Good ideas, but lets just not have classrooms / teachers - just learn online and then come in to use teacher as consultant
I just graduated from high school in a relatively rural community where online classes were extremely popular among students. You got time in the computer lab, and had an "adviser" for each of your online classes. There were notes, assignments, tests, and quizzes. Sounds great right? Except students quickly discovered their "adviser" cared a lot less about online classes than the real counterparts, so notes and assignments quickly vanished from the curriculum. Computer lab time wasn't regulated by any means, so many students "helped" (read: cheated) each other on their quizzes and tests no one cared, even after several incidents were reported.
I even took two online classes my senior year. Each course was supposed to be a semester long, yet I got both of them done in less than a month. Sure, I was an honors/AP/gifted student, but a semester course shouldn't be that easy to complete in such a short amount of time. I took "Online Intro to Creative Writing," and none, NONE, of the writing assignments were required by my adviser. There was no context for the lessons; no discussions to solidify concepts.
Sure, my one experience is probably relatively isolated, but I have heard similar stories from other students in the state. Online learning, imho, isn't helping the problem, it's making it worse.
> a semester course shouldn't be that easy to complete in such a short amount of time.
Sure they can. When you go to college, by the way, take an absurd amount of CLEP tests. Preferably now. You can skip upwards of a year or two of attendance and save buttloads of money. You also save a lot of time. I completely avoided a senior year of college by CLEP testing out of all my schools requirement courses and it took me around 2 weeks of study per subject (rigorous, 4 - 6 hours a day) to accure enough to pass the tests. And I passed all 6 of them.
Your problem just demonstrates the trend - there is no "do this and everyone learns wonderfully and the world is butterflies and rainbows". People are different, will interact differently, and the capacity of an education system hinges on the participation and good intentions of all parties involved. I think that requires more voluntarism and self-motivation on the parts of students, and instructors and mentors that have passion for their craft.
The first thing that needs doing is to decouple learning speed and interests from the classroom, and to invert the teacher relationship from being the mass transmitter to being a consultant an coach.
Educational software will almost always be able to explain any particular subject better than the teacher who is located near you, but you still need to learn how to use that educational software, how to focus (or not) your interests, how to interact with online communities, and know what to do when things go wrong.