Technology Teacher 02/09/2016

• Virtual Education: Genuine Benefits or Real-Time Demerits? - The Atlantic

  • Virtual Education: Genuine Benefits or Real-Time Demerits?
  • Twenty-six states operate publicly funded online schools, many of which don't have safeguards that prevent kids from cheating.
  • Ahmed had multiple courses on her transcript from Florida Virtual School—including physical education—and under the city’s district policy, any credits obtained online weren’t eligible for transfer.
  • "Digital Learning Report Card" briefing early last year—allow Florida students to take two online courses concurrently per semester. And when students pass the courses with a C or higher, they can take more virtual classes
  • Its policy governing transfer credits doesn’t mention virtual schools, many of which are not accredited in the same manner that traditional public and private institutions are
  • Proponents, including Bush and his team, argue that conventional learning is holding students back and that virtual education, both in and out of K-12 classrooms, is allowing them to advance at their own rate.
  • In fact, due to the way many virtual courses are structured, without cameras or the eyes of authority figures constantly tracking them, the temptation to cheat is almost irresistible.
  • That’s because, thanks to the aforementioned state legislation, they can take multiple online courses per semester. And they often learn nothing unless the course is so outdated they can’t find the test answers online.
  • Some of these virtual offerings are better than others, using integrated media, with videos and pop-up screens interspersed with reading materials, tests, and project instructions.
  • The best use blended-learning techniques, where groups of students actually Skype with a live teacher and participate in group chats.
  • Thirty percent of those schools didn’t receive any ratings on their performances, and of the 231 that did receive ratings, only a third had "academically acceptable" findings.
  • Altogether, these schools enroll as many as 275,000 students annually. But enrollment numbers are ever-changing because many of their customers are part-timers. These students may enroll and drop, enroll and fail, or enroll and pass several courses within the same semester; the data doesn’t reflect those adjustments.
  • institutions were launched to assist students who fail, for a variety of reasons, in traditional schools.
  • at our school there is much less pressure and stress around doing the work. So many of the obstacles that make a student shut down are removed … Students can just do the work in a way that works for them in whatever time they need to do it."
  • Everything is at their fingertips. Students [who] may not be comfortable in a classroom to engage with the teacher may feel comfortable being more outgoing and participating at a higher level."
  • e those that simply provide reading materials online, test the students on that content, and ask them to complete projects
  • far too easy to find the answers to their tests and homework assignments by accessing Google on other devices.
  • I know of one particular student who actually runs a business taking virtual classes for others.
  • What’s your favorite book? Where were you born? What was the name of your first pet? These questions may flash arbitrarily throughout the course, requiring a student to instantly answer or face a penalty. A teacher might randomly call a student who fails a test, too.
  • Most part-time virtual-school teachers hardly ever recognize their students’ voices and don’t realize that the kid answering an on-the-spot civics question isn’t the same one who failed the test online two minutes ago.
  • That system just sets itself up to fail. I can't even remember my [Florida Virtual School] teachers' names, let alone any info."
  • And it appears that part-time virtual-school students don’t understand that they have become a commodity. They probably don’t know that it’s their public-school budgets, either directly or indirectly, that pay for the classes—which could mean no new football uniforms (or chemistry textbooks) that year
  • Very few of them are actually capable of learning new and often complicated material—say, calculus—online, by themselves, via a computer. Nor do they want to. It doesn’t impact them unless, like Ahmed, they become victims of the system and another school district rejects their online credits.
  • his can also be completed online, where questions may range from "How many points is a basketball goal?" to "What is a standard heart rate after [a certain amount] of [insert activity]?"
  • Parents are supposed to witness and sign off on required physical activities, but as my former student Sarah Lennon Alfonso noted, "Virtual school is not the way to learn subjects such as P.E. One student will pretend to be another student’s mom to attest to the fact she supposedly did 50 jumping jacks, let's say.
  • "Our students just assume that they will be able to utilize technology to enhance their education … not tech for tech’s sake," he added.
  • While Michigan was the first state to require students to take an online course for graduation, it revised its guidelines last year after investing significant funding in assessing the program’s lukewarm results.
  • the Florida Virtual School has installed data-collection software to determine how long students are spending on each segment and test question.
  • The truth is, any insight gathered from these findings will be flawed until policymakers figure out a way to take human nature out of the virtual environment.
  • "Online [courses] can be a great thing, but it's probably a waste of money to force it on students who just aren't going to do it," she said. "An army of hecklers can't force teenagers to do something they've made up their mind not to do."

• Can Students Learn Virtually? An Evaluation of the Florida Virtual School | Brookings Institution

  • Can Students Learn Virtually? An Evaluation of the Florida Virtual School
  • The FLVS was created in 1997 and is the nation’s first state-wide Internet-based public high school.
  • 97 percent of students are part time at the FLVS and also take classes at another school.
  • Free and Easy Course Access- One of the main merits of a virtual school is removing barriers for students to take classes. The FLVS is a huge success in this sense because it makes Advanced Placement courses available to all Florida students.
  • Lower Costs- Per-pupil funding was about 10 percent lower for the FLVS
  • Some had worried that virtual schools would encourage absenteeism. However, students who attended the FLVS part-time were not more likely to miss school.
  • However, after introducing a series of controls for past test score performance they found little or no significant differences between traditional school and the FLVS
  • The study provides the first evidence suggesting that virtual schools are not significantly worse than traditional public schools.

• Rise in Online Classes Flares Debate About Quality - The New York Times

  • More Pupils Are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality
  • By TRIP GABRIELAPRIL 5, 2011
  • Mr. Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher.
  • Advocates of such courses say they allow schools to offer not only makeup courses, the fastest-growing area, but also a richer menu of electives and Advanced Placement classes when there are not enough students to fill a classroom.
  • But critics say online education is really driven by a desire to spend less on teachers and buildings, especially as state and local budget crises force deep cuts to education.
  • there is no sound research showing that online courses at the K-12 level are comparable to face-to-face learning.
  • “It’s a cheap education, not because it benefits the students,” said Karen Aronowitz, president of the teachers’ union in Miami, where 7,000 high school students were assigned to study online in computer labs this year because there were not enough teachers to comply with state class-size caps.
  • “This is being proposed for even your youngest students,” Ms. Aronowitz said. “Because it’s good for the kids? No. This is all about cheap.”
  • state superintendent of education plans to push a requirement that high school students take four or more online courses, following a bill that passed the Legislature last week to provide every student with a laptop, paid for from a state fund for educators’ salaries.
  • said he could not justify continuing to pay a Chinese-language teacher for only 10 interested students. But he was able to offer Chinese online through the Virtual High School Global Consortium, a nonprofit school based in Massachusetts.
  • The virtual high school says its list of client schools has grown to 770, up 34 percent in two years, because of local budget cuts.
  • Nationwide, an estimated 1.03 million students at the K-12 level took an online course in 2007-8, up 47 percent from two years earlier, according to the Sloan Consortium, an advocacy group for online education.
  • It found benefits in online courses for college students, but it concluded that few rigorous studies had been done at the K-12 level, and policy makers “lack scientific evidence of the effectiveness” of online classes.
  • Advocates say the courses let students who were bored or left behind learn at their own pace.
  • proponents of online classes are dubious about makeup courses, also known as credit recovery — or, derisively, click-click credits — which high schools, especially those in high-poverty districts, use to increase graduation rates and avoid federal sanctions.
  • If credit recovery were working, she said, the need for remedial classes in college would be declining — but the opposite is true.
  • Melony Smith, his online teacher, said she had not immediately recognized that his answer on the Jack London assignment was copied from the Web, but she said plagiarism was a problem for many students.
  • Memphis supplies its own teachers, mostly classroom teachers who supplement their incomes by contracting to work 10 hours a week with 150 students online. That is one-fourth of the time they would devote to teaching the same students face to face.
  • “What they want is to substitute technology for teachers,” said Alex Molnar, professor of education policy at Arizona State University.
  • Online courses are part of a package of sweeping changes, including merit pay and ending tenure, which Idaho lawmakers approved, that Mr. Luna said would improve education.
  • “We can educate more students at a higher level with limited resources, and online technology and courses play a big part in that,” he said.
  • “It’s about getting a piece of the money that goes to public schools,” Ms. Wood said. “The big corporations want to make money off the backs of our children.”

• Virtual Schools vs. Budget Cuts » Virtual High Schools, Ellie Soskin

  • Not only do they force schools to cut back on available courses, but also on the number of available teachers, which swells class sizes and reduces the overall quality of learning for each individual student as the student-teacher ration becomes wildly unbalanced
  • Granted, in most public online high schools (i.e. state-run), the district is still providing a computer, curriculum, and a teacher, as well as other supplementary aspects, but the cost saved overall is still fairly significant.
  • The Postsecondary Education Alliance (PSEA) has already recognized the effects of large class sizes on the widening achievement gap in America.
  • budget cuts have forced larger class sizes and have caused major issues when new students enroll in already maxed-out classrooms, virtual schools can handle the issue by using money saved by the district to hire more teachers, as well as avoiding crowded, noisy classrooms and other perils of oversized classes (Colvin).
  • In an age where budget constraints are hurting our education system, virtual high schools could be the answer.

• Schools of the Future » Virtual High Schools, Ellie Soskin

  • Schools of the Future
  • Along with the growing popularity of learning online comes the concept of completely virtualizing learning; taking the traditional “one teacher, class full of students” high school experience and overhauling it by making it an online, fully interactive virtual educational experience.
  • But with “near-universal access to broadband,” it has become an increasingly viable, and increasingly appealing, option (McLaughlin).
  • Online high schools have grown rapidly since they first began in 1996, and since the beginning of the millennium have grown rapidly from initial numbers of around 1,000 students, a growth which mirrors technological development and advancement in the educational sector (McLaughlin).

  • As of 2012, nearly 300,000 students were participating in full-time online education (Pandolfo).

     
  • In 2011, it was reported that 48 states had a form of virtual schooling, with 29 of those states offering full-time online education as an alternative to the traditional high school format; the numbers grew again in 2012, with 30 states offering full-time online learning options.
  • As technology continues to develop, more tools for online collaborative education will become available, just as software such as Skype and other video communication software has made it possible for students learning at home to receive careful and individualized instruction from the teachers in online high schools.

• Virtual High School - YouTube

  - no discipline problems online - fully online high school - need social and personal relationships in the classroom - student said less distraction.

• Virtual Learning Benefits | Alamogordo Virtual Academy | Alamogordo Public Schools - YouTube

  - By 2019, it's estimated that more than half of all courses in grades 9-12 will be taken online - Over 86% of teens and 80% of parents believe that the Internet helps teenagers to do better in school - A recent study found that students who took all or part of their classes online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction - 23 million students not graduating -

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