Ohio Auditor David Yost has ordered an examination of every cyber school in the state to make sure the online schools are tracking the actual time's students are spent learning.

Some Ohio students are choosing online classes over actually taking a bus to school these days, maybe as a result of such things a medical issue or bullying for example.

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow or ECOT is the largest online school in Ohio and has 23,000 students.  All of the money that would normally follow those students to a brick and mortar school now goes to the e-school.

But now the funding for those schools will be based on the actual time students spend learning online instead of a total number of students at the school.

That new standard could cost ECOT alone up to $60 million.

State Auditor David Yost says most schools are not keeping track.  "What we have been finding are that the records just aren't there to support that the kids are doing the learning we want them to be getting," said Yost.

State Senator Joe Schiavone says the taxpayer money the state is spending on e-schools is not equaling the same results as actual brick and mortar schools.

He has a bill that would require online schools to measure online student active engagement. "They're measuring how long the student is on the computer and what that student is doing on the computer throughout the day. If there is offline work, you measure what that work is so taxpayers know there is active engagement going on," said Schiavoni.

ECOT has the case in the court of appeals and the outcome of that could again change the way e-schools are funded.  

Yost said maybe schools should be paid for a student's pieces of learning rather than time spent in front of a computer because everyone learns at a different rate.

Yost says the reviews of the e-schools should be completed by the end of the year.