Sizing up, virtually: whether buying existing courses or developing your own, online classes demand attention to detail."Here it is, 11:56 p.m. on Sunday the 18th, and I just finished the course with an 80 percent average. Thank you so much for keeping me on track and giving me the chance to prove that I can do it." That's how, unprompted, a once-struggling student in Plano, Texas Plano (IPA: /ˈpleɪnoʊ/) is a wealthy suburb of Dallas, Texas, located to the north, mainly within Collin County, but also extending into Denton County. According to the 2000 U.S. , summed up his recent foray into Verb 1. foray into - enter someone else's territory and take spoils; "The pirates raided the coastal villages regularly" raid encroach upon, intrude on, obtrude upon, invade - to intrude upon, infringe, encroach on, violate; "This new colleague invades my the virtual world of learning. The student found the dynamics of online instruction much to his liking. Our attempts in Plano to provide options that allow students to choose when and where they will attend classes are being replicated in school districts across the country. The growth of virtual school alternatives as a way to give students more flexibility in attaining course credits for graduation Graduation is the action of receiving or conferring an academic degree or the associated ceremony. The date of event is often called degree day. The event itself is also called commencement, convocation or invocation. is escalating. STATS, a recent study by Interactive Educational Systems Design, indicates that more than 50 percent of U.S. high schools now use online courses. School districts have two basic routes to incorporate online courses: Develop their own online curriculum or buy into an existing virtual school program (see list, page 19). Decision makers might consider six strategic questions before moving ahead with their plans to build their own online course offerings. These questions deal with sizing up of existing providers, developing courses internally, providing sufficient administrative support, training online faculty and considering budget, space and equipment needs. Proprietary Offerings * What should you look for in an online course provider? Check to see whether the course provider offers services other than course-based curriculum. It might be advantageous to have SAT/ACT test prep options, for example. Depending on your local circumstances CIRCUMSTANCES, evidence. The particulars which accompany a fact. 2. The facts proved are either possible or impossible, ordinary and probable, or extraordinary and improbable, recent or ancient; they may have happened near us, or afar off; they are public or , you may want to ensure the course provider can offer not only the course content but also teachers to mentor Mentor, in Greek mythology Mentor (mĕn`tər, –tôr'), in Greek mythology, friend of Odysseus and tutor of Telemachus. students as they progress through the course. (Providing support for online faculty will be discussed later.) The course provider should offer a comprehensive system for monitoring and motivating student progress as more state regulations are requiring intensive reporting of online course activity (for instance, the number of hours spent on individual portions of the online course to provide the equivalent of seat time). The course provider should offer help desk services--a phone number where parents and students can speak to a live person for assistance in addition to email correspondence. Any online courses offered for graduation credit should correlate to your existing written curriculum and must align align (  līn),v to move the teeth into their proper positions to conform to the line of occlusion. to appropriate state standards. The online course provider should be able to demonstrate this and disclose the methods used to determine the alignment. Interestingly enough, you'll often find this correlation to be a subjective exercise on the part of the providers and local school districts. In one instance in Texas, a national online course provider listed an algebra algebra, branch of mathematics concerned with operations on sets of numbers or other elements that are often represented by symbols. Algebra is a generalization of arithmetic and gains much of its power from dealing symbolically with elements and operations (such as course as meeting state standards. That assurance was all one regional online school program needed to offer the course for state credit. However, a local school district-based virtual school did a more thorough review of the same algebra course and found it lacking in state standards in multiple areas and thus opted to reject state credit for the course. "Let the buyer beware be·ware v. be·wared, be·war·ing, be·wares v.tr. To be on guard against; be cautious of: "Beware the ides of March" Shakespeare. v. " certainly applies to the correlation issue regarding online courses. Online courses, when properly designed, offer many opportunities for students to participate in discussions as an ongoing activity within the course. Be sure to take the time to adequately check the level of interactivity offered by the vendor in the courses since interactivity often equates to greater student engagement. In fact, you may want to enlist en·list v. en·list·ed, en·list·ing, en·lists v.tr. 1. To engage (persons or a person) for service in the armed forces. 2. To engage the support or cooperation of. v. the help of students to comment on the level of interactivity offered throughout the courses. Finally, references should be provided from school districts, parents and students who have recently participated in the online courses to gauge their degree of satisfaction. Devising Your Own * In lieu of Instead of; in place of; in substitution of. It does not mean in addition to. an online course provider, how do you approach course development internally? First, identify your primary target student population. For some districts, this might be a group of Advanced Placement students, while in other districts the target audience may be the at-risk student population. Are you providing opportunities for students to get ahead or an alternative to credit recovery? Will the courses be factored into the official GPA GPA abbr. grade point average Noun 1. GPA - a measure of a student's academic achievement at a college or university; calculated by dividing the total number of grade points received by the total number attempted for students? Are you planning on providing courses for middle school or elementary school elementary school: see school. students? Once you've answered such questions and identified the student group and the earned credit options, decide on the greatest course needs. Use faculty who are experienced in teaching the written curriculum and have taught online to complete your course design and content. More than one virtual school program has found that the course it created and offered online met the test of correlating to state standards, but did not adequately prepare students to take the subsequent course offered only in a traditional setting. Experienced faculty, by providing that overall knowledge, will ensure the online courses connect to the next level of study, whether students choose to take courses online or in a traditional school setting. Have a specific curriculum development process in place. The process should involve creating content; reviewing content and flow; editing of lessons; proofreading Proofreading traditionally means reading a proof copy of a text in order to detect and correct any errors. Modern proofreading often requires reading copy at earlier stages as well. of content before going live; and scheduling of revisions and updates. Although your initial intention may be to avoid internal development of online courses, more than likely you'll find a need within your school district for course content that cannot be found from an outside provider. One compromise in this area would be to purchase courses from a provider that uses an authoring package that also is available for local staff use so customized content can be added easily and seamlessly to purchased content. Support Needs * Have you provided an appropriate administrative support structure for your virtual school? The top-level support structure helps set the expectation for the entire online faculty. A clearly defined system and set of duties must be in place. Successful virtual school initiatives typically have a staff member assigned as·sign tr.v. as·signed, as·sign·ing, as·signs 1. To set apart for a particular purpose; designate: assigned a day for the inspection. 2. as a principal or manager who is responsible to coordinate all of the district efforts and processes of the school. This person also is responsible to supervise the process for monitoring and motivating student progress and having practices in place to manage students who are not following the rules or completion schedule. Depending on your virtual school enrollment, additional administrative support staff may be necessary to ensure direct parent contact from registration through course completion. Staff may be needed to contact counselors before admitting registration to make sure the student understands whether appropriate credit can be granted for participation in the virtual course. In addition, a full-featured registration system should be in place to provide an efficient and easy-to-use interface for students and parents and must be capable of providing functional reports to help in the program administration and evaluation. Clear expectations for teachers and the online instructional process should be in place, along with clearly defined duties for any support staff. In this same vein, clearly defined expectations for students should exist along with a comprehensive method of communicating these expectations to students through an online guide, student handbook
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Staff Development * Have you provided adequate training opportunities for your virtual faculty members? Even if your staff has taken college courses online, the experience of teaching in an online environment with high school students takes a different set of strategies. Virtual faculty members will need to have a minimum set of computer skills and strategies for developing the student-teacher online relationship, monitoring and motivating student progress. They must also understand and accept their role and responsibility for reporting student progress, grades, and so forth. At the same time, electronic faculty members will learn new techniques used in the virtual setting that may be applied in their traditional classroom setting as well. Ongoing professional development is also a key to a successful virtual school. Your online faculty will need to continuously hone their skills with new technical tools and techniques as well as course delivery pedagogy. As your virtual school enrollment grows, your need to hire additional faculty also will grow, necessitating a cyclical cyclical Of or relating to a variable, such as housing starts, car sales, or the price of a certain stock, that is subject to regular or irregular up-and-down movements. pattern of professional development opportunities. This is an area where a partnership with your course provider can allow for advanced training opportunities in addition to an initial train-the-trainer model. Many of our best teachers have left the teaching profession to be able to stay at home with young children. Being an online faculty member allows us to reengage these teachers since they don't have to physically be at school. As one online teacher in Texas put it: "[Online teaching] allows me to pursue both of my passions--staying home with my children and teaching students. I enjoy the interaction with my students while keeping current on my subject matter. I never thought I would be able to bond with students via the Internet, but I've been able to find the same enjoyment that I had in the classroom." Space and Equipment * Have you considered all of the budget, space and equipment needs of your virtual school program? Maintaining an excellent virtual school program requires more than simply purchasing content from a vendor and making it available to students. The total cost of an online course includes course content, teacher training and support, technology infrastructure (registration, course delivery, help desk) and administrative functions. It's important that you prepare a comprehensive business model to provide appropriate information to calculate the return on investment whether the course cost is to be covered by tuition For tuition fees in the United Kingdom, see . Tuition means instruction, teaching or a fee charged for educational instruction especially at a formal institution of learning or by a private tutor usually in the form of one-to-one tuition. or free (underwritten by state or local funding). For example, do you plan to offer online courses integrated into the student's school day or do you plan to offer online courses that students can participate in on their own time and in a place of their choosing? If you plan to offer courses during the school day, you may need to identify areas within the school with computer equipment and network access for these students. This also may require staff members to supervise the online students and their point of access. Keep in mind that allowing students to use school equipment to take an online course during the school day prohibits that equipment from being used by other students during other regularly scheduled courses during that same period. This option may cause the expenditure of unanticipated dollars to provide additional equipment and or physical space for online students to use during the normal school day. If state requirements demand that proctored exams be part of any online course, the local district may need to bear that extra expense of having staff supervision as well as facilities open to accommodate the testing. You also may decide to provide live access to teachers at scheduled times In rallying, the Scheduled Time of any crew is the time, calculated at the beginning of the event, that they should arrive at any given control. It is different from Due Time in that Due Time is dynamic, ie it can change throughout the event as competitors drop time; whereas for online students. These additional staff costs quickly add a significant amount of dollars to the overall online course budget. Finally, are you considering allowing online students access to equipment and textbooks provided by the school district for use in their homes? Will you accept special-needs students with requirements for support staff or assistive technology Hardware and software that help people who are physically impaired. Often called "accessibility options" when referring to enhancements for using the computer, the entire field of assistive technology is quite vast and even includes ramp and doorway construction in buildings to support within your virtual school program? Each of these options needs to be considered carefully for the possible impact on the budget of your online school. Evaluating Performance * How do you plan to provide an evaluation of the effectiveness of your virtual school? Keep in mind that not all students are good candidates to participate in online courses. The most successful students exhibit a good amount of self-discipline and have a significant need to earn the credit offered by the online course versus earning the course credit in the standard fashion. Having a pre-assessment tool or process in place provides your guidance counselors guidance counselor Child psychology A school worker trained to screen, evaluate and advise students on career and academic matters with the necessary information to make a recommendation as to whether the student has a good chance of success in an online course. At a minimum, you should track students' grades and rate of completion for your virtual school program. Typical online programs have completion rates hovering hov·er intr.v. hov·ered, hov·er·ing, hov·ers 1. To remain floating, suspended, or fluttering in the air: gulls hovering over the waves. 2. around 50 percent. The most successful online programs aim for completion rates of 80 percent or above. In any case, this statistic statistic, n a value or number that describes a series of quantitative observations or measures; a value calculated from a sample. statistic a numerical value calculated from a number of observations in order to summarize them. gives a good picture as to how well your online program is meeting student needs. You should provide tools that allow your virtual school program to receive direct feedback from teachers, parents and students as to how satisfied they were with the online course experience. Scheduled focus group meetings also provide a valuable means of gathering information on course satisfaction. A combination of subjective and objective evaluative measures provides the best overall picture of how effective your virtual school program actually is. What is becoming clearer with the passing of each school year is that virtual schools can no longer be considered a fad. Students who increasingly want to determine the place and time of their learning experiences will cause virtual school options to become an embedded Inserted into. See embedded system. feature of all successful public school systems within the next 10 years. Online Course Providers The following represents a partial list of the major online providers of courses to students nationwide * Christa McAuliffe Sharon Christa Corrigan McAuliffe (September 2, 1948 – January 28, 1986) was an American teacher from Concord, New Hampshire who was selected from among more than 11,000 applicants to be the first teacher in space. She died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Academy operates year round and is geared to gifted students with courses augmented by online mentors. The academy is located in Yakima, Wash. www.cmacademy.org * COOLSchool is fee-based and serves students from middle school to high school and beyond and is accredited accredited recognition by an appropriate authority that the performance of a particular institution has satisfied a prestated set of criteria. accredited herds cattle herds which have achieved a low level of reactors to, e.g. by the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges and Universities. It is aligned with Oregon content standards, www.coolschool.k12. or.us * eSchool in Plano, Texas, awards credit through the Plano Independent School District Plano Independent School District (PISD or Plano ISD) is a public school district in Plano, Texas (USA). Plano ISD also takes students from some areas of Dallas, Richardson, Allen, Murphy, and Parker. [1] Led by Superintendent of Schools Dr. transferable within the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. . The fee is tuition-based, www.planoisdeschool.net * Evergreen evergreen, term commonly used as synonymous with conifer and applied also to all those broad-leaved plants that bear green leaves throughout the year. Of the latter, most are plants of the tropics, subtropics, and other areas where the growing season is prolonged (e. Internet Academy in Vancouver, Wash., provides online instruction to students in grades 7 through 12. Tuition is charged for students outside Washington state. eia.egreen.wednet.edu * Florida Virtual School Founded in 1997 by President and CEO Julie Young, the Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is one of the largest online middle and high schools in the United States. It is the only public online school--and likely the first of any kind of public school--to be funded on a performance basis. began in 1997 and today serves the state of Florida and beyond, offering virtual education options for grades 7 through 12 as well as adults seeking GED GED abbr. 1. general equivalency diploma 2. general educational development GED (US) n abbr (Scol) (= general educational development) → alternatives, www.flvs.net * Internet Academy was created in the mid-'90s by the Federal Way School District in Federal Way, Wash., in response to requests from home-schooling parents who wanted more educational options. The program serves students in grades K-12. www.iacademy.org * Keystone National High School Keystone National High School is an accredited private correspondence school for earning a high school diploma as part of a distance education or homeschool program, based in Pennsylvania. in Bloomsburg, Pa., runs an online program that's accredited so students may earn a high school diploma A high school diploma is a diploma awarded for the completion of high school. In the United States and Canada, it is considered the minimum education required for government jobs and higher education. An equivalent is the GED. . Students must have successfully completed the 8th grade, www.keystonehighschool. com * Laurel Springs School Laurel Springs School is a WASC-accredited K-12 distance learning school in Ojai, California, United States. Laurel Springs School offers personalized resources, customizable curricula, individualized teacher services, college advising and more to families attending public and in Ojai, Calif., is a legally accredited private school offering Internet instruction to students in grades K-12. There is an enrollment fee. Tuition and course fees are determined by the level of study, www.laurelsprings.com * Mindquest is part of the Bloomington Public Schools in Bloomington, Minn. Its purpose is to provide an opportunity for adults and young adults to complete a diploma DIPLOMA. An instrument of writing, executed by, a corporation or society, certifying that a certain person therein named is entitled to a certain distinction therein mentioned. 2. from home. It is free to Minnesota residents and available to students out-of-state for a fee. www.mindquest.org * Virtual Greenbush is a division of the Southeast Kansas Southeast Kansas is a region of the U.S. state of Kansas. It can be roughly defined by Woodson County in the northwest, Bourbon County in the northeast, Cherokee County in the southeast, and Montgomery County in the southwest. Education Service Center and provides school districts and students with a wide range of middle and high school courses. Diplomas are granted by the student's local school district, www. virtualgreenbush.org * Virtual High School, located in Maynard, Mass., enrolls students through a membership between the student's school district and VHS (Video Home System) A half-inch, analog videocassette recorder (VCR) format introduced by JVC in 1976 to compete with Sony's Betamax, introduced a year earlier. . The membership fee is determined by the kind of membership desired. www.govhs.org Jim Hirsch is associate superintendent of technology in the Piano Independent School District, 2700 W. 15th St., Piano, TX 75075. E-mail: jhirsch@pisd.edu |
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