Presentation about online schools

1. • Exactly what it sounds like… students complete high school
credits through online courses
• About 200,000 students in full-time online school in 2012-2013
• Almost 2 million online courses taken by public school students
per year
• Some states require at least a few online courses to graduate
• Shows ability to work independently in online setting
Virtual Schools, What Are They?

2. • Help students who have a hard time or is impossible to attend
regular schools
• Long term suspended students; students with medical conditions
• Deliver basic courses in schools without teachers competent to
teach them
• Low income, rural schools who don’t have enough teachers
• Provide AP and career-oriented classes in rural schools
• Advancement for gifted and talented students
• Provides educational choices to parents
• Look for certain educational philosophy/pedagogy
• Customized instruction for students
Purpose of Online Schools

3. The
Defining
Dimensions
of Online
Programs
Figure adapted from Gregg Vanourek, A Primer on Virtual Charter School: Mapping the Electronic Frontier, Issue Brief for
National Association of Charter School Authorizers, August 2006.

4. • 75% of distance education offered by schools is delivered by a
system outside the school district
• Major providers include:
• College/university institution
• For-profit vendor
• State Virtual School
• Another district in state
• Their own district
• Other providers are: virtual schools from other states, other education
service agencies within state, online charter schools administered by
own district
Who Delivers the Online Content?

5. • They can oversee and standardize
what is offered
• EX: Florida Virtual School
• Offers courses to Florida students
(free) and others outside state (pay
tuition)
• Offers remedial courses to Advanced
Placement
• Other states use their coursework
and structure for their own programs
State Departments of Education
• Everything from small courses to
fully planned curriculum
• EX: K12 Inc. and Connections
Learning
• Largest companies in this market
• K12 Inc. offers individual courses,
online public schools and online
private schools
• Connections Learning offers
everything from credit recovery
courses to online summer school
For-profit Companies
Various Providers

6. • There is currently little research to analyze the impact of online
schools/courses
• Some reports show overall low performance and low graduation rates
• Varying extent of supervision, sometimes too lenient
• Costly
• Cost to create virtual school campus
• Training teacher to facilitate courses
• Training/hiring technical staff
• Time consuming
• Teachers of courses usually need extra, higher education training
• Emailing and responding to students due to no face-to-face interaction
• Students not self-disciplined
• Some don’t know how to learn independently without face-to-face
supervision
Issues With Virtual Schools

7. • If you have an account with Blendspace
• Sign in to your account
• Take the quiz in my Blendspace presentation
• If you do NOT have an account with Blendspace
• Create an account
• Sign up as a teacher
• Re-open my Blendspace presentation and you should be able to take
the quiz then
To take the quiz on the following page….