Sorting Through Vendors.

Before committing your dollars, consider quality of offerings, graduation credits, staff support and likely burdens

Choosing a vendor or multiple vendors to provide online courses to students in your school district is somewhat more involved than selecting a textbook series or new instructional software. The number of companies providing virtual learning in K-12 education has continued to grow, even as many other segments of the dot.com economy have begun to shrink.

The Wall Street Journal earlier this year estimated the online market for K-12 was at $1.3 billion and predicted it would grow to $6.9 billion by 2003. This translates into millions of students enrolling in courses delivered primarily through electronic means.

Before a school district makes any significant investment or commitment to an agreement with an outside vendor to provide online courses, school leaders ought to consider several issues, including the quality and content of offerings, awarding of graduation credit, staff qualifications and support, requirements placed on the local school, district or student and pricing.

Gauging Quality

A first step in considering online courses marketed by proprietary firms is to develop a common understanding of what constitutes quality in the type of online courses you will make available to students.

Ask these questions: Does the course meet national, state and/or local curriculum standards? Does the course contain engaging, interactive methods of learning, assessment and effective delivery? Is the course content accessible via any standard Internet browser application or does it require non-standard plug-in technologies or offline material?

Determining an acceptable level of quality can be difficult. One good resource is the Virtual Resource Site for Teaching with Technology (www.umuc.edu/virtualteaching). This site allows you to review various teaching pedagogies that can be used in online courses.

Graduation Credit

Since vendors design course content to fit a wide variety of customers, much of that course content is created using national standards. This is good news because that often translates into comprehensive content and a rigorous structure. Unfortunately, in today's state-by-state accountability culture, aligning to national standards does not guarantee that course content will address the necessary state curriculum standards.

If you want to offer online courses for which you will grant students state graduation credit, it is not enough to take the vendor's assurance that its courses have been aligned to your state's standards. The credit-granting institution may need to perform the necessary correlations by assigning curriculum specialists or master teachers the task of thoroughly reviewing the courses and reporting on discrepancies.

As an alternative to this time-intensive task, you can grant local credit for online courses run by all vendors. Ask the firms to share any national or state standards correlations they have completed on their courses.

Class or Course

Many vendors offer a small sampling of online courses and make no pretense of providing a comprehensive curriculum. While the quality of individual courses may be excellent, you must consider the consequences of offering these non-articulated courses if a student intends to complete a sequence of content offerings through a combination of online and in-class experiences.

If the vendor has not considered the importance of articulation, there is no reason to think your students will be as prepared with the prerequisite skills and competencies for subsequent courses in a series. Only a handful of vendors purport to offer a comprehensive curriculum or one that is diploma-granting.

Because most online course vendors depend on individual or small groups of educators to construct courses, no guarantee exists that the authors of an Algebra I course have spoken to the authors of the Algebra II course, for example. Without careful attention to articulation, student progress in future courses can be hampered.

Whose Equipment?

Some vendors will only provide courses for students who register and use the online material from their own corporate servers. The advantage to this model, known as an Application Service Provider, or ASP, is that the vendor is not only responsible for course content, but also for course delivery.

Because this allows vendors to aggregate students on typically more powerful servers, issues such as backups and redundant power for improved availability are taken care of for the school district. That advantage also turns into a disadvantage if the vendor's server or network connectivity becomes over-subscribed, slowing student access or leading to a catastrophic failure in which students are left without online access.

If a vendor provides school districts with the option of licensing the courses, a district just entering the online market may not want to outlay the capital dollars to equip its own servers until there's a proven demand for online courses. The ideal situation is one in which the vendor can support either preference for course delivery. That allows a district a great amount of flexibility and can provide an immediate disaster-recovery plan should one delivery service fail. Any school district able to host its own course delivery also has an option of hosting courses from more than one vendor if the hardware/software platform is compatible.

Local Content

Because Internet bandwidth still is limited for most home users, vendors often have to choose between offering highly interactive content in their courses or primarily text-based material that uses relatively little bandwidth and can be used efficiently even over slow modem connections.

Some vendors have opted for a compromise. Highly interactive content such as video, animated sequences and audio explanations are stored on CD-ROMs, which they supply as part of the course materials. Some content providers even include assignments and activity sheets as data files in Microsoft Office for local student access.

As bandwidth increases in the future, you want your online content to be delivered totally over a network connection, so this type of delivery should be considered as at least an option as you decide on a vendor.

Teacher Support

Research shows that one of the best assurances of student success in online courses occurs when a teacher is assigned to mentor the students as they progress.

When selecting a vendor to provide online content, it's important to gauge the quality of the teachers if they are assigned as part of the course license. This is so important to successful learning that many vendors offer the option of training teachers in each participating school or district to assume these mentoring tasks.

Unless you've chosen a vendor that supplies 100 percent independent-study types of courses, investing in the best qualified and most interested mentor-teacher arrangement will give a favorable return.

Handicapped Accessible

Not all vendors rate their online courses in terms of readiness for access by students with vision and hearing disabilities.

Depending on how widespread you plan to make your courses available, it can be worth your time to use a tool known as "Bobby," provided by the Center for Applied Special Technology (www.cast.org/bobby/). This will give you an indication of whether the Web pages as designed are accessible by students with disabilities.

Pricing

Unless your state attendance regulations already address students taking online courses (in addition to measuring "seat time"), the costs of online course vendors must be recovered in some fashion. Vendors offer different methods of purchasing courses: on a per-student basis, as a site license per course or as an entire online curriculum.

If you're not able to accurately predict a minimum number of students who will register for your online courses, the per-student model allows a school district to set a definite revenue stream to cover all costs associated with online course offerings. As the attendance grows, it quickly becomes more cost effective to enter into a site license agreement that gives unlimited registrations to courses.

In either case, it's important to get the true cost of offering online courses, including mentor teachers, technical support and any additional materials that may be required as part of the course.

Record Keeping

Some vendors offer courses that have automatic scoring routines built-in to assignments and tests and even have a fully operational gradebook to track student progress. There are tremendous advantages to providing graded work and feedback to students before moving to new material. This feature also relieves some of the administrative load from your mentor teachers who may be supporting these online courses on top of their regular class schedule.

Most vendors' grading functions are standalone in nature and unique to their software application. If your school district requires these grades be entered into a standard student information system for state reporting, this will typically be a manual process as most vendors do not have the necessary interface to the wide variety of existing student systems.

This concept will become a more important consideration of vendor selection in the future as education codes change to allow more students to choose online courses as an option, even during the normal school day.

Matching Expectations

Proprietary firms and other groups offering online courses and curriculums for sale to schools are proliferating at an amazing rate. At the same time, with venture capital at a premium and states having trouble reconciling attendance credit for online courses, many of these "dot.edu" companies are closing their doors.

With that caveat, make sure to do complete research on any company before signing an agreement to provide online courses for your students.

The success of your online course offerings will be directly affected by the amount of time and effort your team spends in answering these and other important considerations as you review curriculum from many vendors. Set clear goals and you can be confident there is an online provider who will offer a good match to those expectations.

Jim Hirsch is assistant superintendent of technology in the Plano Independent School District, 2700 W. 15th St., Plano, Texas 75075. E-mail: [e-mail]

Selected Vendors

There are numerous vendors offering excellent lesson plans and other online curriculum materials. The following list focuses on providers of full-fledged, rigorous online courses. We have further restricted the list to courses that are aligned to national and/or state standards and are available for purchase across state borders. Since new courses are being developed and made available at an ever-increasing rate, this list should not be considered comprehensive, but rather as a work in progress.

Apex Learning Inc.

Started by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Apex Learning Inc. is a builder and operator of virtual schools. Partnering with states and school districts, Apex provides the infrastructure, accredited courses, and support services to enable the development of an online high school. Individual students may also enroll for courses independent of their school district.

www.apex.netu.com

class.com

The leading provider of Internet-based high school courses, class.com, was developed by the nation's first fully accredited, university-based distance learning high school. A privately held company, class.com partners with public and private schools for online learning opportunities. In-house courses are monitored by licensed teachers. Virtual school programs provide a technical platform, allowing partners to construct a tailored online school commensurate with their needs and resources.

www.class.com

Concord Consortium

The Concord Consortium (also known as the Virtual High School) is a nonprofit research and development organization dedicated to a revolution in education through the use of information technologies. The Virtual High School is structured as a collaborative, charging an annual membership fee to all participating schools. Schools teach NetCourses, which entitles them to enroll their students in other VHS classes.

www.govhs.org

CyberSchool

A public school organization, the CyberSchool is actually a consortium of public school institutions throughout the country. They hire only state certified teachers. Designed to complement traditional face-to-face learning, the school offers handmade, teacher-directed asynchronous courses.

www.cyberschool.kl2.or.us

Florida Virtual School 

Sanctioned by the Florida Board of Education, the Florida Virtual School (formerly the Florida Online High School) was designed to create an online high school curriculum. Free to Florida residents, courses are available to out-of-state students for a fee. Over 60 courses are offered, all taught by state-certified teachers.

www.flvs.net

K12

Led by former Secretary of Education William Bennett, K12 is developing comprehensive programs for complete homeschooling. Although they are not offering all grade levels at this time, K12 plans to eventually have curricula for the entire span of a child's education. Currently offering kindergarten through second grade, the plan is to phase in three grades a year until the full spectrum of K-12 is covered. Stressing a multimedia approach, students spend approximately 25 percent of their time online.

www.k12.com