1 in 4 Kids Now Learning Online, Only 4 Percent of Teachers Meeting Them There

The
good news:

The percentage of high school students taking online courses
nearly doubled in a single year. According to the latest data
available from Project
Tomorrow's annual Speak Up Survey, more than one-quarter (27
percent) of all high school students took at least one class online
last year.

The bad news:

Only 4 percent [of teachers] said they were learning "how to
teach online classes in their instructional methods courses."

The same survey found that another 30 percent of students said
they weren't taking classes online because of issues of cost or
availability, suggesting that the market is only going to become
more massive.

In my feature in the August/September print
edition, I dropped these (already outdated) stats:

More than 1 million public school students are enrolled in
online classes, up from about 50,000 a decade ago. In Florida,
nearly 80,000 kids take classes in the state-sponsored Florida
Virtual School. Virtual charter school companies such as K12 Inc.
provide full-time online education to 70,000 students in 25 states.
Hundreds of small, innovative companies are springing up, vying to
combine learning with the power of the Internet. Nationwide, 17
percent of high school students report having taken an online
course for school in the last year; another 12 percent say they
took a class on their own time. Harvard Business School professor
Clayton Christensen, co-author of Disrupting Class, a
seminal 2008 book about online education, estimates that half of
all high school courses in the United States will be consumed over
the Internet by 2019.

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