Virtual Schools = Explosive Growth

The biggest takeaway from the Virtual Schools Symposium is that this is a growth industry with incredible opportunity - and that is really starting to attract significant private sector investment. But like any growth industry, there will be operators who will not create quality schools. This will be used by some to say that online learning does not work. Another problem with explosive growth will be the variation in schools. Because there have been no large scale studies of students in online learning, the variation in quality will dilute the overall positive effects. So if there are great schools balanced out by poor quality schools, it looks as if the online is no better than bricks and mortar.

This is what has happened in the charter school movement. High growth dilutes quality and schools have been kept open that should have closed reducing the overall positive impact of charters.

In the mean time, it appears there are over 2,000,000 online students out there and a great group of people eager to serve them. Because of that growth, ABCTE will work hard to make sure our teachers can easily become virtual teachers so that high quality staff will not constrain further expansion.