There are two fundamental equalizers in life - the Internet and education. E-learning eliminates the barriers of time and distance, creating universal learning-on-demand opportunities for people, companies and countries.

John Chambers
President and CEO, Cisco Systems

With its ability to provide anywhere, anytime learning opportunities to students beyond the classroom walls, online education is fundamentally changing the way we learn and educate. It's becoming a highly effective tool for education reform.

The Virtual High School (VHS) has become the most successful e-ducation killer app at the high school level. VHS has proven that you can successfully offer rigorous and yet innovative academic courses via the Internet. Its success in part is due to breaking new ground in online course delivery. Instead of modeling itself after corporate online training, where the emphasis is on self-paced training, online tests and quizzes, and one-way communication from instructor to student, VHS prefers learning to take place in a scheduled, asynchronous, interactive, virtual environment.

In the virtual classroom, comments are not limited to a traditional class session. Asynchronous communication and threaded discussion groups allow students the time to reflect on one another's discussions. Students who need more time to craft their response or who are hesitant to respond in a face-to-face classroom find the asynchronous environment more comfortable, and they are more willing to share their thoughts with their classmates. Others use the greater flexibility to syntheisze materials from their course with other online resources before they post in-depth comments. In this virtual classroom environment, VHS students have demonstrated high levels of student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction. Many times, students continue to read and post responses to other students' comments long after the virtual class bell has rung.

Because VHS NetCourses are asynchronous, students from Ohio can learn and interact in the same virtual classroom with students in Amman, Jordan (see pg 6). They can even respond to one another's discussions and work together as team members on long- and short-range scheduled assignments.

A recent evaluation by SRI International gave VHS high marks for the overall quality of courses it offered. But getting to this level of online course quality has required VHS to learn from its mistakes as it ventures into the new territory of e-ducation. Not content to accept conventional wisdom which derides online courses as substandard education, VHS has placed a high priority on offering NetCourses that are at or above the quality of traditional classroom courses.

A major factor in providing quality courses is maintaining high standards of teacher training. VHS teachers are trained in online pedagogy. They learn to moderate online discussions, facilitate group and project-based work, and assess student learning in an online environment.

Based on SRI's evaluation of the first round of teacher training, VHS implemented additional evaluation criteria for the Teachers Learning Conference, the professional development NetCourse that prepares VHS teachers for online teaching. The more rigorous training standards were instituted in order to decrease the variability in course preparation and course difficulty. A NetCourse Evaluation Board was convened to set standards for course design and delivery. VHS faculty advisors also give assistance to VHS teachers. As a result, teachers now feel more prepared and their NetCourses are less variable in quality and expectations.

Progress has also been made in increasing the diversity of students served, with 58% coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in the second year of VHS. During this same period, students from a wider variety of academic backgrounds participated, due in part to an increase in the number of non-honors courses offered. VHS learned that opening more courses to any VHS student allows a greater variety of students, not just the academically superior, to participate. In the area of gender equity, VHS continues to enroll relatively equal numbers of male and female students.

Virtual High School is giving school administrators the chance to not only think outside the educational box, but to reframe the box itself. E-ducation is helping students learn in a graphical and interactive environment, on their own schedule.

Students nowadays live and play in Internet time, having access to resources anytime, anyplace. Now they can learn in Internet time too.

Liz Pape is the VHS administrator.
liz@concord.org

*"Killer app" is the term used to describe the application that makes a mass market for a promising technology.

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