Independent Learning

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is not only failing to lead, but affirmatively inhibiting progress in online learning.

Massachusetts is moving forward to allow the creation of virtual schools. The progress is good news, although we may still be moving too cautiously.

Teachers are eager for new technology, but we don’t have enough of it in the schools. The students who have the equipment and really know how to use it for something other than gaming, are not the ones who need it. The rest have to be explicitly taught how to use technology as a learning tool. For my students, I have to teach them how to learn in general first.

This post is a summary of the answers to this question that came out during a forum in Belmont in March with Commisioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Mitchell Chester.

Online learning is exploding at the post-secondary level and as a result a number of post-secondary institutions are developing skills at delivering online products.  It seems inevitable that these institutions will begin to seek to break the artificial regulatory boundary between secondary and post-secondary education.

Inventory of emerging online learning products.