Virtual Schooling

One of my colleagues in this BlogTrack, Ernise Singleton – Higher Education, posted as one of her initial entries a list of questions that she was interested in or initially drew her to specific area of online learning research (see What is online teaching?).  Thinking it a great idea, I thought that I would try and do the same…

1. What does online learning look like for secondary students?
2. What does online teaching look like?  How is it different in an entirely synchronous environment?  An entirely asynchronous environment? An entirely with both synchronous and asynchronous components?
3. How do they navigate the challenges of learning in an environment that largely requires an adult learning skillset?
4. Would they prefer to learn in a classroom with a teacher in a face to face environment, given the option?
5. What do students think of the option or ability to learn in this environment?
6. Do students in these web-based environments perform as well as their classroom counterparts?
7. Can we design an online learning environment that is accessible to all secondary students?

While I have tried to address some of these in my own research studies to date (namely questions 1, 2, 4, and 7), there is still much that I have left to answer – the mark of a good researcher I guess…  More questions than answers.  In any regard, hopefully over the next few months I’ll get a chance to talk about some of the research projects that I have been involved with an my current thoughts on some of these questions.

Tags: AECT 2006, AECT, virtual school, cyber school, high school, education

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 7:43 am and is filed under Research Potential and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.