Struggling with Virtual Schooling Issues
A colleague of mine, Derek Wenmoth, has posted an entry to his blog (see Derek’s Blog) which I think is particularly interesting. The entry, Tackling online learning in our secondary schools, talks about some thngs going on down in New Zealand in K-12 online learning and then proceeds to ask a long series of questions to specific groups of individuals involved in almost every aspect of K-12 schooling. His questions include:
General Issues
- Is what we are doing truly learner-centric?
- Are we simply replicating the practices of the f2f classroom?
- How can we get policy change to provide the flexibility we require?
- Is our view of the technology future-proofed?
- Where is the evidence that what we are doing is supporting the claims we are making?
Policy issues
- How can student funding be shared between schools?
- How can staffing, including management units, be shared among schools?
- What evidence needs to be gathered to demonstrate the worth of this?
Technology issues
- Connectivity and interoperability – who sets the standards?
- Networks – VPNs or MUSH etc?
- Bridging – what is required? What technologies must be supported?
- Scheduling – enable direct access and school level control?
Curriculum issues
- assessment – developing consistency in approach
- reporting – enabling a unified student report from several ‘schools’ etc
- modularisation – a different view of ‘course’
- RPL – includes recognising the value of informal learning
Staffing issues
- Creating more flexibility in recognising teacher roles: e-teachers, m-teachers, c-teachers,
- How to involve those with real subject expertise as mentors, hotseats etc?
Pedagogical issues
- “personalisation” – what does it mean? How do we make it happen?
- staff training – how to train a large group of the teaching force in these new approaches?
Leadership and coordination issues
- Where does the leadership come from?
- What form should leadership take?
- What coordination is required nationally, locally etc?
Learning Resource issues
- How best to provide resources for learning to support teachers in this environment?
- Learning objects, repositories, search tools – who provides them, who manages them etc?
- How to cater for user-generated resources?
- Copyright and IP issues – how are these to be managed?
Quality issues
- What is best practice?
- What are quality indicators?
What is most interesting about this list of questions/issues is that even though Canada and the United States are about a half a decade ahead of New Zealand and Australia when it comes to K-12 online learning or virtual schooling, I don’t think that we have really tackled many of these issues on this side of the Pacific pond yet either.
Tags: AECT 2006, AECT, virtual school, cyber school, high school, education
