YES.
Exactly. Most teachers (both K-12 and post-secondary) know that text is non-equivalent when presented online versus in print hard-copy, as well.
It's a different learning mode. There are brain imaging studies which have shown this to be the case. It's a different processing pathway.
It's like typing versus writing longhand-- they really aren't equivalent in cognitive terms.
I would like to emphasize the point made earlier that Connections and K12 are both FOR-PROFIT organizations. They are corporations, and they are run like corporations.
In other words, if they can justify using all-online materials and not providing textbooks or workbooks, they will. (And do, in many cases.)
If they can justify "simulations" being "just as good as" hands-on offline laboratory exercises (and they do)-- they WILL.
If you have a child that is interested in the UC system, be very very wary of either provider for high school preparatory coursework. The lab classes offered will not (in most cases) meet UC's a-g prerequisites.
Math/science instruction is where we've had the greatest degree of difficulty. The rigidity of canned instructional materials is highly problematic there because a skilled instructor can see that a student's alternative method is effective and valid... but "the system" only knows that it isn't what "the lesson" taught. That's problematic for HG+ learners, clearly, particularly those with autodidactic, exploratory learning profiles.
In disciplines where students are asked to do tasks at the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy, this model works fine. I still recommend it for bright students or average ones who can be hard workers, and for gifted children, it's not awful up through about 8th grade.
We were promised that high school, requiring synchronous movement through the curriculum (which is now enforced with fairly Draconian measures from our corporate overlords, incidentally) in order, would also come with more live instruction from teachers. My daughter has had about 40-60% of her courses come with NO live instructional component at all.
The most serious of those problems--
in foreign language, she gets ONE HOUR of instruction each week. ONE.
Math, similarly, ONE hour a week. ONE.
AP science courses-- ONE hour.
AP literature-- ONE hour.
Even in hand-picking the teachers who can make the very best use of the instructional platform (which I highly recommend), this is about half as much instruction as is ideal even for a learner as quick as my DD is.
In math, it's about a third what she needs.
This is a problem that has corporate origins-- corporate sees no problem with this level of "student contact" since teachers are also in contact via phone and will answer e-mails.
Also-- assessments are multiple choice. About 70% multiple choice. In AP coursework, that percentage drops somewhat, but it's still at about 50-60%. I don't think that too many people need to review Bloom's Taxonomy to see the problem with that.
The other big problem with the schizophrenic assessment model is that it can't quite decide whether it wants to be formative or summative. So it asks formative questions of students (think Trivial Pursuit from hell blended with lesson-specific analysis questions and questions that force a student to determine whether or not the question is literally intended or if they are to use previous knowledge-- this is a gamble, by the way, since the answer is usually one OR the other and it varies wildly), and then penalizes them as in summative systems. Even a "perfect" PG learner can count on losing 3-5% off the top of every course grade in multiple choice questions that are so poorly constructed as to have no one "best" answer. Many of the assessments are 3 to 5 question wonders, so this is emotionally devastating for students who are chronologically young and have near-age-appropriate EMOTIONAL maturity. "I failed my math quiz..." "Yeah, but that one question was stupid-- it was asking about that one example on page 83, but you know that the example on that page has a 'trick' component, so you answered the more general question correctly, right?" "Yeah, but I only got 66% on the quiz."
(Like I said-- the system can really fuel perfectionism.)
