At Lumberton Senior High School in Robeson County, N.C., geometry teacher
Louine Teague is mastering the nuts and bolts of search engines and hyperlinks.
But as one of the first teachers to take part in the Virtual
High School Project, an ambitious nationwide network offering online
courses to high school students, Teague is less concerned about her ability
to learn the basics of Internet technology than she is troubled about being
an effective teacher online.
"I worry most about not catching clues in a student's voice or not
being able to see a puzzled look," says Teague, a veteran mathematics
teacher and self-described "nontechie" whose contact with students
in her cybercourse will be largely limited to e-mail messages and online
discussions.
Other teachers in fledgling cyberschools share Teague's concern. But
like her, they have volunteered to test-drive the new medium, even though
the commitment often means mastering new software, rethinking course design,
and developing new classroom management strategies.
Nationwide, in fact, a growing number of virtual high schools are opening
their doors, hoping to expand both the reach and the resources of traditional
high schools. Last spring, CyberSchool,
part of Eugene School District 4J in Eugene, Ore., enrolled approximately
30 students in 20 online courses, including Advanced Placement Calculus,
Cell Biology, and Spanish IV. Though the bulk of students attending the
school were from U.S. school districts, some signed on from as far away
as Korea and Turkey.
This fall, the Virtual High School Project will welcome its first class.
The project, which has received a $7.4 million technology challenge grant
from the U.S. Department of Education, will offer 600 high school students
in 13 states the chance to learn online. Among the 30 courses the project
will offer, in addition to Teague's geometry class, are Introduction to
Stellar Astronomy, Integrated Ecospheric Systems, Advanced Placement Statistics,
Space-Based Astronomy, Introduction to Microbiology, and Post-Soviet Studies.
"These will be 30 courses many of these schools have never had before,"
says project director Bruce Droste, a researcher with the Concord, Mass.-based
Concord Consortium, which is overseeing the project. Many of the Virtual
High School's members are small, rural school systems or low-wealth school
districts that would otherwise be unable to offer such specialized courses.
By pooling teaching resources and linking students and teachers via high-speed
telecommunications lines, consortium members have effectively expanded the
number of courses they can offer, Droste says.
Other public cyberschools are also attracting students. Mindquest,
an alternative education program in the Bloomington (Minn.) Public Schools,
has turned to the Internet as a way to deliver courses to adults and older
teens who have dropped out of school.
And last year, approximately 12,000 students earned at least one credit
through Utah's statewide Electronic High School--an
ambitious effort to offer every one of the state's core high school courses
via distance learning. Nearly a quarter of those credits were earned online--a
number Utah officials expect will increase in the next decade.
"Our guess is that online courses will surpass other kinds of distance
learning," predicts Dick Siddoway, a veteran educator and the principal
of Electronic High.
A 500-hour enterprise?
Proponents of netcourses are quick to point out the advantages of delivering
instruction online. Students who take courses via computer, for example,
can proceed at their own pace: If they need to listen to a RealAudio lecture
twice, replay a video clip, or take time to think about a question that's
being posed, they can do so without slowing down other class members. And
because a cyberschool doesn't exist in a specific time and place, students
don't have to "attend" class during the traditional school day--a
boon for homebound or hospitalized students, home-schoolers, dropouts seeking
a high school diploma, college-bound students with an already full load,
or students in small or remote school districts. Many of today's cybercourses
are also increasingly taking advantage of the unique resources found on
the Internet, including links to sophisticated graphics and databases.
As with any new school, though, getting started is a challenge. Just
keeping the technology up and running--and keeping the students connected--can
be a constant concern. "Behind the scenes, this is a complicated setup
that's not getting any less complicated," admits Julie Williams, coordinator
of Bloomington's Mindquest program, which, like other fledgling cyberschools,
runs its own web server. In the last two years, Williams says, the program
has lost two network troubleshooters and two phone-desk operators. (The
latter provide students with technical support.) "We've become a training
ground for technical people who then move on to positions that pay more,"
observes Williams.
Building a cohort of teachers who can design content-rich courses for
the new medium is a stumbling block as well. "It's not just a question
of putting your old lectures online," observes Tom Layton, the technology
teacher who has spearheaded the development of Eugene's CyberSchool. In
addition to mastering basic Internet skills, such as using e-mail or exchanging
files via FTP, teachers interested in developing online courses for CyberSchool
also learn to incorporate Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and RealAudio into their
courses and to develop assignments and activities that take advantage of
the new medium's interactivity. Overall, in fact, Layton estimates that
CyberSchool's teachers spend between 300 and 500 hours putting their first
cybercourse together, half that time developing the course and half writing
web pages.
"It's a lot like writing a textbook," admits Chris Belonger,
a science teacher who has developed several science courses for the school.
Building a cybercourse
Slowly, though, cyberschools are finding ways to navigate around the
very real obstacles. Eugene's CyberSchool is one of the leaders. To simplify
delivery of its netcourses, CyberSchool currently uses two Power Mac 8150s
running WebStar 2.0 as the school's main group servers, where teachers store
materials for students to access. The advantage: "With Power Macs,
we don't have to hire a half-time Unix programmer," says Layton. "As
Joe Average, I can keep these running." In addition, to give teachers
the opportunity to exploit the interactive features of the Internet, Layton
has installed audio software that allows teachers to incorporate sound into
their courses and chat-group software for real-time discussions.
But the heart of CyberSchool is a 10-week course that shows teachers
how to develop an online class. Meeting every other Saturday for three hours
at a time, the course introduces teachers to basic Internet skills, such
as signing on to a listserv, transferring files via FTP, using search engines
to locate content-rich web sites, and working with Claris Home Page, an
HTML editing tool, to create web pages of their own.
The training sessions also cover teaching strategies and classroom management
tips. To make up for the fact that she can't see her students' reactions,
for example, the teacher of CyberSchool's Spanish IV course asks students
to send her an e-mail update at the end of each lesson reporting what they
found easy in the lesson and what they found difficult. Another teacher
uses NetForms, a web utility that allows him to create forms and survey
students about other courses they might have taken and about their computer
skills. (Students simply type their responses into the appropriate space
on the form the teacher creates and submit their responses electronically.)
Still another CyberSchool teacher gives traditional exams online but requires
students to arrange for someone to proctor the exam at his or her site.
Most online teachers also learn the advantage of having students use
specific subject lines for their e-mail assignments. ("Use the words,
'Essay on immigration' in the subject line.") That's a simple strategy,
Layton and others observe, but a necessary one. According to Layton, a teacher
with 30 cyberstudents can expect to receive between 1,500 and 2,000 e-mail
messages every semester.
CyberSchool's emphasis on teacher training has paid off. Nearly 20 teachers--most
of them already teaching in the Eugene schools--have developed courses for
the web, including several Advanced Placement courses; a Special Projects
in U.S. History course for students with learning disabilities; special
interest courses, such as creative writing and classical literature; and
a series of science courses covering cell biology, classification of organisms,
and DNA and genes. All students, even those who attend the Eugene Public
Schools, pay tuition of $300 per course.
This fall, Layton says, CyberSchool will offer the 10-week teacher training
course online--a development that could swell the number of teachers and
courses at the fledgling school.
Transparent technology
The Virtual High School also has teachers squarely in its focus. A network
of 30 high schools nationwide, the Virtual High School asks each of its
member schools to contribute one teacher to the virtual school's teaching
pool. In return, member schools are allotted 20 "seats" for their
own students in any of the high school's cybercourses.
Schools that choose to participate in the Virtual High School project
agree to two other requirements as well: Their schools must have an Internet
connection, and their district must agree to grant students credit for the
netcourses they take.
Teachers who volunteer for the project also must complete a 22-week graduate-level
course on netcourse design, which includes one-on-one sessions with mentors
who have experience designing online courses and online discussions with
other teachers.
"It's the most powerful thing we're doing," says Droste of
the teacher-training effort. "One teacher will write, 'I think I'm
going to fall apart--this just isn't coming together,' and another will
respond, 'That's just the way I felt two weeks ago, but I did X and Y, and
things worked out,'" says Droste.
To make the technology transparent to teachers, Droste says, the Virtual
High School uses Lotus LearningSpace, a web-based distance-learning package
that allows teachers to enter information into templates rather than coding
it in HTML.
Like CyberSchool, Virtual High School also focuses on developing enrichment
and hard-to-offer courses. "Even a kid in a small district is probably
going to get mathematics and English, especially in states with explicit
curriculum requirements," says Droste. "But they might not get
courses in poetry or microbiology or bioethics."
Cybercourses can fill that niche.
Any time, any place
Two other cyberschools have their own lessons to offer. For the last
20 years, the Bloomington, Minn., school district has offered SHAPE, an
alternative program for high school dropouts that gives credit for work
experience and uses individualized education plans. Nearly 60 percent of
SHAPE students have been low-income students, many of whom found it difficult
to attend classes during the day due to jobs, small children, or lack of
transportation. To make it easier for these students to receive their diplomas,
the school system began offering an online version of the program, known
as Mindquest, in October 1995.
With a current enrollment of 40 students, Mindquest uses FirstClass,
a client-server telecommunications package that combines e-mail and group
conferencing and has a graphical interface similar to America Online's,
says program coordinator Julie Williams. Mindquest also lends computers
and modems to students who live in the Minneapolis metropolitan area and
provides those students with free Internet access. Students who live in
Minnesota can attend the school free of charge, while those outside the
state pay a tuition of $250 per course.
Now, two years into the process, the program has made some important
changes. Initially, Williams acknowledges, the online program's dropout
rate was quite high: 85 percent of Mindquest's first class left the program
in the first four months. "We were devastated," says Williams.
School officials found that one of the major reasons for dropping out was
students' frustration with the technology.
"A lot of these kids didn't have their own computers," says
Williams, "and a lot of them were 24 or 25 years old, so they'd left
school before computers had become a fixture. We assumed students would
screen themselves and wouldn't take a class [like ours] unless they were
familiar with computers. But that self-screening didn't happen."
To make certain that students have the computer skills they'll need to
complete the program, Mindquest now offers computer training classes to
teach the basics of word-processing, file management, and working with FirstClass
software. This year, Williams says, Mindquest hopes to pair students with
volunteer tutors who have computer skills.
Utah's Electronic High School has followed a different path. Three years
ago, Utah's governor challenged the state department of education to produce
electronic versions of every one of the state's core high school courses.
Central to that effort is Electronic High School, which expects to unveil
the first of 60 netcourses that Utah teachers will develop. (In the past,
Electronic High has served as a broker between students and schools or agencies
that provide various kinds of distance learning courses, including Internet
courses, correspondence courses, and two-way audio courses.)
The two courses--Ancient and Modern World History and Ecological Approaches
to Biology--are highly interactive cybercourses that are rich in multimedia
resources, Principal Siddoway says. A unit in the history course, for example,
contains an animated sequence showing how Iran's Fertile Crescent was settled.
Similarly, one section of the biology course illustrates the difference
between meiosis and mitosis using time-lapse images taken with photomicroscopy.
To develop the courses, teachers determined the content then contracted
with teams of high school students who are enrolled in a special two-year
multimedia program to create web pages and graphics.
"We found a lot of excellent teachers just weren't techies,"
says Siddoway. "So now we say to them, 'We'll provide the technical
expertise once you give us the [content].'"
Within three years, Siddoway expects to have versions of every one of
Utah's core high school courses online.
The devil's in the details
Despite their enthusiasm, Siddoway and other proponents of online learning
acknowledge the drag of day-to-day reality. Many teachers are developing
new courses or teaching online classes in addition to their normal teaching
load, and it's unclear how much time an online course might require. "These
teachers are dancing as fast they can," says Droste simply.
Ironically, scheduling has sometimes proved to be an obstacle, too. Virtual
High School, for example, tries to keep students working at roughly the
same pace throughout the semester. (Most proponents agree: Building some
structure into the course--with specific deadlines rather than completely
open-ended assigments--is crucial if students are to succeed.) But some
members of the Virtual High School Project start school in August, while
others wait until September, and school vacations often don't coincide.
Such differences can disrupt a teacher's course plans, Droste and others
acknowledge.
Block schedules, which are popular in many high schools, are also a problem.
With block scheduling, high schoolers might have different classes every
quarter, while Virtual High School's netcourses typically last a semester.
Students who have room in their schedule for a netcourse one quarter might
not have an opening the next.
Further, because schools can't count on students' having computers at
home, finding computer time during the school day has also become a necessity.
"Having all 20 students in a lab the same period of the day probably
isn't using time wisely," observes Teague, whose school has just been
wired. "We're hoping to have a place where the kids can go whenever
they have a free period."
Many other sticking points have surfaced as well, including how teachers
will be compensated, who holds the copyright to the courses that are developed,
how large a class should be, and what relationship a cyberschool should
have to a school district's collective bargaining agreement. In fact, union
representatives and school officials are currently discussing some of these
issues in Eugene. "We're not trying to be obstructionist," says
Douglas Bilheimer, a lawyer for the Eugene Education Association. "But
we are being vigilant. We don't want to let this horse get away from us."
Still, the biggest day-to-day challenge facing online courses could be
making certain that high schoolers can handle the responsibility of learning
online--and that adults can provide the sense of community and connectedness
that is at the heart of schooling. "I worry about keeping on top of
kids and keeping kids on top of themselves," admits Courtney Glazer,
an instructional technology specialist at Allen High School in Allen, Texas,
and a site coordinator for the Virtual High School. "I mean, I can't
go and bang on their doors late at night."
Maybe not, cyberschool advocates concede. But as teachers and students
become familiar with the new medium, the beep announcing the arrival of
an e-mail message just might serve the same purpose as a knock on the door.
Donna Harrington-Lueker is a freelance education writer in Newport, R.I. |
