Microsoft UK Schools News Blog

Scaling up Innovation

Rayfl — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:05:00 GMT

The Microsoft UK Education team has a dozen people in it (surprised?) who are focused full-time on education – across schools, colleges and universities. Which means that we’re awfully busy and spread across many, many things all the time. But fortunately we have the help of other similar teams around the world, and a much bigger team in our offices in America. Sometimes we produce work for the rest of the world (like the Innovative Schools case studies, focusing on journeys of innovation and the lessons that innovative schools have learnt on their way), and sometimes the work flows the other way – towards us.

One of the things that has been done as part of the worldwide Partners in Learning programme is The Scaling Framework – an interactive tool that helps analyse how you move an innovation from being something done by 1 or 2 people, to making it widespread.

It made me think of two specific cases where today there is a challenge of scaling innovation. The first is Learning Platforms, where it is proving to be difficult to take good practice from one teacher/department/school to the whole system. And the other is taking an innovative ICT initiative and spreading it to other schools.

The Scaling Framework is a simple interactive tool that explains the five dimensions of scale, and then digs down into areas such as “Traps to Avoid” and “Next Steps to Explore”.

You can either us this as an individual, or pop it up on your whiteboard next time you’re holding a leadership team meeting, and explore interactively.

Take a look at the interactive Scaling Framework, and see if it can help you

I was interested in the “Spread” dimension – and the trap to avoid: “Developers should realise a somewhat less powerful innovation that reaches much greater numbers of use is a step forward”. We were talking about this at lunchtime today, discussing a new piece of software for teachers which may only appeal to innovators, meaning that the majority of users won’t be affected by it. So is it better to try and promote something a little less innovative, but likely to be used by more people?

Planning for BETT 2010

Rayfl — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:22:15 GMT

BETT is the big event in the education ICT calendar, not just for you but for us as well. Knowing that 30,000 people will flood through the doors of Olympia in about 7 working weeks tends to focus our minds on making sure that we put on a good show for them/you.

Our challenge, every year, is to get a balance between whizzy new technology and being realistic about ICT in the classroom – because the pace of change means that technology appears to be moving faster than the pace of change in the classroom. Some people are always looking for things to change rapidly (you only have to look at your students’ attitude to the release of the latest game) whilst others see change as something that disturbs the natural rhythm of things. And in your own school you will probably have staff on both ends of the spectrum.

This year, we have got lots of new products to launch (or which have been launched in the last few months), which will create a bit of a buzz. Windows 7 is out there, and in use by the innovators, but for many schools it may be the first chance for them to see it in detail. For some teachers, Office 2007 will be ‘new’, while some others will want to look at the next version – Office 2010. SharePoint is in a similar position – with some schools pushing the limits of the current version, and some who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the Beta version of SharePoint 2010.

So the plan this year is to dramatically increase the number of demonstration PCs, so that we can show all of our new things, and still explain how we can help schools get more out of what they’ve already got.

Our draft list of “demonstration Pods” looks like this at the moment (bound to be some changes between now and BETT)

Windows 7 (and also the multi-touch facilities, which are exciting to demo)
Office 2007 (and a new add-in product to be launched, which I can’t yet tell you about yet)
Office 2010 Beta – more here
SharePoint 2010 – more here
Home Learning Package – more here
Semblio – more here
…and a nice little bundle of 3 other new products to be announced on the first day of the show

Oh, and we’re just finalising this year’s freebies!

See you in January!

Office 2010 Beta Available

Rayfl — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:46:27 GMT

Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 have all reached the Beta milestone and are now available for download.

Remember how sometimes you felt smug when you were running Windows 7 Beta at least 6 months before everybody else in school? Well, you can feel it once again!

What’s new in the Office system?

On Monday 9 November, Microsoft Exchange 2010 became the first product launch in wave of innovation across the Office system. The first half of 2010 will see this wave continue with the release of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 .

Microsoft Office 2010 provides rich and powerful new ways to deliver work. New features include enhanced tools, customisable templates, photo editing and the ability to work with multiple people from different locations at the exact same time using new co-authoring capabilities. By offering more ways to access files from virtually anywhere, Office 2010 gives users greater control. Learn More
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 enables organisations to connect and empower people through an integrated set of rich features. SharePoint 2010 facilitates business collaboration in its broadest sense and helps colleagues, partners and customers to work together in new and effective ways. Learn More
Microsoft Project 2010 provides teams and organisations of all sizes with the right project collaboration tools, and a pathway to step up to more advanced Project and Portfolio Management capabilities as their needs evolve. Learn More
The advanced diagramming tools of Microsoft Visio 2010 help you simplify complexity with intuitive and professional-looking diagrams, dynamic and data-driven visuals and new ways to share these on the Web in real-time. Learn More

In addition, with this beta we are unveiling several new features and products:

Office Web Apps for business customers, available through SharePoint Server, allows SharePoint sites to host browser-based Web Apps accessible from virtually anywhere.
To me, this is one of the most significant developments of SharePoint 2010 – you can provide Office applications, from your SharePoint server, to your students whether they are in-school or at home. Which means they can start a piece of work using Office on their school computer, and then continue it at home using their web browser.
Outlook Social Connector, a new feature that brings communications history and social networking feeds into the Outlook experience.

Happy downloading

Windows 7 building up steam in schools

Rayfl — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:16:00 GMT

You may remember a while ago I mentioned that almost 1 in 5 readers of this blog are running Windows 7.

To be honest, that’s nagged at me for a while. Because I’ve worried that it means that I’m only “preaching to the choir” – ie the readers of the blog are only the super-keen Microsoft lovers. Although some of the emails I get would prove that wrong :-)

So I thought I’d check elsewhere, and asked Chris at EduGeek what their statistics were showing. EduGeek is a big community of network managers and technicians from schools in the UK (and latterly in other countries too). His answer (after duly consulting the web logs) was 14%. Not quite matching my 19%, but considering that it is a much more diverse community, its still a surprisingly good number.

The whole table was:

Windows XP	56%
Windows Vista	17%
Windows 7	14%
Mac OS	7%
Windows 2003	2%
Ubuntu	2%
Linux	1%

You can read the EduGeek statistics on their website – and if you don’t know EduGeek already, then it’s worth considering popping onto their website more regularly.

There’s something that I don’t get in this table (and it was the same in my earlier version) – 2% are browsing the web using Windows Server 2003. Must be a statistical oddity – or there’s more going on the in the school Server Room than we all think!

Free staff training – the UK Innovative Teachers Forum

Rayfl — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:35:00 GMT

Kristen and Stuart, who run our Partners in Learning programme, spend their time helping teachers to get most effective use from ICT in their classroom. They have found that one of the most effective ways to help teachers is to give them time to share experiences with other teachers, learn from innovators, and reflect on their own teaching practice. And sometimes that means getting out of school!

There are still free places available for exactly that at the Innovative Teachers Forum in Birmingham on 1st December. With a theme of “Connecting Learners, Connecting Teachers”, it promises to be a good day because some of the best there are some inspiring speakers.

In fact, I’ve just ditched three meetings from my diary and decided I’m going to go too, as I haven’t heard John Davitt speak for a year, and it’s time for top up from his inspirational jumble of ideas.

If you’ve got a favourite teacher that you’d like to move up the ICT learning curve, then let them know about it, and send them this link with the details of the day and registration. Surely somebody deserves a day out of the classroom?

The Innovative Teachers Network is nominated in the BETT Awards

Rayfl — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:24:21 GMT

Yesterday, I learnt that the Innovative Teachers Network has been nominated and reached the shortlist for the BETT Awards 2010*. Of course, this is great news, and especially for Kristen Weatherby and Stuart Ball who have spent the last two years getting the website going, and building the community of teachers on it. It has now got to a new level of maturity because of all of the classroom lesson plans that are available to download, with some excellent resources, not just from UK teachers but from others around the world.

We had no idea it had been nominated for an award so it was a surprise. Perhaps if we’d known we wouldn’t have changed its name last week to the Partners in Learning Network. Maybe we’ll be the first winner to have been nominated as one thing, and win as another!

You can find out more about it, and what it does on our Teachers blog

Find out about registration
Read a bit more about some of the international teachers that contribute resources to it
Find out how to get free education licences for Kar2ouche Creative Writing, Songsmith and AutoCollage

And here’s three thoughts if you don’t actually teach yourself, and are surrounded by colleagues that do:

Help your closest teaching colleagues by giving them a link to the “Teaching Ideas and Resources blog” (Blog link)
Help all of your teaching colleagues by adding the RSS feed to your school’s learning platform or website (RSS link)
And for those who won’t be affected by either of the above? Persuade them to sign up for email alerts from the blog – so that every other day they’ll get a helpful email with a teaching idea (How to subscribe by email)

Saving money with your IT – Dean Close School

Rayfl — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:23:34 GMT

Dean Close School, in Cheltenham, are in the process of rolling out Windows 7 and the latest Windows Server across their school – to 500 computers owned by the school, as well as using it to more effectively manage the 500 laptops that are brought to school by pupils.

Part of the pressure for this has come from pupils themselves. As Nyall Monkton, the IT Manager at the school said:

When students started bringing their own laptops to school with pre-release versions of Windows 7 installed, we didn’t have the capacity to support them.

I often think that pressure for change in IT seems to come from two directions – from the users and from the suppliers – with IT managers in the middle between the two. And in schools, it also feels like teachers are the middle too – being pressured for faster paced change, with students pushing upwards, and the IT world pushing downwards.

The school had an existing School Agreement, and were lucky enough that their Microsoft partner, Bechtle, were on our early adopter programme for Windows 7. So they were able to jump onboard earlier than most – with their first part of their deployment in July.

You can read their story on our global case studies website

But now, the “saving money” bit.

In the case study they talk about reducing the time taking managing the network, and reducing the time that staff have to spend on administrative tasks – and improving their access to the school network from home. But they also identified a really clear cost saving, through the new DirectAccess feature in Windows:

In the future, we won’t need to maintain Citrix. This will save us £15,000 to £25,000

I’ve started to hear similar stories of cost savings – either saving money in the IT budget through using the in-built capabilities of Windows to save money on third-party applications, or saving the school significant amounts of money on the electric bill by a combination of using power saving settings in Windows 7 and through virtualising physical servers. I’m going to ask Gerald (who wrote the Windows Early Adopters paper) to interview people from some of the stories I hear – if you’ve got a story about how one of our products has saved you money, then drop me an email, and perhaps I can send Gerald in your direction.

Who will be the next Bill Gates

Rayfl — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:24:00 GMT

If you’ve got a Sixth Form, you’ll want to know…

XMA and Toshiba have launched a competition, called “The next Bill Gates”. In a world of competitions and campaigns all the time, it’s a bit of a “does what it says on the tin” competition. It’s for students who’ll be applying for university next year, and students enter by recording a 60-second video answering the question “Why are you the next Bill Gates?”

The prize is £3,500 of tuition fees, a Toshiba laptop and a summer 2010 placement with XMA.

As far as I know, it has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but darn, why weren’t we quicker thinking of this idea :-) Every year we take in about 80 interns for a full year as well as offering work experience for pupils from local schools, but hadn’t thought of offering it as the chance to become the next Bill Gates…

Windows 7 in North Leamington School in Warwickshire

Rayfl — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:35:00 GMT

In parallel with Gerald’s written case studies (see Saturday’s post) in September, I also managed to get out of the office, and visit North Leamington School in Warwickshire – with a film crew in tow.

Although they’d only just opened, and they were adjusting to the new school site, they were very accommodating, and willing interview candidates!

The goal was to capture their story – of opening a brand new school in September, with a big deployment of Windows 7. You can see the result for yourself below.

North Leamington School - Windows 7

It was an astonishing project to complete on time, as the Warwickshire IT team had only finally got access to be able to install the IT equipment on the 20th August, and so they had to deploy a brand new, massive network in just a couple of weeks. And make sure it was running for the new arrivals.

From watching the video, you’d have no sense of how much pressure that will have placed on the school, the staff and the IT technicians, and it definitely seemed a swan-like performance (very smooth on the surface, but I imagine lots of paddling underneath!).

Normally, I wouldn’t be aiming to get a video produced so soon after a school had opened, but we had to rush this one through so that it could be shown when Steve Ballmer came to London. It’ll be interesting to hear the student’s opinions in a few months – especially once they’ve all realised that they had Windows 7 so early, and their school really was a leap ahead.

What is it like to be one of the first schools using Windows 7

Rayfl — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:08:48 GMT

Windows 7 became available to schools in mid-August 2009, uncomfortably close to the start of the new school year. Although there was every encouragement from Microsoft for schools taking the plunge, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that those ICT teams that grasped the nettle were displaying a fair amount of courage. The start of a school term, after all, isn’t a moveable deadline.

Whether the new operating system was installed or not, whether or not it worked, or did what was printed on the tin, the students, teachers and administrators were still going to arrive and switch on their machines expecting to do pick up where they left off before their holidays. Failure, as they say, was not an option.

These are the first two paragraphs from Gerald Haigh’s article about the experiences of the early schools using Windows 7 in the UK. After just two weeks of term time, he went out to talk to half a dozen schools for us, and record their stories. Gerald normally spends his time split between writing books for school leaders, and leadership focused articles for educational publications. But given his ability to dive straight in and ask the right questions, it made sense to ask him to talk to these early adopters.

The resulting document, which you can download from my SkyDrive, gives you a clear idea of the thoughts of those schools, and why they chose to make such an early start on Windows 7.

Take a look for yourself, and perhaps share with others in your school, to find out what happened when the following schools started term with Windows 7:

West Hatch High School in Essex
Lodge Park Technology College in Northamptonshire
The Long Eaton School in Nottingham
The Samworth Enterprise Academy in Leicester
Twynham School in Dorset
Broadclyst Primary School in Devon

Thanks to Gerald and the schools for their openness in doing this – what had originally seemed like it might make an interesting blog post has turned into a cracking 15 page read!

What features are in which version of Windows 7?

Rayfl — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:26:00 GMT

I’m sure this list is out on the web somewhere, but just in case you’ve not seen it in this easy-to-read format before, below is my list of the features of each version of Windows 7. I think this will help you to work out which one is right for your school:

Windows 7 Home Premium is the retail version. It doesn’t allow network login (called Domain Join), so it’s unsuitable for school-based computers, and unlikely to be useful for student laptops owned by the school, unless you don’t plan to manage them or connect them up to your school network except via the web. It is also unable to run XP Mode, which might be useful for some of your older software.
Windows 7 Professional is the minimum version you’ll need in-school as it has network domain join and XP Mode.
Windows 7 Enterprise is the right version if you believe that you should be encrypting any laptops used by staff (this is something I believe strongly!), because it comes with BitLocker and BitLocker To Go. And in addition it also adds AppLocker – which you may want on all of your devices too.
Windows 7 Ultimate is in the table below for completeness, but you are only likely to get this version if you buy it in a retail store with it pre-installed (which is an expensive way to get the functionality in Enterprise or Professional edition)

See below the table for my “How to Buy Windows 7” guide

What features are in which version of Windows 7?

Features	Home Premium	Professional	Enterprise	Ultimate
32-Bit and 64-Bit Versions	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Create and Join a Home Group	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Tablet PC Functionality	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Multiple Monitor Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Document Libraries	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fast User Switching	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Windows Search	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Windows Mobility Center	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Windows Aero, Taskbar, & Jump Lists	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Live Thumbnail Previews	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Multi-Touch	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Premium Games Included	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Windows Media Center	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Create & Play DVDs	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Device Stage	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Action Center	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Encrypting File System	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Location Aware Printing	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Remote Desktop Host	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Domain Join & Group Policy Controls	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Windows XP Mode	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
AppLocker	No	No	Yes	Yes
BitLocker & BitLocker to Go	No	No	Yes	Yes
BranchCache	No	No	Yes	Yes
DirectAccess	No	No	Yes	Yes
Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA)	No	No	Yes	Yes
Enterprise Search Scopes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Multilingual User Interface Language Packs (MUI)	No	No	Yes	Yes
Licence Rights for 4 Windows Virtual Machines	No	No	Yes	Yes
Virtual Hard Disk Booting	No	No	Yes	Yes
Volume Activation	No	No	Yes	No
Licence Rights for Network Booting of Windows	No	No	Yes	No

How to buy Windows 7 for your school

So now you’ve worked out which version you want, you may want to know the best way to buy the right version!

Existing computers

For any existing computers running any version of Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can buy a Windows 7 upgrade on your Select or School Agreement. If it’s basic Select, the upgrade is to Windows 7 Professional. If you have a School Agreement, or buy a Select licence with the Software Assurance option, you’ll get Windows 7 Enterprise.

New computers

For Professional edition, you can either buy a new PC with it pre-installed, or buy a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, and then add an upgrade.
It’s worth checking the price of both options, because the second often can often be cheaper.
For Enterprise edition, the best way is to buy a new PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, and then add an upgrade licence via a School Agreement, or with the Select licence plus Software Assurance (which gives you the right to keep upgrading, and adds the Enterprise features)

Here’s some links to find out more about School Agreement, Select Licences and Software Assurance. And the evergreen “How to get the best deal on Microsoft software” post

Your existing Microsoft partner will be able to give you a quote. I’ve just checked on the Pugh site*, and they quote £34 for a Select Windows 7 Professional upgrade.

* Pugh is one of our partners, but there are plenty of others. You can find them all on our website

Windows 7 meeting for early adopters on 7 October

Rayfl — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:48:00 GMT

Mike Herrity, at Twynham School, is hosting a meeting for schools who have adopted Windows 7, to allow early adopters to share their experiences, and the lessons that have been learnt over the last 5 weeks since it was released for Volume Licence customers.

Instead of having to head down to the south coast, I’ve offered to provide a meeting room here in Reading, at the Microsoft Campus, on Wednesday 7th October.

There’s space for 20 people available, so if you’d like to attend, zip over to Mike’s excellent blog, or just drop Mike an email. He’s managing the attendee list, I’m just providing the room and the free lunch!

If you have started deploying Windows 7, this is going to be a valuable day, and I am pretty sure it will save you more than a day of your time in learning from other people’s experiences.

However, if you haven’t started deploying Windows 7 yet, then Mike will be aiming to write up lessons from the day to share with others, so keep an eye on this blog later for when it’s published.

The summer's most popular blog posts

Rayfl — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:48:00 GMT

For those of you who didn’t hang around to upgrade your networks, grapple with new furniture, install audio visual equipment, or enjoy the blissful student-free corridors, welcome back.

What did you miss? Well, whilst your back was turned I managed keep on blogging at an increasing rate – and whilst not every post is worth going back to, here’s a list of the most read posts from the summer holidays:

What does Windows 7 run on
A runaway winner, thanks to links from all kinds of Windows forums
Shift Happens UK download
Will this ever make it’s way out of the blog hit parade?
Slides from the Windows 7 in Education event
Actually, the event invite got more readers, but it’s history, so better to look at the slides
Do you work during your holidays?
A look at the “Out of Office” phenomenon
We’re going on a Quango Hunt
Making light of the CPS report, and giving you a poll to quash a quango
Where are all the freebies now the budget’s cut
An update on where to find Microsoft’s free stuff
How fast can Windows 7 go?
Only posted yesterday, but already in the top posts list

If you want to read the rest, you’ll have to look for them yourself – just click on the “+” sign next to “Archives” in the left hand bar, and you can see them all. I’ve just noticed a wrote 32 this summer.

But my favourite (to write) wasn’t in the Top 10. It was actually “A week in Atlanta – Technology, Cheese and Soda” – about a visit to the World of Coke. I suspect that it’s not in the Top 10 because most people have more sense!

How fast can Windows 7 go?

Rayfl — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:08:00 GMT

Earlier in the week PC Pro ran an article stating that Windows 7 is “already used on 1% of PCs”. This was lifted from some Internet metrics measured by NetApplications. It’s easy to do – each time you visit a website, your browser tells the website what version it is, and what operating system it is running on.

Given the buzz this summer about Windows 7, I thought I’d have a quick look at the stats for this blog. And the answer has truly surprised me. (Or at least it did once I’d learned from Wikipedia that Windows 7 reports itself as Windows NT 6.1)

What this table shows is the last 10,000 visitors to the blog – and 1 in 5 are running Windows 7!

Now I reckon that this is partly because the readers are more technical, and there’s been quite a buzz about Windows 7 – and lots of early deployments in schools. Given that there have already been half a dozen schools who’ve told me they’ve rolled out Windows 7 to all their desktops, perhaps Windows 7 is going to overtake even Windows 95 in it’s speed of adoption.

I was genuinely surprised at what I saw. Are you?

Online learning is better than face-to-face learning?

Rayfl — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:00:00 GMT

The US Department of Education sponsored the Center for Technology in Learning to look into the effectiveness of online learning – and to specifically compare the effectiveness of using online learning compared to face to face learning. The results, published in May, are on the www.ed.gov website, for all to see.

What I’ve seen of the reporting seems to take the simple line that “online learning is better than face-to-face learning”. Hmmm, having read more than the first highlighted sentence in the abstract, I think there’s a lot more to it!

The inescapable conclusion is that with students changing, and their lives changing, methods of supporting online and blended learning are not only more convenient for many different types of students, but also more effective at ensuring that the student achieves the required learning outcomes.

What the researchers did

The researchers looked at 1,000 pieces of research, over the last 12 years, of online learning. After throwing out those pieces that didn’t compare online and face-to-face learning, or didn’t measure the impact on student learning, or didn’t take a rigorous approach to the research, they were left with 51 pieces of research – which is a large enough group to make effective comparisons.

Then they crunched all the conclusions together from all of the reports, to arrive at an overarching conclusion – answering the question “What do we know about the effectiveness of online learning compared to conventional, face-to-face learning?”

The headline conclusions

The simple conclusion was:

students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction

Which is the bit that has been reported widely.

But read on a little further, and the report went on to say:

The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes…was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face

Which is saying that a combination of online and face-to-face learning (ie blended learning) is more effective than online learning alone.

Although there are some provisos around this finding – eg theories that blended learning often includes additional learning time and additional face-to-face learning not included in standard courses – it is still significant.

Key Findings

Further in (starting on page xiv, if you’re following along) are some key findings that are good summary conclusions:

Few rigorous research studies of the effectiveness of online learning for K–12 (school) students have been published
"K-12" is ‘Kindergarten to 12th Grade’, which is American for "schools"
Of all the research completed, there was none on school use of online learning between 1994 and 2006 that met their quality criteria, and only five in total up to 2008.
Personally, I think in the UK we need to improve this situation. We’re mandating online learning platforms in every school in the UK, without there being a robust set of research to prove that it works?

Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction
This conclusion speaks for itself

Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction
Which may result from the approach a teacher takes – do they feel more engaged too, when the learning is mixed?

Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning
I’d suspect this is a factor of students being able to each learn at their own pace, and pause or repeat sections of their learning – something that’s all but impossible in face-to-face learning.

Most of the variations in the way in which different studies implemented online learning did not affect student learning outcomes significantly
I suspect that if we had the data for all e-learning in UK schools we’d see something similar – that the biggest difference in learning outcomes is achieved by a decision to support blended online learning effectively, however that happens. The two factors that did make a difference were the use of blended learning (as opposed to online only) and the amount of time students spent on task.

The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types
Although, because the schools research sample was so small, there are few strong conclusions for school-age learning specifically.

Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online and face-to-face conditions varied in terms of curriculum materials and aspects of instructional approach in addition to the medium of instruction
ie don’t just put your existing course materials onto a website – you need to plan to deliver your course differently

In the US, and I would guess that’s it also true for the UK, online learning—for students and for teachers—is one of the fastest growing trends in educational uses of technology.

The US National Center for Education Statistics (2008) estimated that the number of US school students enrolling in a technology-based distance education course grew by 65 percent in two years between 2003 to 2005, and after some recent research it’s been estimated that more than a million school students took online courses last year.

You can read the full 93-pages of the report on the US Department of Education website (although you may want to re-read your “Dummy’s Guide to Statistical Analysis” before you start!)

It’s also interesting to read the Comments debate on the New York Times website, which started when it reported the findings.