by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Ultimately, new technology-rich education models will need to be evaluated based on their productivity, that is, the results that they produce relative to the required investment. Unfortunately, within the nascent field of online learning, this information simply isn’t yet available. While embracing the need to understand and illuminate both costs and outcomes, our goal in this paper is to explore the cost issue. We seek, to the extent possible, to compare the costs of digital education on various dimensions with the costs of traditional brick-and-mortar schooling in order to help lay the foundation for the ultimate lens on productivity. This analysis is not straightforward, of course, because costs vary within digital education just as they do within brick-and-mortar schooling options. Educators and policymakers pursue online learning for different reasons and adopt different flavors of technology-rich models. Broadly speaking, today’s policymakers and educators appear to pursue online-learning solutions for one or more of three primary reasons: to reduce overall costs (often in response to budget shortfalls); to increase the range of course offerings available to students (such as advanced or remedial classes or unusual subject areas); or, more radically, to use technology to rethink the traditional teaching-and-learning model (primarily reflecting a leader’s instructional vision, but often linked to budgetary considerations).
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