Second thoughts...

What an informative document!

I felt time pressure to pick an interesting school before reading all of the documents.  I am still trying to organize my online schedule!  There is a lot to love/hate about online learning, but I haven't gotten into a flow yet, so shouldn't offer a full opinion.

Doing a quick search for schools online led me to the Hopkins Online Academy in MN which I misread as being part of the Minnesota Virtual Academy, which it turns out is not a state school at all, but rather a private K12inc. school endorsed by a local school district.  I called the school directly to find out more, but there wasn't anyone there that could help.  I asked if they were part of the Minnesota Virtual Academy system and they said that they "thought so", but they thought incorrectly.  They also told me that they were public and part of the state initiative?  This snafu made me realize that virtual schools can be confusing to parents, students, and most importantly ME!  I wondered if it would be easier if I were an actual motivated parent/student in MN and wanted to investigate options.  Would this information be known to me through mailings and school conferences or would I have to seek it out myself?  My phone conversation with a human at the school did not leave me with confidence.

I wanted to find schools in locations that lent themselves to geographic isolation (the various Hawaiian islands) or environmental burdens (weather) that would impact a student's desire for online learning.  I briefly considered looking at the Louisiana Virtual School because of the hardships that they have gone through particularly recently, but decided on Hawaii instead.  Aloha!

Keeping Pace broke down the various dimensions of online learning nicely and explained them in clear and concise terms.  I like how it touched on the resource allocation, quality - assessment and measurement, political, motivational, and pedagogical aspects of online learning. Who would have thought that there would be so much legislation and debate over seat time requirements for virtual learners?  Isn't learning learning?

As a parent, how would I have found Keeping Pace?  I'm not the intended audience, but it is still a valuable read to a wider population.

I didn't get the concept of a district school.  It seems like it would just create pockets of privilege.  If costs can be shared elsewhere, why not demand at the state level that all EDU resources be shared?  Maybe district specific content would not make sense in the context of another district, but why not share the AP courses?  Content generated in one district should be made available to others.

"You're not required to use it, but if you are interested, district X will share."

I also got the sense that there is a lot of redundancy.  In the early part of any movement it is better not to standardize too early and try out myriad ideas, but from briefly reading over some of the other school sites, it seems that all of them are touting their efforts as revolutionary.  How many revolutions can we have?

Interesting things that I learned this week:

• Hawaii claims they were they had the second State Virtual School in the Nation.
• Some students take online courses for credit recovery.
• Some kids take online courses that are also offered at their school f2f, but conflict with classes that they would rather take f2f.  For example, a student took english online instead of f2f, to make room in her schedule for an AP class at her school with a great teacher.
• Parents are involved in the registration process for online classes to make sure that they are involved.
• Students have to take a computer literacy test before registering for class to make sure that they are ready online learning.  If they do not pass, they must take a remedial prep course. 
• The smallest schools in the state love the system and feel connected.
• Students connect from school during a specially designated E-School period.
• There's a consensus that Online Learning is not for everyone and that it should be one of many options for improving how students learn.

Next week, we'll go to the opposite weather extreme and take a look at a virtual charter school in the 49th state!

First thoughts

My mental model of online schooling had been somewhat narrow with students mainly connecting to resources from home. Our intro reading has broadened my view. I've learned that there are many models for online schools and schooling to explore. I really like the concept of online schools within traditional schools and third places. Third places were always in the back of my mind, as much of my volunteer work has been based out of libraries, but the idea of going to school to connect elsewhere never really made sense to me. I have always made the assumption that if you have to go to school to connect elsewhere, the school probably wouldn't have the resources to do so. I hope I get hit in the head with little things like this every class.

I find it frustrating that there is not a standard set of tools for online coursework. I am not alone in this, as several other students have mentioned this as well. Maybe this will only be the case until TC migrates over to moodle.... but then again, what happens if I take courses at a different university or even another school at Columbia? Will I need yet another new registration?

About Me

Hi!

My name is Alejandro Heyworth and I am in the Computing in Education program. My undergrad degree is in EECS from MIT and I have spent my years since school successfully developing and applying technology in fields that I have passion for including interactive entertainment, education, and finance. I would like to compliment my tutoring and volunteer teaching experience with formal training here at TC to improve teacher (especially volunteer teacher) efficiency through innovation. I have encountered a ton of people with strong and diverse skill sets with neither the time nor energy for a full time commitment, but who are still eager to contribute. Given these human resources, I am looking to explore ways to maximize their efforts. While I am a born and bred New Yorker, I am currently living in Cambridge, MA and telecommute to work and school back in NY!

This course is my first experience with formalized bidirectional "virtual learning." I have watched and listened to many lectures, run managed simulations, read journals, publications, source code, and other resources online and have learned a great deal, but those experiences were not interactive in the way that I think this class will be. While those experiences were very technology interactive through multimedia and simulation, they were not socially so... Socially static. No participation. No human feedback.

It was only me and the machine learning things that I was already interested in and committed to learning. If I had questions, I would search for my answers elsewhere online. These efforts were successful because I learned what I wanted and needed to learn, but I don't know if the same process would work when trying to learn something that you're not interested or invested in.

I am eager to explore how virtual schooling can be used to combat distance, resource, closed thought, and scaling limitations of conventional learning environments without suffering from technoisolationism.