Nevertheless, we warn institutions against making dramatic leaps into the digital learning space without understanding how students will respond or how technology complements, instead of merely replaces, teaching.

Online learning’s rite of passage Email, social media, and even the telephone all faced resistance when they were introduced to the market; but convenience and necessity soon trumped concerns around security and the detriment of human interactivity. Online learning faces similar arguments. We expect that opposition will subside in the near future as learning evolves with student demand, not through mandates from budget-minded administrators.

I had assumed that all the laptop-staring, smartphone-glancing students were like my daughter (a college student when I started teaching) and all her friends and the other digital natives I had heard so much about. So I put together an online survey and discovered a wide disparity in my students' web skills. Just because they Facebook, text, or participate in online games doesn't mean that all young people understand rhetorics of blogging or collaborative uses of wikis or building personal learning networks with Twitter.

But, Lehmann cautions, the use of social media in school can't be left to chance; it needs to be mediated. "It's very much a part of our curriculum," he said. "The kids take a semester-long technology class at the beginning of the ninth grade. It teaches the kids to use the tools in the context of their academic classrooms." Social media does not replace the existing curriculum, Lehmann said – it's a transformation of it.

"Schools need to think how powerful it could be as a learning tool to bring that engagement outside the classroom into the classroom," he said.