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Flipping the classroom -- the practice of giving students access to lectures before they come to class and using class time for more engaging activities

to preserve the role of the lecturer

a move toward project-based learning and inquiry.

“It’s a cheap education, not because it benefits the students,” said Karen Aronowitz, president of the teachers’ union in Miami, where 7,000 high school students were assigned to study online in computer labs this year because there were not enough teachers to comply with state class-size caps. “This is being proposed for even your youngest students,” Ms. Aronowitz said. “Because it’s good for the kids? No. This is all about cheap.”

But administrators insisted that their chief motive was to enhance student learning, not save money in a year when the 108,000-student district is braced for cuts of $100 million and hundreds of jobs. “What the online environment does is continue to provide rich offerings and delivery systems to our students with these resource challenges,” said Irving Hamer, the deputy superintendent.

Teachers’ unions and others say much of the push for online courses, like vouchers and charter schools, is intended to channel taxpayers’ money into the private sector. “What they want is to substitute technology for teachers,” said Alex Molnar, professor of education policy at Arizona State University. In Idaho, Gov. C. L. Otter and the elected superintendent of public instruction, Tom Luna, both Republicans, promoted giving students laptops and requiring online courses. The State Legislature, pressed by critics who said the online mandate would cost teachers jobs, rejected it, but Mr. Luna said in an interview that he would propose it this summer through the State Board of Education, which supports him. “I have no doubt we’ll get a robust rule through them,” he said. Four online courses is “going to be the starting number.”

What’s interesting is that the methods, i.e., substituting real-world items in the student’s immediate environment when that’s possible and creating online simulations when it’s not, marry so well together in an e-learning environment as strategies for dealing with what is fundamentally an environment of low situational control for instructional designers.

I didn’t teach them anything. They chose to learn or not.

strong interdependence with oth-ers and the feeling of being a member of a stable group

Numerous researchers in special education have examined online learn-ing from the perspective of student satisfaction and grades

and the idea that available technologies can be used to expand and support a sense of community.

Learner- centered teaching places the emphasis on the person who is doing the learning