In the twenty years I have been doing research and development on the ways technology can improve education, rarely has an idea gained acceptance as quickly as our Virtual High School (VHS) project.

By most measures - participant satisfaction, growth, publicity, interest - VHS is in a league by itself. Three years into a five-year grant, we already have reached our major milestones. We now are in the unaccustomed position of trying to satisfy more demand than our funding anticipated.

The key to VHS success is its cooperative nature, in which schools who contribute courses can enroll students in any of the courses offered by other schools. Because of our organizational structure, there is no tuition and no increase in the teaching load. This year, 34 schools are offering 40 courses to about 500 students in these schools. More districts and even states want to join than we can support with our original funding. To respond to this interest, we have created two options for new participants.

A limited number of schools can join the funded VHS project. Preference will be given to schools that increase the diversity of participating students. Groups of schools can join the project, but if the group is larger than four schools, we have to charge a fee for our costs. This strategy will allow us to expand to over 200 schools in the last year of funding, with approximately 300 teachers prepared to teach NetCourses when the funding ends in summer 2001.

Groups can create their own VHS cooperatives. Our service arm, CC Services, is prepared, through fee-based workshops and services, to transfer our experience, technology, administrative knowledge, and professional development materials to projects that want to create their own VHS. Our dream is that our VHS project will become only one of several sister VHS cooperatives, all using similar technologies and structures and sharing high-quality courses. Some of the new VHS projects might be administered by large districts, intermediate units, or states. In addition, hardware vendors, associations of schools, or educational units within other countries might sponsor other VHS cooperatives. While many students would take NetCourses within their cooperative, others might register for unusual courses offered by other cooperatives. Courses would be free for most students because they would be offered by schools in exchange for the right to enroll their own students in other courses. Some entrepreneurial schools might, however, charge tuition. This might serve students who do not belong to cooperating schools or it might be a way of coping with over-enrollment in very popular courses.

The key to making an expanded VHS work will be shared standards for NetCourse design, course quality, and teacher preparation. In our first @CONCORD I made a call for voluntary standards. More recently, we created a NetCourse Evaluation Board representing a broad range of educators. This effort will culminate in a set of VHS standards that can serve as voluntary quality standards for all online courses.

It is sometimes difficult to move educational developments from the lab into wider use. Sometimes that's because developments deserve to die. Others should be turned over to companies who have the resources and orientation to create large-scale products. For VHS, however, this is not feasible.

Our plan for expanding the VHS project on a fee basis, while simultaneously seeding new projects, is a unique dissemination strategy which we think can benefit everyone.

Robert Tinker is President of The Concord Consortium. Bob@concord.org

Copyright © 1999 The Concord Consortium, All rights reserved. Last updated: 26-Feb-99
Questions and comments regarding this site can be sent to webmaster@concord.org