Emerging State Policy in Online Special Education.
Introduction T has been a dramatic increase and acceptance of online learning in the last decade. In its various forms, online learning has begun to disrupt the status quo of K 12 education and, in turn, special education. The growing prevalence of K 12 online learning provides a grounded opportunity to reflect on traditions and redesign policies, systems, and practices. The Department of Education Office of Special Education recognized this need and in 2011 funded the Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities (COLSD) a partnership between the University of Kansas, CAST, and the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE) The mission of COLSD was to identify trends, promising practices, and challenges in online learning for students with disabilities. To this end, COLSD has conducted numerous research projects and informational gathering activities. As has been documented in the COLSD publication, Equity Matters: Digital and Online Learning for Students with Disabilities (Basham, Stahl, Ortiz, Rice, Smith, 2015) online learning has impacted nearly every aspect of special education service delivery. Specifically, online learning opens possibilities for new and innovative thinking about all aspects of the learning experience, including learning environment design, identification of disability, instruction, socialization, collaboration, and parent engagement. In addition, researchers from COLSD have found that by design, online learning environments produce substantially more data and have a great potential to support continued progress monitoring for students with disabilities. Regrettably, however, these data are often inaccessible within these digital systems, in an unusable form, or overlooked by underprepared instructional staff (Basham et al. 2015) The most recent report by the Evergreen Education Group (2015) the annual status report for online learning in the United States, found that online learning exists in some form across every district in the country. Yet, even with the tremendous increase in online learning, it is impossible to identify how many students, including students with disabilities, are participating in some form of online learning. This lack of understanding, alongside the involved nature associated with the various forms of online learning, provides complexities in researching as well as evaluating the impact of online learning in practice. The concern is that districts across the United States may be adopting various forms of online learning without considering the complexities that online learning introduces to the teaching practice and how these changes may be impacting students. The purpose of this article is to provide education leaders and educators with a basic understanding of