We had a successful online meeting with Dr. Michael Barbour at our distance education class. I had read some of his work before so I felt pretty excited for the opportunity. I hadn't thought very much about distance and K-12 education, but this is obviously a fruitful field. He gave us a brief history of things likek-12 online learning started in 1997; the first was was the F virtual school—used with state allocated funds.
We also discussed the difference between a "virtual school" (supplemental program, district/state based) and a "cyber school" (usually a district-based school, created under charter legislation).
We also discussed the difference between a "virtual school" (supplemental program, district/state based) and a "cyber school" (usually a district-based school, created under charter legislation).
Cyber charter schools have 70-80 kids per teacher, they use a model that the parent is considered one of the teacher and provides the primary instructional role. The cyber school providers the content, technology, a grader and a tutor.
An exciting part of the class (for me) had to do with a discussion Disrupting Class. Barbour has blogged extensively about this book, and I have written a humble review of it for Education Review. It appears that we had different views of the book :) I also later discovered that Jeb Bush (governor of FL, home of the first online school) is reading Disrupting Class, and apparently likes it. --no intent is given to state that Jeb Bush's reading materials do or do not merit endorsement.--
Another interesting thing we discussed is that there is no statistically significance in student performance in the F2F VS online courses. In fact, he seemed to think that perhaps only the “better” students are taking the online courses, in which case it might skew these results. In one case study he referenced those in the online classes got 11% lower grades than their f2f counterparts.
He pointed out that a lot of the distance learning strategies are built on learning for adults, which may be different from the learning style of adolescents. I think this is an important thing to think about as I try to create resources for youth - to study carefully about the ways in which they think and learn.
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1 comment:
Glad you had a chance to connect with Dr. Barbour. An interesting point that you reference I think tangentially is that online courses may or may not get better results than traditional face-to-face. As we tried to make the point in the book, this is probably right. It's not the online or computer-based medium per se that would help a student learn better (sometimes maybe, but it's not often the causal mechanism I would think), but instead the importance is learning opportunities targeted to how the best student is geared to learn the particular subject on a particular day. Computer-based learning has the opportunity to move us closer to this student-centric learning, although many online programs to this point have not realized or even attempted to realize these benefits. It's not a foregone conclusion they will either, but we hope that by writing the book they'll go in that student-centric direction.
Lastly, one other thing I'd add is that "online learning" doesn't always mean distance learning either. Apex Learning for example is generally used in a brick-and-mortar classroom with a physical teacher in the classroom playing the role of mentor.
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