In the summer of 2009, the Department of Education published a meta-analysis on online learning that looked at the effectiveness of the practice across educational offerings.  It found that: “classes with online learning (whether taught completely online or blended) on average produce stronger student learning outcomes than do classes with solely face-to-face instruction.”  Further, the report said that courses that blended face-to-face instruction with online instruction produced stronger outcomes than courses taught completely online.

With this document, the Department of Education helped to give additional credence to what practitioners of online and blended learning approaches already knew: it is an effective means of teaching.  That said, the models for online and blended learning that were being produced at the corporate level (by K12, Kaplan, Apex, Connections Academy, and others) and at the university level (by Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and others) were not the types of courses that independent school teachers and administrators would recognize as of them.  They either offered courses created to take to scale, or featured video content of leaders in their fields with little interaction available.

When OSG launched online courses in the fall of 2009, it changed the landscape of online education to be not only the first online school for girls, but also the first truly independent school online.  Instead of the interaction with computers being essential, in OSG courses the relationship between students and their teachers and students and their classmates is key.  Instead of learning from the expert being the primary experience, in OSG courses, learning became a collaborative process.

Over the last year, the Online School for Girls has found that teachers and administrators from around the country were interested in the approaches we have taken to online and blended learning.  During the 2010-2011 school year, we launched two professional development classes, one in blended learning and the other in online learning, which have become more popular than we could have ever imagined.  OSG Consulting is an outgrowth from those online professional development opportunities.

The OSG Consulting opportunities that we are starting with present an opportunity for schools to use their professional development time within their schools to advance understandings of online and blended learning, and to bring discipline-specific tool sets to classrooms.