1 – Measurement – What measures these systems that leads a school to believe that kids are learning? How much are they learning? How does it correlate with what my school is tasked with teaching students? Aligning the outcomes for online systems with what schools are responsible for and creating online assessments (outside the curricula) to measure this is the first step towards making online strategic.

2 – Once you start measuring, you realize that old-style linear curricula don’t cause a lot of student learning. Once you watch kids on these curricula, you realize why, the “zone of learning” is entered and exited pretty quickly while the “zone of boredom” (kid is doing something too easy but curricula doesn’t adapt) and “zone of frustration” (kid is doing something to hard but curricula doesn’t adapt) are sticky. i.e. once a kid gets out of the right place in the curricula, they stop learning. So adaptive systems that are smart about using kids clicks to figure out where to move them in the system are 10x more important than well-thought out pedagogies in terms of driving student learning.