The next big thing

I just got back from a K12.com training in the Washington DC area for my teacher/advisor role at the virtual academy where I work. It was amazing. I have never seen an organization that is so visionary. K12 is a virtual school provider that uses the latest research in cognitive science and educational psychology, as well as a collaborative business model of continuous feedback and improvement, to offer an exceptional and continually improving interactive, multi-sensory, and multi-media education. Yes, I know, what does all that mean? Well, click on this link for a quick sample of their curriculum.

I had already seen much of their curriculum because my children are enrolled in a free public K12 online academy (read the story of how that happened), but I didn't know about the creative process behind it until the training. (By the way, if you are wondering about the social aspect of an online academy or virtual school, click here to read about our story or watch a video of what other families have done.) Because K12 only hires the best curriculum developers, their interactive lessons start out great, but they continually improve too. We have all found errors in textbooks or have had ideas about how to improve products, but don't usually do anything about it. Even if we tried, most corporations are not very responsive to feedback from employees or customers. K12 is different. They value their customers and employees and offer them links throughout the online curriculum and toll free phone numbers for feedback and new ideas.

In fact, I decided I would test K12's responsiveness. At the training, I was in a meeting in which we were discussing how to deal with technical problems. I remembered that a few days ago, I had encountered a technical problem with blogger.com and had gone to a blogger.com help discussion group and posted my concern. In a very short time, I had a number of users provide quick and easy solutions to my problem. I thought that would be perfect for K12. I had also thought a lot about how Challenger School offers computer classes (including programming)--starting in first grade! That got me thinking. My son wants to be an inventor/engineer/scientist. We are always looking for new ways to help him achieve that goal, but I always feel like there is more we could be doing. If Challenger School offers programming to first graders, why couldn't K12 start offering computer classes (or even engineering/technology classes) in first grade? Yes, it sounds a little crazy, but think about it. Math and language are extremely complex, but we start teaching kids the basics in kindergarten. That principle is true with basically any subject--and in fact, students learn much better when they start younger--think of foreign languages (speaking of which, K12 purchased Power-Glide--the foreign language learning program created by my mission president, Dr. Robert W. Blair, and we use Rosetta Stone in our K12 program). Edison had a lab at home and started experimenting at a very young age. How many Edisons are we losing because we don't encourage them early enough? I approached one of the product executives with my ideas. She was very receptive and asked if I knew of any online courses already out there that they could incorporate into their program. I mentioned that I had a friend who is working on his PhD in Engineering Education who would be able to help with that. She gave me her contact information and encouraged me to get her more information. We also had a parent complain about an inappropriate remark having to do with sex and pregnancy in her daughter's health class. I encouraged her to submit feedback on it, which I did as well since I agreed with her, and it disappeared within days. Finally, one of my jobs is to track student progress. I submitted an idea for a tracking tool that would show the time students have spent in their courses (I can see how much time they spend on each page of reading, each quiz or test, etc.) in the form of a graph. That way, students, parents, teachers, and administrators could view the time they have spent versus what the expectation is and their grade. This would allow all of us to easily see the correlations and adjustments that need to be made. A few days later, I learned that they had beat me to the punch--they were already coming out with it. Wow.

Later at the training, I also asked the Vice President of Public Relations whether I could post some of the new ideas they were discussing on my blog. He told me to email him a draft of my blog entry (which I did before posting) and he would let me know. I was amazed at how approachable these people were. I started to think of how this business model could revolutionize the business world. If everyone, both employees and customers, in every business collaborated the way K12 does, progress would greatly accelerate. I then thought about how K12's students were going to be so much better educated than previous generations, and then they would join the collaboration. The progress would accelerate at an even greater rate.

Time Magazine named Gutenberg the Man of the Millenium for his invention of the printing press because it made literacy for the masses possible. Of course, this paved the way for enduring democracy because widespread education led to the creation of a solid middle class, which is necessary for an effective democracy (I came to the conclusion long ago that a major reason our society has so many problems has to do with our education system--it is a good thing that education reforms are happening. I also believe that a lack of proper education, in its broadest sense, is the reason why it is so difficult to establish stable democracies in the Middle East). In our day, Bill Gates is credited with sparking the personal computer revolution. Think about what that has done and will continue to do. This new high technology business model, the "digital nervous system," will bring us to the next level of education, collaboration, and progress. Of course, this combined with the $100 laptop project will bring educational opportunities to even more of the world (speaking of which, it was really cool to meet a lady from Malaysia at the training who was starting a K12 school there). Just as the printing press made literacy more available to the masses at that time, these advancements will bring greater educational opportunities to lower-income groups today.

It is ironic that I just finished reading The 5000 Year Leap on the plane to DC. The book explains how the Constitution and the free market set the stage for the explosion of progress and technology that the world has witnessed over the past 200+ years. I believe there is the potential for this to happen again. Many think that America is on the decline, and that is true in many ways, but there is still much good that can be built upon. There is reason to be concerned about the behavior and lack of morality of the rising generation. A very wise man named David O. McKay once said that if we teach our children without religion, we are just turning them into clever devils. (By the way, George Washington warned against the belief that morality could be maintained without religion.) A K12 education can help in this area too because it gives parents more of an opportunity to protect their children from negative influences, encourage positive relationships (our school has regular field trips and other activities), and teach them correct principles.

K12 is also releasing its own internal version of MySpace, called "the big thinK¹²." However, it will be moderated and kept appropriate at all times. I find the name "big thinK" interesting. It encourages students to think about others and the big picture. Great things will happen when K12 students come together in such a community. (I'm excited because teachers and administrators will have their own big thinK communities as well.)

There are some amazing things in K12's future. In listening to CEO Ron Packard speak about how he came up with the idea (which was very similar to Jordan Clements' story about how he founded Parents for Choice in Education because he wanted the best education for his daughter) and where the corporation is headed, we were able to catch a glimpse of K12's future. We also listened to Bror Saxberg (check out his amazing resume), who left his family vacation in Norway just for the conference and flew right back afterwards. His mind is way ahead of our time. Just as an example, he is discussing the possibility of bringing something like Second Life (a virtual world) into education. Bror also talked about his son's "addiction" to online video games. Bror said that children are constantly learning, memorizing, and becoming experts in online video gaming. He talked about the great potential such principles have in education. Kids could become addicted to education! It was so cool to hear him say that because I have said the same thing about education and video games many times. In fact, I shook his hand afterwards and spoke to him about these ideas for a while. He was very down to earth. I have often thought about how education has been left behind technologically. While kids have moved on to DVDs, cell phones, iPods, laptops, video games, etc, we still teach the same way we taught one hundred years ago. K12 is finally bringing educational technology up to speed.

On the flight home, I was reading an article about a new city in New Mexico that is focusing on alternative energy. That reminded me of Dubai, which has created Dubai Knowledge Village (DKV) and Dubai International Academic City (DIAC). By creating tax free education zones, these areas have drawn many of the world's leading universities and other educational organizations to build satellite institutions there. I think it would be great if the same thing happened in the United States, only including K12 virtual schools as well. Just imagine. It would be filled with museums like the Exploratorium, the California Academy of Science, the NASA Exploration Center, planetariums, aquariums, etc. People who love education would converge on the city and would continually share their ideas. That educational synergy would continue to grow through the generations.

Well, I'm going to go invest in K12.

A friend of mine encouraged me to include in this post some drawbacks of K12, so here are some things I have learned about K12 since I wrote the above.

K12 could have done a lot more training. I have had to figure things out as I go. I have spoken to others who feel the same about their jobs. I must say, though, that when I have a question, it's really easy to go to K12 Teacher Support for help. There, veteran K12 teachers can tell me or show me on their virtual whiteboards what I need to know. I have seen some weaknesses in the curriculum, but again, I can submit feedback on that. (I have to add that the curriculum team called me concerning some feedback I have made. They really listened and are going to make changes in the curriculum. I have never had that happen in any other school where I have taught!) K12 also had a lot of technical difficulties at the beginning of the year. We had too many new students across the country starting at once. Tech support finally doubled the bandwidth to solve the problem. In addition, I realize that virtual school isn't for everyone; however, it is important for parents to have choices. Rather than government providing a one-size-fits-all public school, it is best if parents can choose between public, charter, private, virtual, and home schooling or a combination. That's really the focus of my blog. I think the ideal, at least for my family, would be a hybrid of virtual and brick and mortar (for the more hands-on activities) private school. Actually, the charter school that I was a founding member of was going to be a hybrid. I prefer private because religion can be a part of it and the private sector basically always does it better than government.

One thing we really like about K12 is that our children are able to go at their own pace and speed past lessons (they can "test out" if they already know something--the pre-assessments help the system know what they need and don't need too and then post-assessments tell the system what they may need to review), subjects, or grades. When my son was in kindergarten, my younger daughter loved the history and science lessons so much that she couldn't be kept from doing everything with him. She is now in first grade, but is in third grade history and science. The problem is, I don't see the same thing in high school--at least at the virtual academy where I work. I believe that students should not be held back. If they can fly through lessons, subjects, or grades, they should be able to. If they are ready for college courses in some subjects, but need remedial work in others, that's what should happen. Our head of school says that that may happen in the future, though. For now, we are still trying to figure out the basics--and that is a lot with K12.

Finally, I don't think K12 has gone far enough in catering to the individual interests, talents, and learning styles of students. I believe that will happen in time, though. For example, this country needs great engineers to compete, and looking at the way the Chinese do the Olympics, I'm guessing their engineers are starting very young and will continue to start younger. Of course, they have a bureaucratic, centralized, high pressure system. Our system should also start them out young, but do it more like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and George Washington Carver. The parents and kids should be the decision makers--the schools should be consumer driven. My son loves learning about science and technology, but we have to supplement his K12 education in those areas.