Yesterday I wrote a brief commentary on The Toronto Star article entitled “Secret Document Shows Ford Government Changed Its Mind Before Making Online Course Mandatory For High Schoolers.” A day earlier, the President of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) released a statement on Facebook about the plan outlined in the ‘secret document’ (for those without Facebook, I’ve re-produced the full statement below. While the OSSTF (and all teachers’ unions to be honest) are engaged in job action against the Government right now, it is a bit unfortunate how skewed this statement is given how good the OSSTF has historically been when it comes to K-12 distance/online learning.
Let’s look at some of the comments from that statement…
The Doug Ford plan is all about removing investment from the system, reducing students’ access to the teachers and education workers they rely on to help them succeed, and creating an online learning system that amounts to bargain basement education delivered on the cheap.
Based on what has been publicly reported about the secret document, the Government did intend to reduce funding to school boards.
…which also calls for steep cuts in funding to school boards. The plan calls for $34.8 million less in the school year starting September 2020, $55.8 million in 2021, $56.7 million in 2022 and $57.4 million in the 2023-2024 school year.
After that, there would be “continued cost saving of $57.4 million annually with full catalogue of online ‘gold standard’ courses,” the plan predicted.
There was also some comment about the online courses saving money on an annual basis – although there is no mention if this is due to savings from removing duplication by centralizing the system, offsets generated from revenue of the sale of online courses to out-of-province clients, or – as Bischof contends – “bargain basement education delivered on the cheap.”
The OSSTF statement also reads:
Nowhere in the government’s secret plan is the quality of education addressed. Nowhere is it acknowledged that success rates for students taking online courses are significantly lower than for students in a traditional classroom. Nowhere does the plan mention that significant numbers of students simply don’t learn well in a self-directed environment, without the guidance of dedicated education professionals.
Actually, the plan mentions a “gold standard” process for the online courses and the need to increase the number of courses that meet this gold standard from the current small proportion courses to include all online courses. The lack of an acknowledgement that success rates for students taking online courses are significantly lower than for students in a traditional classroom may be because the research simply doesn’t support Bischof assertion. In fact, the research into supplemental K-12 distance and online learning has generally found that students in the online environment tends to perform at similar levels or even out-perform students in the traditional classroom. Now there is a lot of caveats about that research, including the fact that online or face-to-face is just a medium in which education is delivered and does not impact student performance. It is the design, delivery, and support of learning that impacts learning. Finally, it is a complete mischaracterization of the current online learning system in Ontario to describe it as “a self-directed environment.” This completely negates the good work that is done by e-learning teachers across the province – all of whom are members of the OSSTF.
The OSSTF statement continues…
…the plan contemplates the creation of a “business model” for marketing Ontario’s online learning system to international students, and for licensing course content to jurisdictions outside Ontario. It contemplates a system designed not to deliver the best possible education, but designed instead to generate “maximum revenue.”
The business model for out-of-province students is actually a common model outside of Ontario. In fact, if the revenue generated by selling online course content to out-of-province students was invested back into the quality of the online learning program it has the potential to actually improve the quality of online learning for students in Ontario. And as I noted in my entry on The Toronto Star article, this is actually happening in Ontario and other jurisdictions in Canada right now – “a private online school in Ontario that enrolls international students and a public school district in BC that established a model to allow them to do the same.”
After a bunch of editorializing about the motives of the Government (which I tend to agree with, but aren’t actually supported by what is actually in the “secret document” – only the OSSTF’s slanted presentation of that document), the OSSTF statement concludes with:
There is simply no evidence, anywhere, that mandatory online learning is good for students’ learning experiences or that it helps them succeed. All the evidence, in fact, points to the contrary.
Actually, there is no formal evidence at all. No one has examined the impact of mandatory online learning. So we don’t know if it “is good for students’ learning experiences” or if “it helps them succeed” – but we also don’t know that it doesn’t. So the statement “All the evidence, in fact, points to the contrary.” is just incorrect. The closest to an examination of the impact of mandatory online learning that is available is a look at graduation rates in the US jurisdictions that have implemented this kind of requirement. According to what Randy LaBonte and I wrote in an article published in the International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education entitled “Sense of Irony or Perfect Timing: Examining the Research Supporting Proposed e-Learning Changes in Ontario,” we write:
In examining the graduation data for some of these jurisdictions, the Michigan Department of Education reported a four-year graduation rate of 74.33% in 2011 (i.e., the first class that would have been held to the online learning graduation requirement), which was a decrease of 1.62% from the previous year.v However, there was also an increase in the graduation rate each subsequent year since the requirement was implemented. Similarly, the Alabama Department of Education reported that the graduation rate in 2013 (i.e., the first class that would have been held to the online learning graduation requirement) was 80% or five percent higher than the previous year; and their graduation rate had also climbed each year since the online learning graduation requirement has been implemented.
However, we also caution that:
Since 2000, the No Child Left Behind Act and its predecessor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, both placed a major emphasis on raising graduation rates in the United States. As such, graduation rates have been going up consistently but other measures of achievement have not risen. This dichotomy suggests that graduation rates may have been inflated in some way that do not truly represent student academic success, as was reported in the case of Alabama (Carsen, 2016). The main takeaway from examining this information is that, based on the available data, it does not appear that the implementation of an online or e-learning graduation requirement has negatively impacted graduation rates in these other jurisdictions.
A much more nuanced view of the issue than the unsubstantiated statement by OSSTF.
This is not to say that the OSSTF is incorrect in its descriptions of what motivates this Government (i.e., decreasing funding for public services). What I am saying is that this six-page confidential document that the OSSTF is commenting on doesn’t support these attributions, and that the language that Bischof and the OSSTF uses is continuing to misrepresent e-learning in Ontario and continuing to disrespect those OSSTF teachers who work in this environment.
This is also not to say that the Government should implement their e-learning proposals. As mentioned above, there is no research to support many of the aspects of their plans (e.g., see the research into class size and online learning in this report and how it aligns with the Government’s proposal). There is also the issue that publicly these proposals have been driven by a belief that regardless if it is workplace professional learning or some form of post-secondary, students today will need to know how to learn online – or at least learn in an independent fashion. But there is no research out there to actually show that experience with distance/online learning in their K-12 careers helps students develop those skills. There’s also no research to disprove it either. In fact, this is the only research on the topic that I am aware of is a study that was conducted by Dale Kirby and Dennis Sharpe (and I joined the team to add the literature review, but was not involved in the actual study). The study was designed to “examine the impact that experience with online learning at the K–12 level had on students’ perceptions, attitudes, and habits in online learning at the postsecondary level.” The authors reported that
These results indicated that when the high school distance learners were compared with the other university students who participated in the survey, there were no significant differences between them on any of the measures.
So the experience of learning online in high school had no impact on students perceptions, attitudes, and habits in online learning at the postsecondary level! Instead of misleading the public about the nature of online learning in Ontario and demonizing those dedicated OSSTF teachers that work in that environment, maybe we should be talking about what is the best way to prepare students to develop self-efficacy, self-directedness, self-motivation, self-regulation, etc.?
The Ford government e-learning plan: a statement by OSSTF/FEESO President Harvey Bischof
Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) · Tuesday, January 14, 2020
The Ford government’s confidential “implementation plan” for e-learning, which has been obtained by the Toronto Star, offers all the proof we need that this government’s approach to education is nothing more than a fiscal exercise.
The Doug Ford plan is all about removing investment from the system, reducing students’ access to the teachers and education workers they rely on to help them succeed, and creating an online learning system that amounts to bargain basement education delivered on the cheap.
Nowhere in the government’s secret plan is the quality of education addressed. Nowhere is it acknowledged that success rates for students taking online courses are significantly lower than for students in a traditional classroom. Nowhere does the plan mention that significant numbers of students simply don’t learn well in a self-directed environment, without the guidance of dedicated education professionals.
Instead, the plan contemplates the creation of a “business model” for marketing Ontario’s online learning system to international students, and for licensing course content to jurisdictions outside Ontario. It contemplates a system designed not to deliver the best possible education, but designed instead to generate “maximum revenue.”
As this document makes abundantly clear, anyone who cares about Ontario’s students and their future should be deeply concerned about the kinds of values and assumptions that underpin the Ford government’s approach to education. We see clearly that the most important concerns for students – the quality of the learning experience and the chance to succeed – do not even register. The only concerns that do register are purely fiscal. This government sees education not as a key to future success for the province’s students, but rather as a product to be marketed. This is a plan clearly designed to set into motion the privatization of Ontario’s world-renowned public education system.
There is simply no evidence, anywhere, that mandatory online learning is good for students’ learning experiences or that it helps them succeed. All the evidence, in fact, points to the contrary.
OSSTF/FEESO members will remain steadfast in their resistance to the Doug Ford secret plan for mandatory e-learning.
Original available at https://www.facebook.com/notes/ontario-secondary-school-teachers-federation-osstf/the-ford-government-e-learning-plan-a-statement-by-osstffeeso-president-harvey-b/2663308370389838/
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