E-Learning Promoted as 21st Century Schoolroom

The American education system is “an eight-track tape deck living in the high-speed digital age,” said former Govs. James Hunt, D-N.C., and Jeb Bush, R-Fla., in a May op-ed piece. They advocated using some of the Recovery Act’s $5 billion dedicated to education experiments to “revolutionize the way we deliver knowledge to students” by creating an Amazon.com-type campus of virtual schools that would allow students to customize their educations and help teachers and principals find courses. “With the click of a mouse [students] could take Chinese at one virtual academy, geometry at another and 18th Century poetry at another,” they said. The Center for American Progress, in a May paper by Cathy Cavanaugh, an associate professor of educational technology in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida Gainesville, said online education could be a way to increase learning time, which should raise achievement. Studies have shown that high-quality online courses enable student performance the way good classroom courses do, Cavanaugh said. An additional benefit of online learning is that teacher retention might improve, because teachers could choose schedules that would fit their needs.

And now students can choose courses that truly feel like virtual learning environments rather than schoolwork. At least that’s the promise of “Conspiracy Code,” an American history course launched by the Florida Virtual School this month. Florida Virtual School, a statewide, publicly funded school, is probably the best-known of the cyberschools. It was part of Bush’s dream for education, said Pam Birtolo, the chief academic officer. Its newest course is designed to look and feel like a video game, with students taking on the roles of two characters to collect historical clues to defeat the villains. The school created the course with 360Ed because 97 percent of students say they're gamers, Birtolo said. “They also say they're bored in school,” she said. Coursework is built into the game so students leave with the same knowledge as any other American history student, she said. “Just because you're gaming doesn’t mean it leaves out assignments … You still have to write papers and do assignments.” From anecdotal evidence, students seem to love it, she said. This month the school will bring students in and hook them up to EEGs to determine their level of engagement with the game and where they're concentrating, she said. Meanwhile, the state has asked the school to create a gaming course for remedial reading, she said, which should be ready in the next school year. “All of us are very interested to see how it’s going to work out,” she said.

Online education isn’t a panacea, and educators said as much to Sloan during its survey. For many schools, funding is a problem. While concerns about course quality decreased between the two surveys, concerns increased about the cost of buying courses and about state funds not following students online. Schools must also help students, particularly younger ones, develop the independence necessary to successfully complete online courses, Cavanaugh said. Online students have to know how to locate and evaluate information, she said. “Students who are struggling to simultaneously learn demanding content and pick up the necessary technical skills tend not to succeed at either effort,” she said. The National Education Association, a teacher’s union, said online courses can supplement traditional classes and “serve to enhance and promote the skills students need to be successful, productive citizens in the 21st century.” But it doesn’t support a full online education program, saying that students need the in-classroom experience at younger ages to help with social development and to have relationships with teachers. That view isn’t universal. A study of more than 250 students by Interactive Educational Systems Design, a consulting service for educational publishers, said last month it found no significant behavioral differences reported by students, parents and teachers of students enrolled full- time online or in classrooms. “Spending a longer time enrolled in full-time, online public schools was not associated with a higher level of problem behaviors,” it said. Florida Virtual School deals with the lack of face-to- face relationship by requiring quite a commitment from its teachers to develop the online relationship. Teachers are connected by phone, texting, instant messaging and course feedback, Birtolo said. The contact not only helps to engage students, but also helps ensure the teacher recognizes the student’s original work, she said.

Teachers need special skills to teach online, O'Connor said. Conscientiousness alone will only get an instructor so far before the workload becomes overwhelming, he said. Connor is program adviser to the E-Learning and Online Teaching Certificate at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, established in 2005. The program has grown from about 15 students the first year to a couple hundred, he said. The biggest issue for teachers is they can no longer look into a sea of faces and “read” whether the students comprehend, he said. The online teaching program helps teachers figure out how to read students electronically, he said. And as K-12 education experiences “phenomenal” growth, “trained people are at a premium,” he said.