NPR: Is Digital Learning More Cost-Effective? Maybe Not

Politicians from Jeb Bush to President Obama like to hype the revolutionary power and cost-effectiveness of digital learning, but a new study suggests, in many cases, it is neither more powerful nor cheaper than old-fashioned teaching.

Billions of public dollars have been directed toward digital learning initiatives in recent years, and the report from the National Education Policy Center, a research institute at the University of Colorado, found that they rarely improved outcomes. When they did, they cost more money, not less.

Here's an interesting quote from the study:

Personalized Instruction is based on the metaphor of personal desktop computers -- the technology of the 80s and 90s. Today’s technology is not just personal but mobile, social, and networked. The flexibility and social nature of how technology infuses other aspects of our lives is not captured by the model of Personalized Instruction, which focuses on the isolated individual’s personal path to a fixed end-point. To truly harness the power of modern technology, we need a new vision for educational technology. We need technologies that are based on what we know about the process of learning and take advantage of the mobile, networked technologies of today. [..] The focus of the systems reviewed thus far is exclusively on instruction, and not on the process of learning. Learning has always been an interactive experience -- observation of others, questioning and being questioned, dialog, discussion, and debate. These are interactions between people. The relationships between people that are formed during these interactions help students not only to understand new information but to trust it and to value it. The irony here is that an approach that reduces the time students spend interacting with teachers and other students is called "personalized."

The study: NEPC: New Interest, Old Rhetoric, Limited Results, and the Need for a New Direction for Computer-Mediated Learning