The decision last week by the Butler School District to phase out Japanese will upset some students. The timing of the decision is unfortunate, given that 22 students enrolled in Japanese 1 for the coming school year will now have to rework their schedules.

The only positive in Butler’s decision is that the program will be phased out over several years so students already taking Japanese can continue through their graduation.

Schools across the country are facing difficult budget decisions, and every course, every program and every extracurricular activity should be examined in terms of costs and benefits.

In looking at the costs of every program in the schools, it’s time for adminstrators and boards to explore new ways of teaching. This might be particularly effective for classes that add to the quality of education but are not considered core courses, such as Japanese.

Online learning is making news in higher education as Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania and other top schools recently announced a partnership offering 100 or more free “masssive open online courses,” or MOOCs, expected to attract millions of students of all ages and from around the world. Online learning can capture the skills of the most talented instructors and bring them to many more students than they can reach through typical on-campus lectures.

It might be time for superintendents of Butler County school districts to explore the potential of online learning coupled with shared resourses.

Ironically, the Japanese program being phased out at Butler contains an online component that could be a feature that allows Japanese to be offered in the future.

A cost-sharing program among school districts, along with weekly transportation of students to a central location, could create a mini-revolution in education at Butler County high schools.

The leaders of the county’s high schools should explore state-of-the-art online education combined with transporting students once a week to the county vocational-technical school campus or some other central location for class instruction with a live teacher. Technology is rapidly improving online learning and there now is the ability to personalize instruction as well as other features that improve the effectiveness of courses.

The online courses of today — and tomorrow — are a far cry from a simple video of a teacher giving a lecture. Leading universities see the evolution of online learning as a true game changer in expanding access and controlling costs.

Still, there is no substitute for interaction with a human teacher.

As they look ahead, most teachers should be learning how to adapt their instruction to coordinate with online material.

Butler and the other high schools in the county could look at the courses they would like to offer, but cannot afford to offer because of marginal demand and costs.

This new approach might work for Japanese or other courses, such as a targeted history or literature course or classes in some other fields that might not be affordable for each high school to offer individually, but could work as an online class supported by once-a-week instruction with a teacher at the vo-tech or Butler’s centrally located campus. it could be that, instead of students being transported to a central location once or twice a week, the teacher could travel, meeting with students at their own schools once a week.

Details would have to be worked out among the schools, but Butler County school districts should consider such a cooperative approach and be exploring new ways for presenting course material and new ways of educating students. Recent advances in online learning appear to offer great potential to expand course offerings and expose students to highly skilled instructors while also saving districts money.