A new series that Darren at Teaching and Developing Online had posted a while ago that I am only getting around to posting now.
- Stats 2007-2008
- Stats 2007-2008 Part 2
- Stats 2007-2008 part 3
- Stats 2007-2008 Part 4
- Stats 2007-2008 Part 5
- Stats 2007-2008 Part 6
- Stats 2007-2008 Part 7
- Stats 2007-2008 Part 8
Jukes on Virtual Schooling.
So, I was listening to Kevin Honeycutt’s Driving Questions in Education podcasts, specifically one that he did with Ian Jukes entitled Getting beyond the full frontal lecture (I actually came across him from my good friend Clif – see Clif Mims from NECC ).
Anyway, about 29:00 minutes in Kevin and Jukes get to talking about virtual schooling and Jukes cites virtual schools in Alberta and British Columbia as examples that should be modeled. Without being negative towards virtual schools in those two provinces, as someone who has been studying the virtual school movement for a while now if I were to pick virtual schools that should be held up as a model for other schools the Florida Virtual School (FLVS) would be at the top of my list. I’d also have the Virtual High School Global Consortium (VHS) near the top as well.
I hold these two up as examples because in the beginning both were founded with large grants which allowed them to take their time, plan things out, and get started on the right foot. It also allowed for a great deal of research and evaluation to be undertaken to ensure that things were going as they should. While the virtual schools in Alberta and British Columbia are as old (or older) than FLVS and VHS, almost all of them were created at the district-level with very little in the way of funding. So they grew in a very piecemeal, trial and error kind of way. Don’t get me wrong, they have grown into great virtual schools – but they didn’t have the funding to be as deliberate as FLVS and VHS in the beginning.
Throughout the time Jukes talks about virtual schools, he makes some interesting quotes:
-”virtual teaching environments”
-”not just about digitizing information and leaving it online for people to use”
-”what we have now is no more than distance teaching”
In many respects, I think that Jukes is probably a little more familiar with the cyber charter schools – which are largely a digital curriculum with a teacher as evaluator (and I’ve written at length about this – check the tag on Wisconcin on the right to see some of those comments). I say this because the virtual schools that I have become familiar with, both in Canada and the United States, are much more than information online.
I also have to take issue with Jukes’ distinction between distance teaching and distance learning – in the same way I take distinction with the whole student-centered learning issues (I mean regardless if a teacher is up front droning on, doesn’t any learning have to be student-centered – the teacher certainly isn’t the one doing the learning -> but that’s a debate for another day in another forum). The term teaching, regardless if we are talking about a virtual school or a brick-and-mortar one, has gotten a bad rap. For whatever reason, it is assumed that students must learn in an independent way, on their own and if there is teaching involved somehow it is bad. If we focus upon the practice and the art of teaching, somehow we are forgetting about the student because we can teach all we want and unless the student wants to learn the student won’t learn. While there is some truth to ensuring that the student is a willing participant in the process, the act of teaching can’t be neglected and we can’t assume that the student is the only thing that needs to be focused on.
Similarly, Jukes made the following statement which I found very telling:
“you have to have level of discipline, you have to have set of skills
and knowledge and habits in mind that are completely different”
So what about the students that don’t have those skills, knowledge and habits? Do we just assume that those are the ditch diggers of the future and focus upon those students who do possess those attributes? This is the biggest problem I have with virtual schooling and K-12 online education… to date the research we have indicates that it only serves a select group of students and that some K-12 students simply aren’t capable of or suited to online learning. The problem with this is when you find situations like in m home province where a student if they want to graduate from high school with the regular curriculum (as opposed to the basic curriculum) must take online courses as they aren’t offered in this school in any other format. And what we are starting to see is that students capable of passing in the regular stream and choosing to take the basic program so they can avoid taking online courses. This means that the only options these students will now have after high school is to go directly into the workforce or to go to trade school, because the basic curriculum makes them ineligible for any other form of post-secondary education. So what of the students that don’t possess these qualities?
Anyway, the portion on virtual schooling begins around 29 minutes and ends around 36 and a half minutes. Take a listen and let me know what you think.