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According to a new study by the research firm Ambient Insight, the number preK-12 students who will take some or all of their courses online will increase from 2 million to 10 million by 2014.

As reported in the Journal,  Ambient Insight Chief Research Officer Sam S. Adkins estimates that

“…about 450,000 K-12 students attend virtual schools or “cyber” charter schools full-time, while another 1.75 million take some of their classes online. The two groups are still outnumbered by students who take all of their courses in physical classrooms, which Ambient Insight reckoned at 50.03 million as of 2009.”

What’s extraordinary is Ambient Insight forecasts that close to 4 million students will take all of their courses online by 2014.

What’s, perhaps, most fascinating about the findings is that much of the early development in online or virtual schooling is taking place in the private sector. As Michael Horn points out in a recent blog,

“this [online learning market] is a reasonably robust private sector one at the moment. This is a bit of a rare phenomenon in K-12 education, but these signs of investment activity are positive ones. This suggests that the government’s role may be first and foremost one of providing the context for this to grow in an efficacious way, but also to be careful not to crowd out the private investment with its own competing investment dollars or to create too much process-focused regulation such that it stifles the potential innovation that comes from this. If we manage this correctly, we will hopefully see not just the boom of online learning, but also the boom of a student-centric system that provides every student—regardless of geography, income, or learning preferences—a rich set of choices.”

Michael Horn also points out that a transformation seems to be taking place where online learning is moving away from a strictly distance learning phenomenon to a robust blended learning revolution.

I guess this is where we say, “power to the people!”