Five Myths Surrounding K-12 Online Learning Free

Frequently, when presented with an opportunity to innovate, we just go back to our old practices and assume that things are meant to be a certain way. This inside-the-box comfort zone can be a barrier when trying to profit from new scenarios. For example, it was not until a backache patient came to therapy and refused to lie down at a major hospital setting in the United States that psychoanalytic couches were replaced by chairs so clients could sit down and talk directly to the therapist. The therapist in charge decided not to do what he had been trained to do, thus introducing a new era in therapy and he came to manage a 25 million patient therapy service (Kottler & Carlson, 2009).

When we observe what is going on in the majority of the institutions dedicated to online course design, we can see the inertia from face-to-face schools’ practices. It seems that curricular design, timetables, sequences, human resources, and materials mimic those from brick-and-mortar settings. In this sense, the introduction of online learning has been seen as a sustainable innovation and not as a disruptive one, in Christensen, Horn, and Johnson’s (2008) terms. That is, rather than addressing a lack of offerings, online learning has been conceived as a substitute for face-to-face learning. This nostalgia from the way we were (and still are, in many places) is preventing accomplishments we could attain if we had a wider spectrum of possibilities. Those possibilities stem from the abolition of a series of myths the author of this article has observed in her professional practice:

How do courses look? They are generally presented in an orderly fashion, have a beginning, a body, and an ending, they have tests, quizzes, or other evaluation procedures, they have a teacher or expert, and they follow a certain pattern. However, a learning program that promotes math skills could resemble more of a Guitar Hero videogame session, or a course on economics could look like a level of Age of Empires and lack almost all of the abovementioned elements. Students may not embrace them as courses, but if they promote the desired learning outcomes, could they be considered as such?

Even in online master’s degrees related to distance education, where ultimate innovation should be showcased, on the contrary a concern exists for having certain structures that relate the educational product to a traditional course. For example: it is often thought that there must be a paragraph establishing the educational objective of the course, another referring to the requirements and so forth. In invariably including these elements, we are restricting the creative possibilities the media has to offer. It is probably because we are still not fully comfortable with media that we tend to resort to our old habits. But we have to bear in mind that we can develop courses that look like games, letters, a visit to Universal Studios or to the Louvre, a secret mission, the play-offs, or any other means imaginable, and they can still be valuable learning experiences. Not only that, for thousands of students bored with traditional courses, they represent a golden opportunity to increase deep comprehension levels.

Because a great proportion of online leaders at present have a long history in face-to-face education, many developed a hard-to-change premise related to the desirability of online learning. They came into the field believing that online learning should be used only if there was no face-to-face option. In doing so, they contributed to diminishing the real potential it has, for digital natives continue to demand this type of education as well as some traditional learners who prefer online learning over traditional face-to-face education (Daniel, 2007). The most recent meta analysis conducted by the U.S. Department of Education (2009, in Patrick & Powell, 2009) concluded that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those in face-to-face instruction. Previous studies have concluded that both have similar academic results (Cavanaugh, Gillian, Kromrey, Hess, & Blomeyer, 2004) or that online learning has equivalent or better learning outcomes (Shachar & Neumann, 2003; Watson, 2007).

The question here is why do we have such a low conception of our learners’ skills? Why does a unit (in case we use units) have to look exactly the same as the previous one? Are our students not intelligent enough to accommodate to new, changing settings? Let us not restrict possibilities in an everlasting negative Pygmalion effect (Ferreiro, 2004): we should foster cognitive flexibility in students and the adaptability to cope with (and enjoy) change. Therefore, no unique format is necessary throughout the course. We can begin with a soap opera type of content in order to provide context in a psychology course and then introduce a connectivist learning activity (Siemens, 2004) in which learners create blogs and construct, together, a wiki dealing with peer pressure, and finally a proposal for a high school for troubled kids may be presented trough U-Stream.

Because of the autonomy that online learning generally entails, many teachers and course designers assume that given the chance to select, K-12 learners will only be interested in completing tasks that involve a grade. This is only true when content and format are not intertwined to motivate students to learn. If learning activities are compelling and we take into consideration students’ interests, we foster a joyful experience and contribute to the development of intrinsic motivation—defined as incentives and goals unique to the individual (Lim & Kim, 2003, in Hannafin, Hill, Song & West, 2007). On the contrary, if we underscore the importance of grades and communicate with a requirement-empha-sized discourse, our students may develop an extrinsic motivation and we could lose many potential lifelong learners.

Once again, leaders and content developers may be projecting their own fears; they feel they need to slowly incorporate the span of possibilities available in K-12 online learning. Leaders can restrain progress if they believe that the process must involve many discrete and sequential steps. Because technology has permeated through social networks, entertainment, and the many different uses of the Internet, students tend to be quite literate in terms of online tools. Therefore, a full immersion is not only possible, but many times, recommended.

Leaders and developers in online education may establish restrictions if they are not aware of mistaken underlying assumptions. This article presented five common myths that may restrain the evolution of more powerful online materials in K-12 education in order to raise awareness of self-imposed limits while developing curriculum and materials.