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