Week 2 Reflection

Blog reflection: What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important or interesting? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week?

This week, in starting to examine specific State virtual schools, I immediately noticed a wide variety of programs and options depending on State. In the Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning article, I was surprised to learn about the broad spectrum of online learning characteristics since I have traditionally just thought in terms of synchronous vs. asynchronous learning and course-paced vs. self-paced. More than anything else, the most interesting factoid that jumped off the pages was that New York, my home state, was practical non-existent in the world of virtual schools. I thought this was particularly surprising since the article also notes that virtual schooling is moving from "the fringe" to a strategic initiative across the country. So, where is NY? Why no presence? The article makes mention of BOCES as providing a limited number of online courses but as I explored deeper, it seems that they only offer online professional development courses and not courses for students (at least in my county - Nassau). SCOPE, similarly, offers member schools online professional development but not students. Next week I provide details on a charter school that operates in NY called Accelerate U, which offers limited courses for students. The article did mention that district programs are growing and I will be interested in following the progression of this development in New York State. 

I selected the North Carolina Virtual Public School to research for this week's assignment but also began examining Michigan Virtual High School before deciding. NCVPS's website is clearly ahead of the curve with regard to look and feel, content and overall completeness. However, the course offerings are more limited than the courses offered at MiVHS. From a high level perspective it is important to note the distinctions, but from a parent or student perspective it seems to matter little since a student can only enroll in a virtual school in their own state. Perhaps next week's research will enlighten me on this.

The second article for this week - Management and Operations of Online Programs: Ensuring Quality and Accountability, I also found to be quite interesting. It first captured my attention by addressing the fact that online learning helps meet "the needs and expectations of the today's millenial students." It creates 21st century "learning opportunities" using Web 2.0 technologies. This is an area that is passionate to me as my Masters thesis revolves around this topic. There were several other points in the article that really hit home for me:

• The "online voice" - The quote by Jonathan Schmalzback of Apex Learning that highlights the importance of a classroom teacher who can translate experience to online content and understands how to appropriately using multimedia aspects to enhance learning spoke directly to me. That is exactly what I am being trained to do as an Educational Technology Specialist.
• From an assessment perspective, looking for meaningful substance is student contributions is spot on. I recently conducted a research study comparing effective learning in synchronous vs. asynchronous environments and our results, strongly qualitative, were measured based on meaningful participation. 
• Stakeholder satisfaction - I think the article makes an excellent point that all stakeholders must be involved in order to ensure a successful online learning experience. This includes parents, teachers, students, administrators, community members and more.
• Teachers - I did find it odd that the teacher management section did not make any mention of the certification requirements. One of the most disturbing things I have discovered this week is that teachers must be certified in the State that the virtual school resides. This certainly limits the claim that students have access to the "highest quality teachers." It should stay "the highest quality teachers in the State." Hopefully, this is something that will be resolved over time.

Finally, the Keeping Pace article also illuminated for me the wide variety of companies providing Learning Management Systems. This is interesting to me because, while at Sun Microsystems, I began working on a LMS-project called "Sun Learning eXchange" which was designed to be a YouTube-like platform for social learning.  I was already familiar with Blackboard as a platform but Desire2Learn was new to me. Content companies such as Apex, Aventa and Class.com were also mentioned. Some companies also provide both content and an LMS like Pearson. The mention of these various technologies caused me to pause and consider how they might integrate with wireless devices and software currently being used in traditional schools, like those from Wireless Generation and Mimio. Might the lines between traditional and virtual schools someday be blurred so as to become unrecognizable? It remains to be seen.