What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learn this week?
Schools being schools, whether virtual or brick-and-mortar, there are many core resources and processes that are similar. There need to be students, teachers and administrators. There need to be syllabi, content, teaching resources, etc. There is teaching and learning, with instructional program, pedagogy, monitoring and evaluation. We talk about performance, teachers professional development, etc.
One important difference is for virtual school is that many of the processes are adopted and adapted from conventional brick-and-mortar schools to suit the online environment, as described in the standards of NACOL.
I learnt that similar processes adopted in an online environment can become very different. Hence, I appreciate the insights provided in "Managing teachers you can't see" and "evaluating online teachers is largely a virtual task". The readings mainly covers evaluation of teachers in an online context and the professional development of teachers. I find that accountability in an online environment with all information, exchanges and output in virtual form, it becomes very challenging to track down real performance and accountability, not only in terms of teachers' performance but also in students' work.
Hence, I do see validation becoming a key challenge for virtual schools.
On a separate note, having researched on the 2 schools selected (similar to the situation faced by other coursemates), I found it extremely hard to mine for any "insider" information, like teachers selecion process, teachers' role, student-teacher ratio, etc. All this hidden information sudenly became crystal clear to me when I read "Professional development for online teachers" (esp the "Cases" section, pp 166-171) and "Best practices in teaching K-12 online: lessons learnt from Michigan Virtual School teachers". Upon these artical, many of the question marks I've around Michigan Virtual School (one of my research school) is instantaneously resolved!I would strongly recommend to my course mates to read pp 16-27 of the latter, which gives alot of information about the practices by MVS teachers and examples of their practices. For the former, besides pp. 166-171, I find the tabulation of Louisiana Virtual School's teacher training and professional development model quite useful. This tabulation kind of bridges the gap that I've identified through this week's reading, ie. a gap between indicators of online teachers' performance and the process of evaluating their performance to that of professional development.
Finally, reflecting on the conditions for online learning...
In this course, we are undergoing an online course. And right now, I am stuck in a country (due to business travel) with broadband internet services and yet not being able to load our coursepage and process CUB email. Given the speed of the service, many institutions' technical support teams had set up firewalls and blocks to many websites (especially multimedia-heavy sites), in hope of easing traffic and increasing speed.
So, I'm starting to realise that for virtual schools to be successful, besides ensuring that students have access to computer of suitable specs and internet access, it is not sufficient. There is a need for high-speed internet in order to download all those media-rich content.
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What I admire, Puay San, is that you found a way around all your connectivity problems. The issue is that we can't expect most teachers or students to do this. I have seen students give up when faced with poor Internet connections and no one around to help them out. This is why some schools have courses that look so boring--because they are designing to the lowest common denominator in terms of connectivity and software.
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