DISRUPTING CLASS

In 2011, the weak economy that has bogged down the United States for the past two years will continue to propel online learning innovations in both K-12 and postsecondary education. Here are six trends to watch for in the new year:

1. Just under 40 percent of all U.S. postsecondary students will enroll in at least one fully online course this fall. The number has continued to grow year over year; in the fall of 2008, just under a quarter of students were taking at least one fully online course. In the fall of 2009, 29 percent of students did. Don’t expect this to slow down.

2. Public school budgets will continue to shrink, so more districts will do more business with online learning providers to fill in the gaps. Just as technology has made virtually every other sector in society more productive, the same will happen in K-12 education out of necessity. As the U.S. falls further behind other nations in educational achievement, doing less is not an option.

3. An increasing number of suburban schools will adopt online learning. In K-12 education, online learning has made its biggest impact to date in rural schools that cannot afford to offer breadth in their curriculum, as well as in credit recovery and dropout recovery programs in urban districts. This will change for two reasons. First, suburban schools feeling the pinch of tighter school budgets will jump on the online learning bandwagon out of necessity. Second, suburban parents will begin to see children in other suburban schools accelerate ahead of their peers thanks to online learning. What was formerly a group that prevented changes in education will begin to be a force for innovation. The full impact of this won’t be felt for a few more years, but the early signs will be increasingly visible in 2011.

4. Education entrepreneurs will create high-quality chartered schools that make use of online learning. They will do so by pioneering “blended-learning” schools, in which online learning is knit together with a supervised brick-and-mortar environment outside the home, so that they can scale faster—for less money and with better outcomes.

5. User-generated online content will begin to explode in education. The emergence and success of education rock stars like Sal Khan of the Khan Academy, which received a large grant from Google for its free online videos that teach math and science concepts,, will drive both growth and awareness of user-generated online content. The initial impetus for Khan was simple: he was trying to help his cousins with their homework, so he created the videos from home and posted them to YouTube. More will follow suit. Some Fortune 500 companies are already seeing dramatic savings by turning to user-generated learning content—with no tradeoff in the quality of outcomes.

6. Mobile learning, the subject of increasing hype in the United States, will make its impact in the developing world first. Roughly 70 million children worldwide do not have access to primary school. Over 200 million do not attend secondary school. In the countries and regions where this is the reality, mobile learning will offer education for people who historically have not had access to it.