The Allure of Bison Online

Every year at prom or graduation, there are students that nobody else has seen. Unfamiliar faces appear, who will walk across the same stage, receive the same Buffalo High School diploma, and claim the same education as every other BHS student. Most people have never seen them in the hallways. That’s because, in many cases, they never were.

These are the students of Bison Online.

Bison Online is a concept that many in our school aren’t familiar with, a self-paced, self-led learning platform powered by Edmentum and reviewed by BHS teachers. Bison Online offers classes from English, Economics, Math, and anything in between, completing course materials on their own schedule without ever setting foot in a classroom.

It is theorized that Bison Online was created as a way to preserve enrollment at Buffalo High School and prevent students from leaving to PSEO or other online-learning options, due to a heightened number of students preferring a flexible schedule. Mr. Mens, a 9-12 English teacher who reviews Bison Online coursework during 4th hour, is candid about it: “If we didn’t have it, it would be at our own demise, because we would be losing enrollment of students.”

In other words, the program isn’t really for the development of students as an educational offering, and it also suffers from lack of development due to this: there are typo’s in the lessons, outdated articles, and writing segments which are easy to skimp by with using AI with no way for the teacher to really tell or monitor.

AI is a great problem in this day and age, proven by MIT to accumulate cognitive debt and kill creativity, also causing reliance every single time that it’s used. According to MIT’s study: Your Brain on Chat GPT, “While LLMs [AI chatbots] offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning.”

 Bison Online allows for easy use of AI in ‘learning’. Bison Online was built to lower barriers to education, but AI has lowered the barrier and threshold to completing Bison Online farther than it ever should have gone. At some point, the chain gets thin enough that the credential at the end of it stops meaning very much at all. How can we gauge that any learning is actually happening? How can we monitor the full time students? Full-time online students are only required to report attendance once per day, and there are ways to fall behind and get caught back up. Being at your own pace also applies to falling behind, which is incredibly easy to do. 

Distractions are one of the leading causes of the dysfunction of Bison Online, According to Mr. Mens, “There are so many distractions. You can literally forget about [Bison Online]. You don’t have to open up your laptop. If you are primarily an online student, who’s holding you accountable?”

However, Mens also notes some positives, primarily for students requiring an alternative education due to certain life circumstances, such as health issues, family commitments, or the desire to work during the day, ”I think there are things behind the scenes that we don’t see. that could potentially prohibit a student from getting a traditional education, and this is a way for students to get a good education at a respected high school and to potentially catch up or potentially stay on track to graduate with their age group, or within 4 years”.

And so, despite its shortcomings, Mens believes that Bison Online is a net positive, especially for students who are driven and willing to put in the work, who want to get ahead and do their own learning rather than relying on AI or the learning of others. It offers an alternative way for students to get the same education as their peers, and it will continue to be developed throughout the years. Bison Online is a relatively new option, and we are still waiting to see how it will pan out.

The flexibility of the option has led to many students electing to take more online and hybrid courses in the coming years.

According to Lily Kinches ‘27, “This year I tried chemistry online, and I like the dynamic of the online classes. I chose to take mostly online classes as I wanted an easier senior year, and I think it’ll be nice to have more flexible options on my schedule.”

Overall, Bison Online is an appealing option to students, and it won’t be for a while that we see any changes in the way that our school runs due to Bison Online. Bison Online isn’t the problem, it is the misuse of it. For the students who are self-motivated and work well independently, it can be a great option to fill some or all credits while not physically being in the classroom.