The professor, David E. Pritchard, led a research team that analyzed student performance in an online homework system called MasteringPhysics.com during four different semesters. The researchers were able to measure the time spent on each question and look for suspicious work patterns. If a student took less than a minute each answering several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. “Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere,” said the researchers in a paper due out today in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research.

Based on later surveys of the same students, researchers found that the culprits typically copied answers from friends, by logging onto a friend’s account on the system to copy work or by getting answers via e-mail or instant message.

For veteran teachers this is hardly a surprising revelation. The complexity of cheating and plagiarism schemes has increased with the rise of technology and ability to transfer information digitally. Cellphones and other devices have made cheating easier than ever, see The Cheating Heart for an overview. Furthermore, despite the education aimed at informing students about copyright and intellectual property, it is clear that generation y and future generations seem to have a different perspective regarding copyright.

While many would point to this as indicating the need for better detection systems, real success comes from successfully encouraging students to choose not to cheat. Restrictive access to technology and more robust detection schemes may seem appealing but lead to students and teachers engaging in a never ending cycle of trying to outsmart one another. This doesn’t mean ignoring cheating or giving it a free pass. In this Web 2.0 world, it does mean, demonstrating a better way and allowing students to make choices. If unethical, according to Professor Pritchard, these choices mean that cheaters will earn the scores they deserve.

In my next article I will outline three keys to building an environment supportive of ethical decision-making. Until then I’d like to hear your comments and observations.

Open curriculum, or curriculum based on open educational resources, presents exciting opportunities for public schools. The curriculum is very flexible, easily personalized, inexpensive, and has (over the last few years) significantly improved in terms of academic quality. Many prestigious universities are  involved in building open curriculum, including MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, and Stanford University. With the difficult testing requirements and economic circumstances facing most schools, a significant demand has emerged in the  K-12 market for both open source technology and curriculum. State-wide programs in Utah and Florida, for example, are serving thousands of students using open curriculum. This trend appears to be growing fast.

Open curriculum has a few important benefits worth noting.

1. Low Cost– Most schools pay large sums of money for books, resources, and curriculum. Therefore, the financial benefits of utilizing open curriculum is obvious. As a site administrator who is strapped for resources, this is certainly a very appealing reason to use open curriculum.
2. Flexibility– Open curriculum is usually easily customizable and can involve third parties, including learning management systems like Moodle (which is also free). This means new features, tools, and apps can be imported from the open source community. These applications can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the virtual learning environment.
3. Curricular Continuity– Because open curriculum projects usually involve a large network or community of contributors, it is very unlikely the curriculum will be discontinued.
4. Continued Improvement– Because of the aforementioned network of contributors, the product is always being improved.

Some of the most important developments in open curriculum have taken place at the university level. Following is a list of a few exciting programs.

1. MITOpencourseware (MIT)
2. Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon University)
3. Open Yale Courses (Yale University)
4. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (Stanford University)
5. UOnline (University of Utah)

In addition to colleges and  universities, a few influential organizations have begun developing open curriculum for K-12 institutions.

1. National Repository of Online Courses
2. HippoCampus
3. cK-12
4. Curriki
5. OER Commons
6. UC College Prep

Although open curriculum presents many exciting opportunities for K-12 education, it also presents significant challenges.

1. Building Consensus– When it comes to using open curriculum at the K-12 level, building consensus around a particular type of curriculum is difficult. Whether in a small department or a large program, it’s very hard to get  professional educators to agree on a specific approach or course of action. Often times, this sort of disunity sinks a fledgling online program.
2. Implementation– The implementation phase of an online program which utilizes open curriculum is the most difficult. Finding a curriculum that best suits the students’ needs is challenging. However, building an online platform which not only integrates various technologies (i.e., communication tools, grade book tools, assessment tools, etc.) but also effectively delivers curriculum to students at the K-12 level can seem like an insurmountable task. Moreover, finding ways to modify and improve the open curriculum can also present difficult challenges for K-12 educators.
3. Hidden Costs– Every open source curricular program has hidden costs. Depending on the nature of the online program, these costs can quickly sink a project. Developing online curriculum and managing a complex learning management system, for example, can be a very costly endeavor, particularly for a cash strapped public school.
4. Intellectual Property Issues– The intellectual property issues usually associated with open source curriculum can be confusing and frustrating for educators, especially teachers who have limited experience with online learning.

Even though open curriculum presents a few difficult challenges, its potential for improving student achievement is very exciting.

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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!”

Teacher’s Worries Blossom into District’s Online Program– Eva-Marie Ayala, Star-Telegram

Competition Seeks Ways to Transform Learning– eSchool News

10.5M Pre K-12 Students to Take Online Course by 2014– Michael Horn, Disrupting Class

ELearning Conferences– Tony Karrer, eLearning Technology

Mobile Learning Jam Reflections– Judy Brown, mLearnopedia

How Technology Can Help Improve Education– David Andrade, Tech and Learning

Educational Networking: The Important Role Web 2.0 Will Play in Education– Steve Hargadon, Whitepaper

Revenge of the Edupunks– Shawn Roner, Edbuzz

Because of advances in technology– mobile technology, new and exciting social media platforms, iTunes, and YouTube– the way today’s students share information is very different than in the past. This new information paradigm requires educators to consider new approaches to educating students. Because of the way today’s students learn, it’s important that educators tailor instruction to meet individual student learning needs and design curriculum that addresses student interests.

One of the first successful ventures into this new learning paradigm was MIT’s free online coursework venture in 2001. Kamenetz points out,

“Today, you can find the full syllabi, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for every course MIT offers, from physics to art history. This trove has been accessed by 56 million current and prospective students, alumni, professors, and armchair enthusiasts around the world.”

What’s interesting about these new sorts of technology-oriented changes is they are disrupting the traditional model of teaching and learning. As schools like MIT take advantage of the Web, they are able to “disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field.”

According to Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, organizations like MIT are

“changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.”

The problem, it seems, is most universities are still mired in a 20th century mindset when it comes to how educators think about knowledge and learning. While universities remain prohibitively expensive and unnecessarily rigid in terms of how instruction is provided, a growing movement of high-tech do-it-your-self students or “edupunks” are creating a new and exciting market for decentralized learning.

According to Kamenetz,

“The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that’s structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor’s degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.”

The education futurists see the development of Web 2.0 as the final death knell of the 20th century learning model. The proliferation of open source learning tools, social media technology, mobile learning tools, and the ability of educators to cheaply and effectively construct rich, complex, individualized learning experiences for students is bound to revolutionize education.

As teachers move to utilize new technologies to improve curriculum and pedagogy, there are a few important problems to consider. Perhaps the most difficult problem, at least in a practical sense, is how teachers effectively integrate different technology-based learning tools to create a seamless learning experience. As a pedagogical practice, using new technologies to disseminate the different sorts of academic information high school and college students need is a very complex task. Therefore, teachers are left asking an important question: How should teachers use this technology to deliver effective instruction, and once we’ve identified effective ways to do this, how exactly should teachers organize the curriculum?

In some ways, integrating technology with high school and college curriculum may seem like a simple task, but any experienced educator will tell you it’s definitely not. Shifting from a classroom mindset to an online mindset not only presents significant practical problems, but the transformation can be very difficult for teachers to conceptualize. Perhaps this is why many universities, including MIT, have been unsuccessful at creating highly effective learning environments using Web 2.0 technology, at least compared to the traditional classroom experience (MIT’s online courses could hardly be considered examples of effective curriculum and pedagogical design!).

It’s not to say there aren’t individual examples of online curriculum that incorporate innovative design principles and rigorous curriculum to create a rich, student centered learning experience. The problem is finding examples of large-scale models that can easily be incorporated by any given university or high school. Although there are certainly emerging models that show exciting promise, most tech savvy educators would admit we’ve got a ways to go.

It’s also important to consider the problem of deciding exactly which digital tools educators should utilize to improve student learning. Digital tools such as micro blogging, open source learning management systems, and web-based student information systems are important tools for creating a robust and integrated learning platform. But which tools should educators use, and for what purposes? Furthermore, how can these tools be integrated to create a seamless learning experience? What’s exciting, I think, is that the tools and information are presently available. The problem now is constructing a learning infrastructure that truly works? Today’s teaching environment requires educators to utilize a variety of programs in order to deliver effective instruction– a learning management system, a different grading program, a different student information system, and so forth. Teachers, therefore, are faced with a difficult challenge. Not only do they have to figure out which technologies to utilize, but they have to figure out how to make them work together. Figuring this out requires a lot of time, experience, and perseverance. Once all the factors are considered, designing a great online course can be quite expensive, time consuming, and frustrating.

When this problem is considered at the high school level, moreover, the issues become even more complex. Perhaps this is why high school teachers and administrators are reluctant to move courses online.

Although the potential benefits online learning presents are exciting, shifting the way educators think about teaching and learning is definitely not an easy task. Nevertheless, the more students and their parents demand highly individualized and inexpensive curriculum, educators will be forced to change the way they deliver instruction. The market forces that are shaping today’s schools will, at the most fundamental level, disrupt the current educational model. The problem we face as educators is deciding which tools we should use and the best ways to use them. Finding a solution to this problems might require the sort of radical thinking the edupunks like to embrace.

The study, entitled Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies, involved a rigorous evaluation of more than a thousand recent studies of online learning. Of the collection of empirical studies examined, the research team identified forty-six studies that could be subjected to meta-analysis. The meta-analysis involved examining the conclusions of the various studies in order to construct a general conclusion (composite estimate) regarding online learning.

The research analysis is based around four important questions:

1. “How does the effectiveness of online learning compare with that of face-to-face instruction?”
2. “Does supplementing face-to-face instruction with online instruction enhance learning?”
3. “What practices are associated with more effective online learning?”
4. “What conditions influence the effectiveness of online learning?”

Not only are all four questions very interesting but they are the sorts of questions commonly asked by educators when considering the efficacy of online learning.

In terms of the effectiveness of online learning compared to face-to-face instruction, the study found that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

The study also found that blended learning measurably enhanced student learning as compared with instruction solely based on face-to-face interaction. Moreover, it found that the effectiveness of online learning programs seems “quite broad across different content and learning types.”

The study identified three important best practices related to online instruction:

1. “Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.” The study seems to indicate that online learning environments improve student learning when students are able to manipulate instruction based on their particular learning needs or when the online curriculum provides learning mechanisms that trigger student reflection or self monitoring of learning.
2. Online learning is more effective when the curriculum includes blended learning elements (e.g., face-to-face interaction, online collaboration, independent practice, etc.).
3. Effective online learning environments include a variety of learning activities. The simple inclusion of online learning activities such as video or online quizzes do not necessarily improve student learning. Although these sorts of instructional activities are often recommended by educators, the study was not able to find a significant connection between the activities and improved student achievement.

Although the authors of the study determined that blended learning measurably increased student learning, they were not willing to simply attribute the higher achievement to the instructional approach itself.

It’s also interesting to note that the study concluded that time on task is more beneficial to learning in an online environment than in a face-to-face environment.  This seems to confirm what many educators already know: Online learning activities enable teachers to effectively differentiate instruction and tailor learning to meet individual student needs. It seems to make sense, then, that online learning can be highly effective because it enables educators to design instruction that addresses the specific learning needs of students, provide more efficient and individualized student remediation, and individualize instruction based on student aptitude, different learning styles, and interests.

The study did acknowledge that the implications of the its findings are limited and more research regarding online learning is needed. Moreover, the implications for K-12 are very limited due to the small sample of k-12 based research analyzed in the study.

Nevertheless, the study’s analysis is very important. As many schools today face difficult economic challenges, blended learning programs may provide a more efficient and cost effective way to deliver instruction. At the classroom level, blended learning seems to offer important advantages over traditional face-to-face instruction. Perhaps the most important advantage is improved use of instructional time. By utilizing effective blended learning practices, teachers can better maximize limited instructional time while providing interesting and meaningful student-centered learning activities.

1. After two days of listening to teacher conversations, questions, and input during the breakout sessions and symposiums, I realized we (educators) have a lot of work to do if we want to effectively utilize Web 2.0 technology to improve student learning.
2. Teachers are excited about utilizing Web 2.0 technology in their classrooms, but the diversity of applications seem to present difficult problems. Implementing LMS technology in a high school classroom, for example, is difficult enough for a teacher with limited technology knowledge. Adding podcasting, blogging, and mobile technologies to the equation makes the problems normally associated with implementation seem insurmountable.
3. Teachers are having a difficult time understanding how mobile technology can be used to improve student learning. After attending a conference by Hall Davidson related to using cell phones in the classroom, I realized most of the teachers, including myself, were excited about the idea of experimenting with this technology, but were concerned with the potential problems it presented. Sure, taking polls during class, Twittering during lectures, etc. sounds really exciting, but the thought of kids having cell phones during my history lectures is scary! It seems they already have a difficult time staying on task! Add cell phones… and all hope is lost! I guess for most of the teachers at the conference, common sense and experience tells them this sort of technology will most likely only make classroom distractions worse. That being said, most of today’s presentations that focused on mobile technology failed to provide examples of best practices nor reasonable solutions to the aforementioned problems.
4. The key note speaker, Bob Bramucci, addressed the usual myths associated with online learning: (1) Myth 1—Technology doesn’t improve learning. (2) Myth 2—Online learning is a fad. (3) Myth 3—Distance education is inferior to classroom-based learning. (4) Myth 4—Distance education is dehumanizing.

Generally, day two seemed to focus on using technologies for new educational purposes rather than as a means to implement old educational programs or systems in different ways.

“Researchers estimate that more than a million public school students now take classes online, a 47 percent increase from the consortium’s original K-12 survey done in the 2005-06 school year.”

What’s amazing about the report’s findings is that three-quarters of the schools surveyed are utilizing online learning technology. The report also found that the schools surveyed were using online technology in a variety of ways.

“The survey of K-12 administrators found that online learning is being used in a wide variety of ways, from offering Advanced Placement and other high-level classes to high-achieving students to providing credit-recovery programs for students who failed or did not complete a class.”

Perhaps the most interesting finding is the trend in public schools toward “blended learning.” According to the study, a large number of educators who teach in the traditional classroom setting use online technology to individualize instruction.