Home schooling is not a new concept in America – in fact it was only late in the 19th century that public schooling was even an option for certain population groups. It wasn’t until the 1960’s, thanks to legal cases such as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that the United States offered a free, uniform, and open public education system to all American children. However, recent changes in technology have stimulated an explosion in the number of students participating in homeschooling programs. According to data published by the National Center for Education Statistics, an estimated 1.5 million students were homeschooled in 2007 – an increase of 74% since 1999. Compare that to a 6% increase in public school enrollment for the same period. Many parents of children who are homeschooled cite concerns regarding the school environment and access to religious and moral instruction as the key factors in selecting homeschooling for their son or daughter. Despite these numbers, the most common questions among parents, educators, and politicians is whether or not homeschooling students exhibit higher academic performance than their public school peers. The simple answer… We don’t know.

Despite much of the conjecture and anecdotal evidence, there has been no consistent research study that equally measures the performance of a random sampling of public school students and homeschooled students. Consequently, there is no clear evidence that public schooling is better or worse than homeschooling. Despite the lack of evidence, homeschooling offers parents a choice about the type and quality of education provided to their children. Unfortunately, it does not provide parents with the financial support that public schools receive for the student support through state and federal funding. Fortunately, a new model of education seems to be making it possible for homeschooled students, parents, and public school systems to benefit through cooperative online school programs.

Online schools are appearing in many states throughout the country. Many of these programs are required by state legislatures to work with local school districts manage and standardize the education provided to students who participate in this new educational paradigm. Why the cooperation? Like it or not, brick-n-mortar schools represent a significant capital investment by most states and are a wonderful central location for activities that are essential for youth such as interactions with peers through the participation in sports and other extra-curricular activities. In addition, these learning centers provide students with access to resources that may not be readily available to the average household, i.e. swimming pools, gyms, weight rooms, theaters, computer labs, etc. For the parents of homeschooled students, providing a basic education for a single student is an expensive proposition with an annual average cost of roughly $600. How can these two groups cooperate to provide a rich and publicly funded education for a student who is being homeschooled? Technology has provided the solution.

In Oregon, students participating in a district sponsored homeschooling program can receive a laptop, online courses facilitated by a teacher, access to an academic counselor, and access to school activities – for FREE! The participating private online provider receives a portion of the state tuition reimbursement – in Oregon this is approximately $7000 per student per annum. The remaining portion is provided to the school district. The private online school uses the funds to provide the equipment and courses while the school district uses the funds to provide the access to a teacher and other traditional educational amenities.

At Clark College Corporate & Continuing Education, in cooperation with public education institutions and the International Academy of Science – we’re looking at ways to provide a similar experience for homeschooled students throughout the country by providing public schools the opportunity to offer proctored online programs through the Acellus system.

At 16 she dropped-out of high school. By 20 she was married and began raising a family. For most of her life her earnings were below the poverty level. My mother was 55 years old when she enrolled in her first college course. She was a very intelligent person with college level math, reading, and writing skills. She could solve math problems in her head faster than I could do them on a calculator. However, like many Americans, the public school system did not meet her needs. She dropped-out of high school during her sophomore year – it was 1942 and she spent most of the next 35 years working as a waitress until at age 51, in 1975, she began work as a data-entry operator for a large insurance company. A position which included health insurance benefits, retirement benefits, paid time off, and tuition reimbursement. It has taken me almost 50 years to understand why she waited so long before taking on a career that would help pull her out of poverty. What I’ve learned most recently is that her experience is not unique.

Statistics presented by Bill Gates during one of his recent TED talks paint a bleak picture of the American public education system, especially for older-age, under-served populations – typically referred to as OU students. If you’re not familiar with TED.com I suggest you check-it-out. TED events, both live and online, are where amazing people share how they’re helping to make the world a better place. According to Gates (2009), more than 30% of American children never finish high school – for minorities the number is over 50%. In addition, if you do graduate high school but you are “low-income” you have less than a 25% chance of earning a college degree (Gates, 2009). Worst of all, according to Gates (2009) if you are in the “low-income” bracket “…you have a greater chance of going to jail than earning a college degree.” The obvious overriding question becomes – How do we turn this around?

Like Bill and Melinda Gates, many individuals, public and private organizations, educators, and others are working to improve education for everyone. For OU students, online education is proving to be an effective method for succeeding in college – even if they have not completed high school. In fact, one common misbelief among many high school dropouts is that they need a high school diploma in order to go to college. Taking college level courses does not require a high school diploma. In fact, taking college courses that lead to a better paying job does not require a college degree; however, the statistics demonstrate that individuals with a college degree continue to earn more than those without. For OU students the answer to higher education success is tied to competency-based education (Sturgis, Rath, Weisstein, & Patrick, 2010).

In a recent report, Clearing the Path: Creating Innovation Space for Serving Over-Age, Under-Credited Students in Competency-Based Pathways, posted on the website for the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL), the authors presented why competency-based instruction meets the needs of OU students (Sturgis, Rath, Weisstein, & Patrick, 2010). According to the report by the authors, these types of courses ensure mastery of skills, motivate students, provide educational continuity, and increase the likelihood of graduation (Sturgis, Rath, Weisstein, & Patrick, 2010). The online courses, especially the Acellus online courses, being developed by the Corporate & Continuing Education unit at Clark College, have been designed using a competency-based approach.

Our existing Acellus courses and the new Acellus courses we’re developing for our students are especially exceptional because they teach to the gaps in the student’s knowledge. Each Acellus course tailors itself to meet the individual needs of the student, creating a customized course for every individual. For OU students, these courses, totally online, are available 24/7 and create an open-entry, self-paced learning experience. Our current offering of Acellus courses includes instruction in all the traditional K-12 courses including mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies. We’re also expanding our courses to include Acellus courses for healthcare professionals, high-tech professionals, and even individuals interested in obtaining a 2-year college transfer degree. We employee award-winning instructors to design and present the course in a totally online format – a format that can be easily accessed on a computer or tablet device like the iPad. These courses are designed to ensure success for every student who is dedicated to improving his or her education.

For over-aged, under-served students, like my own mother who returned to school after being a high school dropout for more than 30 years – courses offered through our Acellus learning environment may be the perfect pathway to success.

References

Gates, B. (2009, February). Bill Gates on mosquitos, malaria and education [Video file]. Retrieved from TED.com website: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/bill_gates_unplugged.html

Sturgis, C., Rath, B., Weisstein, E., & Patrick, S. (2010). Clearing the path: Creating innovation space for serving over-age, under-credited students in competency-based pathways. iNACOL.

Do you take classes online? or  Do you use the technology as a toy - something purely for entertainment? What should you know about information and the Digital-Age to make your future more successful?

Prior to Gutenberg's development of the printing press the ability to read limited your access to information. For most people, life in the 1400s was physically daunting and individual success was not tied to education. In fact, in Western civilization and many other parts of the world, most people were "serfs" - A serf, like the land they live on, was owned by a noble. The serf gave 80% of what was produced on the land to their lord and kept 20% to sustain their family. Healthcare and public education for these individuals was non-existent... most never saw a book and few lived past 30. Gutenberg's development of movable type, an invention developed by the Koreans 800 years earlier - was the dawn of the Information Age in Western civilization. Soon people would learn to read, develop public school systems, create machines that operated without man/animal power, launch humans into space, and create the technology to share information anywhere at the speed of light. Thus we have run headlong into the Digital-Age.

The Digital-Age, still in early infancy, was born in 2002 - the year when the amount of digital storage surpassed analog storage (books, paper, etc.) The Digital-Age is currently defined by two characteristics. Like the Information Age before it, the Digital-Age is experiencing continuous population growth. When I graduated high school in 1980 the world population stood at 4 billion - 31 years later the population has reached 7 billion. By 2050 we could see a world population at an estimated 9 billion people. Consequently, the second characteristic which significantly defines the Digital-Age is the amount of information available to a person with access to the information.

According to a recent study by researchers at the University of California Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, each person on the planet possesses 295 exabytes (295x 1018 bytes) of information, an equivalent of 315 times the number of grains of sand on the earth. In a digital age conversion that may make more sense, the equivalent of 295 billion gigabytes of information per person. In 1986 the number was less the 1 billion gigabytes. Maybe this chart will help you make sense of how much information is out there:

In addition, each person transfers more than 6 times this amount of information annually.

So what... we knew this, right? Look at all those emails, tweets, phone calls, pictures, blogs, eLearning courses, YouTube videos, mp3 songs, etc. How does all that information impact your life? Imagine if you were one of the following groups of people:

• the 24% of the people on the planet without electricity
• the 78% of the people on the planet who only use electricity at night for light
• the 67% of the people on the planet who cannot read
• the 7% of the people on the planet with access to the Internet
• the 1% of the people on the planet with a college education

How do you use all that information that is literally at your fingertips? Do you take classes online? Are your tweets insightful? Do you make the world a better place, increase your success, make life better for other people, or - do you use the technology as a toy - something purely for entertainment? Are you a "Serf" of the Digital-Age? Maybe you should think about improving your grades by taking some of our online, personally customized, elearning courses... and learn what you don't know.