Week 3 Reflection

What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important or interesting?

State virtual schools
Upon reviewing the wikis & comparison table and participating in the forum, it is interesting to see that the diverse presentation (in terms of look and content) across respective virtual schools. And, I find it "shocking" that a few virtual schools actually have such poor and non-robust presentation of their school information! My assumption is that a virtual school being heavily reliant on technology and the Internet, the most basic thing it can show is to at least "look" savvy in its home page presentation. So, it seems that it is a wrong assumption to make.

I find the issue about inconsistency observed is important to note. This observation probably implies that the development of virtual schools is still in its early stages where there is very little benchmarking, though at least most virtual schools' curricula are tied to the state testing standards. Or maybe it is simply a notion of diversity for the differences observed?

Or would it be that the virtual school market is not that competitive within respective states that some schools may just not be well-aligned to PR, marketing, communications and having organizational goal to deliver quality services to the public?

There seems to be many different reasons for the inconsitency observed and as explained by some of my coursemates in the forum. So, will there be a time in future that the art of managing virtual schools become more widespread that there will be more virtual schools and with more intense competition, they'd be more competitive. And, more competition would drive higher standards and better presentation, delivery of services, etc.?

Charter virtual schools
It is surprising to find such a gap in the presentation of info and content on a charter school home page as compared to a state school home page! Comapring Michigan Virtual School (state sch) and Ohio Connections Academy (charter sch), I find the page design of OCA more user-friendly than that of MVS. And, the infomration of the latter is more oragnised and accessible too. I wonder if charter sch pages are generally more well-organized than that of state sch?

Upon exploring OCA and Connections Academy (CA) website, I feel that charter schools are like a "franchise". CA is like the main distributor, who sets the operation model and resourcing model of the schools under its charter. Hence, upon checking other CA schools in other states, they all have the same page design for their school website. Since CA is then the "branding" of the charter schools under its flagship, then I think there'd be a model of monitoring and quality control within their operation model (which is not explicit to the public) to ensure quality delivery of education to each child at his/her home.

Would it be due to this that there is better accountabilty and more consistent delivery, and a more unfied message and look across all CA schools? Hence, I am looking forward to next week's class to look into other charter schools and do a comparison between the two types of schools :)

Furthermore, I kind of find some ans to the question about accessibility to virtual schools, which i raised in previous week's reflection. In CA, they loan out computers with suitable specs and software pre-loaded, and provide free internet access too! In a way, this addresses the issue of accesibility, also bearing in mind that the education is tuition-free. Hence, even poor families will be able to send their kids to virtual schools!

However, I wonder how would on be eligible to apply for this loan and how do they get sufficient resources to fund this exercise??! And, we're talking about 28,000 enrollment in CA to date!! From the "Authorizing Matters, Aug 2006", it seems to imply that a typical charter school will loan out computers to students and reimburse for the Internet charges but no in-depth discussion of how to fund the model of a charter virtual school :( Though there is some mention of "authorizer funding" in the "September 2006" issue, it remians vague to me as to how exactly how the charter model works, for both traditional and virtual schools. I shall research on this over the weekend :)

Initially, I thought the "who should fund virtual schools?" article would shed some light to the way resourcing in charter schools work. But, this article generally speaks of funding in state virtual schools, recomending a 2-stage implementation of a funding model and sharing 3 case studies of how 3 state virtual schools are funded.