Online learning for student-centered innovation

As budget woes and rising pension and health care costs increasingly cut into the resources for our schools, we have an opportunity to use this crisis to transform them.

All students have different learning needs at different times. Most of us know this intuitively. I remember being in high school in Utah and struggling to master a physics concept while my best friend grasped it immediately. Much later in my life, when the same concept was explained to me in a different way, and I had more time to work with it, I understood. We all have friends who excelled in certain classes but struggled in others.

Yet our schools are not built to personalize for these different learning needs at different times. There is far more standardization than customization.

The reason is that schools teach using a monolithic batch system. When a class is ready to move on to a new concept, all students move on, regardless of how many had mastered the previous concept. On the other hand, if some students are able to master a class in a couple months, they remain in the class for the whole semester. Both the bored and the bewildered see their opportunity to achieve — and need to experience real success — shredded by the system.

Why is this? It's not that teachers, administrators, and others in the school system don't appreciate the need for customization. They do. The system in which they work, however, constrains their ability to customize because all of its parts are highly interdependent.

If our goal is to educate every student to the highest potential, then schools need to move away from this monolithic classroom model and toward a student-centric educational one with a modular design that enables mass customization.

The way transformation has occurred in nearly ever sector is through the force known as disruptive innovation — a force we must now harness.

In education, online learning represents this disruptive innovation, and as such, it presents a promising opportunity to make this shift. The proper use of technology as a platform for learning offers a chance to modularize the system and thereby customize learning by allowing students to progress at different paces and through different paths as needed.