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Online learning is sweeping across America. In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K-12 students did. What was originally a distancelearning phenomenon no longer is. Most of the growth is occurring in blended-learning environments, in which students learn online in an adult-supervised environment at least part of the time. As this happens, online learning has the potential to transform America's education system by serving as the backbone of a system that offers more personalized learning approaches for all students.

Online learning appears to be a classic disruptive innovation with the potential not just to improve the current model of education delivery, but to transform it. Online learning started by serving students for whom there was no alternative for learning. It got its start in distance-learning environments, outside of a traditional school building, and it started small. In 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. But by 2010, over 4 million students were participating in some kind of formal online-learning program. The preK-12 online population is now growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate of 43 percent-and that rate is accelerating.

The Internet is full of free and open educational resources, from courses to academic journals, and with so many education providers getting in on the movement to offer free educational content online, there's likely to be even more in the future. Yale, Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley are just a few of the high-profile universities that share some of their best courses with the world for the low, low price of zero dollars. While there are a lot of great resources out there, there are some online education resources that truly stand out as inspiring, for their vast collections, unique perks, and incredibly supportive organizations. We've picked out 15 open education resources that we find to be the most impressive and inspiring out there, and we encourage you to take advantage of what they have to offer.

History Tours is a collaborative website that gives teachers access to pre-made Google Earth tours on various topics in American and World history. These tours provide an excellent backdrop for visual learning. They allow students to view people and places of historical importance while the teacher presents essential background knowledge.

Wetoku is a web service or web 2.0 tool out of Korea that does one thing very well…it provides a simple platform for interviewing someone via the Internet. Collaborating globally is a must for our students and as result interviewing can be a challenge. Wetoku makes doing an interview as easy as filling out some basic information, creating an interview session and then sending the creative interview session's URL to the interviewee.