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DENVER (CBS4) – State lawmakers got a lesson in online schools on Thursday.
About 1,000 people rallied at the Capitol to talk about the benefits of learning from home over the Internet.
Students even set up classrooms to talk about the flexibility of online learning.
For the rest of the article, go to State Lawmakers Get A Lesson On Online Schools
“Last year alone 16 states passed legislation related to online learning. We’re expecting just as many this year,” she said. “It’s about access, it’s about quality and it’s about creating new learning models.”
Patrick says right now 33 states allow full-time online learning programs. 55 percent of all public school districts offer online classes or online learning programs.
Last fall some of Colorado’s full-time online schools came under scrutiny for poor student performance, high dropout rates and inefficient use of taxpayer dollars.
For the rest of the article, go to Online K-12 School Leaders Discuss Policy ‘Roadmap’
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 55 percent of all school districts in the nation offered some form of distance or online learning in 2009-2010. The majority of these were in the country’s Central and Western regions and involved smaller rural districts similar to those in Teller.
In Colorado, according to a June 2011 report from the Colorado Department of Education, 45 of the state’s 178 school districts are certified to offer multi-district, full-time single-district or part-time single-district online programs. Colorado jumped on the virtual-school phenomena in 2007 when legislators created the Colorado Department of Education’s Unit of Online Learning.
For the rest of the article, go to Making the news in 2011
Everybody gets confused by the parade of studies on whether charter schools or traditional schools produce better student achievement. A new report by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education claims to clear up the confusion by studying the studies.
That “meta-analysis,” in the words of a news release, “reviewed the 40 existing high-quality studies of charter school achievement and scientifically combined the results.” The review concludes charters are doing somewhat better in lower grades but that charter and traditional results are similar in high school. Learn more
Another report, this one from researchers at CU-Boulder, calls for “immediate” regulation of K-12 virtual schools. The report, titled Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S.: Uncertain Private Ventures in Need of Public Regulation, was released Tuesday by the National Education Policy Center and is by CU education professors Gene V. Glass and Kevin G. Welner. An accompanying report, Model Legislation Related to Online Learning Opportunities, comes from University of Kentucky education professor and attorney Justin Bathon and offers statutory language to bring state policies in line with the research.
“There’s zero high-quality research evidence that full-time virtual schooling at the K-12 level is an adequate replacement for traditional face-to-face teaching and learning,” Welner said.
According to Glass, “Private operators are gaining access to large streams of public revenue to run cyber schools. But the public is not getting full information on the actual costs of these programs, so it’s not clear if taxpayer money is being used properly.”
For the rest of the article, go to Wednesday Churn: Obama’s back
Don’t underestimate yourself. It’s advice that every educator has provided to students at one time or another. Yet this time it came from Jillian Conrad, an incoming senior at Jeffco’s 21st Century Virtual Academy in Golden, CO, outside Denver, who was speaking as a panelist at a session at the recent International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. The panel also included another student, Britnee Osteen, as well as Judy Bauernschmidt, director of student online learning at the academy.
Conrad’s comment was in response to a question from Julie Evans, CEO of the nonprofit education group Project Tomorrow, which co-hosted the session along with e-learning solutions provider Blackboard. Evans asked the panelists what advice they would give to the educators in the audience. Conrad opened with, “Don’t be afraid to engage with the younger generation because of the gap in knowledge about technology. Don’t underestimate yourself.”
For the rest of the article, go to In the Company of Sages
Online learning is spreading quickly in U.S. schools, with 27 percent of high school students saying they were enrolled in at least one online course in 2009, nearly double the 14 percent enrolled in 2008, according a newly released update to a 2007 study.
Further, online learning appears to run in the family, according to the report released by Blackboard K-12 and Project Tomorrow at the ISTE 2010 ed-tech conference Tuesday morning. Students with a parent who had taken an online course were twice as likely to take or explore taking their own virtual course. And more parents than ever—33 percent—reported having enrolled in an online course for work or pleasure.
“I think that that’s just a little piece of something bigger that’s going on,” said Jessie Woolley-Wilson, Blackboard K-12 president, who suggested that parents’ interest could be sparked by students’ online courses. “The archetypes … are changing. Teachers are students. Students are teachers. And so our notion of a linear learning curve that is completely dictated by your age and by your grade and all this stuff, it all blows up.”
But while students, parents, teachers and administrators all appear to be more open to online learning, the infrastructure to accommodate that demand is still evolving—and at this point still falling short, the survey finds.
For the rest of the article, go to Tracking E-Learning Growth
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