and Julie Young say their expansions into the brick-and-mortar schools are just that, expansions. Both are quick to defend the need for full-time virtual learning. Young says it is important not to forget that some students who struggle in a traditional setting often excel in the virtual one, where they are allowed the flexibility of going their own pace and learning on their own time.
“There’s a great value for all these models,” she continues. “And what we’ve got to do is focus on the students’ needs first.”
And that, Revenaugh says, also means that virtual schools need to be willing to branch out into the more traditional classroom setting. “I think the Department of Education report on hybrid learning having more power than either face-to-face or online learning itself is why the interest in this is growing exponentially,” Revenaugh says. “And for an awful lot of students, school is a lot more than just a place where they get their instruction. So what we’re seeing is a blossoming of a lot of different hybrid models and resources. Which is exactly where we need to go in education to make sure we’re meeting the diverse and changing needs of students.”
Brigid Schulte is a reporter for the Washington Post.
