You may recall that I mentioned a super-secret surprise? It is mostly completed, so you get to be among the first to see it. It is a brand-new website that pulls in RSS feeds about online high schools, online colleges, and educational technology.
I hope that you will consider taking a look. I am quite pleased with how it has turned out. Since these seem to be the three areas that I do a great deal of reading — online high schools, online colleges, ed tech — I decided that there are likely other folks out there just like me. Scary thought!
As part of Edutopia’s Schools That Work section of their website, they now offer The Brave New Breakthrough in Online Learning. It is a collection resources and information related to K-12 online learning.
Key quote: A U.S. Department of Education analysis of more than 40 studies, including five focused on K-12 pupils, 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.” Another study, by the National Survey of Student Engagement, reported that the online-learning experience yielded deeper use of “higher-order thinking, integrative learning, and reflective learning.”
Over the years I have been quoted a number of times in articles on distance learning, online high schools, and the like. I was recently interviewed by the The Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Florida. The reporter was working on an article about Keiser University, a large for-profit school, and how they have used or not used the services of a “school” in Texas to help students get high school diplomas.
I spoke with the reporter for over an hour. A friend was surprised at how little of the interview they used. I have long-since realized that is how it works. Only so much fits in a story. Hey, they spelled my name right! I wish they had mentioned the website, but you can’t get everything.
If you would like to read the article, it is found here:
I am giving a presentation virtually tomorrow for the eLearning Special Interest Group of CUE, Computer Users in Education. It’s been a while since I have presented in Elluminate, so it should be interesting. I am going to talk about the current state of online high schools both in California and nationally. Still pulling together some of the pieces. I will try to come back in the next day or two and post about the experience, but also share some of it here.
In my local newspaper, I responded to the concern expressed in an editorial about the University of California’s use of online courses. Yes, I said that online courses are often better than traditional courses. My source: U.S. Department of Education.
If you work in online learning, if your school district is considering online learning, if there is the remotest possibility that you need to learn more about online learning, this is the one conference that you should attend. No others even come close.
Well, if you had asked me, I could have told you. There is an opinion piece in the Washington Post that asserts that traditional schools are not working and recommends that we move learning online. Here’s the first part:
Deep within America’s collective consciousness, there is a little red schoolhouse. Inside, obedient children sit in rows, eagerly absorbing lessons as a kind, wise teacher writes on the blackboard. Shiny apples are offered as tokens of respect and gratitude.
The reality of American education is often quite different. Beige classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education in the United States — and they’re right to, as test results confirm again and again.
That does about say it all. Ultimately, what we are doing in classrooms is not working. I’m not willing to give up on it, though. However, I think that online learning will be key in fixing what is going on in those classrooms. When people want to talk about the effect of the traditional classroom on online learning, they have it exactly backwards.
Online learning is what will fix the classroom. Interactivity is what makes or breaks instruction. As we begin to do more creative instruction online, that will spill over into the brick-and-mortar classrooms.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an opinion piece about the mythsthat are still around about distance/online learning. It is perplexing to those of us who work in the field that we can still be having these sorts of conversations. The first distance education courses were offered, what, 150 years ago? Granted, they were not online, but the world has a sufficiently long history of offering education where the teacher and the students are not in the same place.
Librarian and online instructor Todd Gilman offers the following:
I enjoy the work and feel confident that I have helped students become better readers, writers, future librarians, curators, and researchers. Yet every time I speak with faculty colleagues who have only taught what distance educators call “face to face” or “on ground” courses, I get the same bewildered responses: “I’ve never understood this whole online teaching thing” or “So do you teach via e-mail?” or “Is that like a correspondence course?”
Hidden beneath the surface of such seemingly innocuous comments and questions is a little jab, which, if put into words, would go something like this: “You’re not a real college teacher, are you? If you were, you’d be interacting with students in a bricks-and-mortar classroom like I do.”
I am still amazed that we are still having these sorts of discussions whether it is at the college or the K-12 level. One of the statistics that I share with administrators, teachers, and the general public is that the first online high school courses were offered in 1994.
You may recall that I mentioned a super-secret surprise? It is mostly completed, so you get to be among the first to see it. It is a brand-new website that pulls in RSS feeds about online high schools, online colleges, and educational technology.