The instructional potential of the Internet is extraordinary. Yet schools have hardly scratched its surface. With the assistance of a five-year U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant, the Hudson (Massachusetts) Public Schools, the Concord Consortium Educational Technology Lab, and 30 collaborating high schools across the nation have begun a bold and far-reaching experiment to realize this potential through the development of a virtual high school over the Internet. Through Internet-based courses, Virtual High School significantly enhances the curricular offerings of each school and integrates the best that technology can offer into the academic curriculum.
Virtual High School is built on a simple concept. Each school in the collaborative selects one or two innovative and technologically adept faculty members to teach over the Internet. These teachers receive training in how to teach netcourses, engage students, maximize the use of Internet-based resources, and utilize the best in multimedia technology. In exchange for releasing each teacher to teach one netcourse, the school is able to register 20 students to take netcourses offered by any of the participating schools. Because the teachers for these 20 students may be in 20 different schools, each school provides release time for a site coordinator who acts as a guidance counselor and technical advisor for students in that school who are taking netcourses.
- Advanced courses, including advanced placement courses; advanced electives such as "Modeling and Calculus;" or advanced literature courses in any language.
- Innovative core academic courses that maximize the use of technology, such as "Writing Through Hypertext," a simulations course on "Economics and the Budget Debate," or the "Global Lab" environmental studies course that uses online collaboration among students worldwide.
- Courses for language minorities, so that small groups of students from a particular language background for whom individual schools are not able to offer a bilingual program can take courses in their native language.
- Technical courses built around the very technology we are using, such as "Network Operations" and "Robotics."
In September 1997, Virtual High School teachers began offering 29 courses to more than 550 students from 27 high schools. The initial set of courses includes such titles as "Microbiology," "Model United Nations," "Informal Geometry," "Writing through Hypertext," "Business in the 21st Century," "Stellar Astronomy," "Bioethics," "Advanced Placement Statistics," "Economics and the Budget Debate," "Poetics and Poetry for Publications," "Programming in C++," and "Music Composition."
Virtual Classes, Real Benefits
Virtual High School provides four unique benefits for schools and students. First, it significantly expands curricular offerings. For example, many high schools cannot offer advanced or specialized courses because enrollment is too low to economically justify the course. Through netcourses, however, small groups of students at a number of high schools can fill these courses.
Second, it provides technology-rich instruction. Netcourses give students experience in telecollaboration and the use of software tools in the context of serious academic instruction. Netcourses provide learners experience with e-mail, online working groups, and online conferencing. They challenge students to learn how to use the medium to communicate well, present data authoritatively, and demonstrate effective research skills.
Third, Virtual High School brings unprecedented resources to schools. Students learn how to access the wealth of data on the Internet. From exploring primary source material at the Library of Congress to accessing scientific databases to conversing with experts, students can take their learning far beyond textbooks into the real world of open-ended problems and unanswered questions.
Finally, Virtual High School significantly enhances teachers' skills in technology that can extend to their regular classroom instruction. There is probably no better way for teachers to become adept at telecollaboration and using a wide range of software tools than to make daily use of them in their instruction.
New Approaches to Instruction
Although netcourses provide unique benefits for education, they are a challenge to organize and teach. Netcourse instruction is different from regular classroom instruction and requires a particular approach to be successful. One cannot simply transfer a traditional course into the Internet environment. A number of netcourse design characteristics that match technology and quality education have emerged:
Asynchronous communication. Netcourses need to make effective use of asynchronous communication that does not require the sender and receiver to be present at the same time. These asynchronous technologies include electronic mail, conferencing, and news groups. Synchronous technologies, such as two-way voice and video, real-time chats, and shared applications, require two or more users to be present at the same time. Asynchronous communication is more adaptable to a person's schedule, works far better across time zones, and usually requires less technology.
Seminar model. Many teachers who experiment with online courses report being overwhelmed with enrollments of only 10 or 12 students because they set up e-mail conversations with each student. The better model is more like a seminar, in which the teacher determines the topic and activities, encourages substantive interactions among students, monitors and shapes the conversation, and promotes an atmosphere in which students respond to one another's work. This model results in more conversation, is far more likely to be constructivist, and builds on the rich learning that takes place in groups.
Technology-rich instruction. Access to the Internet and multimedia computing is a requirement for netcourses. Participants need to utilize all the resources of the Internet—data, images, references, current events, and expertise. Because of the general isolation that a student taking a netcourse may experience, a text-based course will not hold interest. Teachers need to use all available technology resources—including digitized images, short audio and video clips, graphics, conferencing, and multimedia presentations—to bring students in contact with one another and the reference world within the network.
Project-based learning. In addition to maximizing the use of technology to engage students, netcourses need to create forms of instruction that actively involve students. Projects that are posted for the whole class, simulations and gaming that involve the class in role-playing, and collaborative investigations are strategies that provide the kind of hands-on engagement that breaks away from the static medium of text-based communication.
Netcourses have some obvious disadvantages as well, the most significant being the lack of face-to-face communication. Interpersonal communication is far richer than electronic communication. Responses are immediate, non-verbal cues enhance communication, and group dynamics become an important part of the message.
The lack of this kind of communication, however, may serve some students well. Often in classrooms, the social dynamics of the group dictates who responds and who is acknowledged.
In the rapid-fire exchanges of the classroom, those who think the most quickly are often the most vocal. A netcourse brings freedom from these restraints. Virtual High School students enter a new social environment that does not carry their personal history into each course. It gives students the time to think through an answer and shifts attention from articulate speech to articulate writing and presentation. Netcourses offer opportunities for students to demonstrate unique abilities that they may have not been able to exhibit in the regular classroom.
Freedom from Time and Place
Netcourses have a number of built-in advantages compared to traditional courses. The asynchronous communication can be more inclusive than classroom discussions, the seminar model provides for stronger collaborations, and the full use of information technologies gives teachers and students facility in their application.
But one of the greatest advantages is that netcourses can be offered any time and any place. Thus they can reach new audiences, utilize new teachers, and tailor instruction. Homeschooled students, students who are too ill to attend school, and students who live in rural communities can have the same rich curriculum as anyone else. A netcourse faculty can easily be a worldwide team of experts, as netcourses make it feasible for far more people to share their time and knowledge with interested learners. Because netcourses have a global reach, teachers can tailor them to serve learners, from special needs students to language-minority students to students interested in a highly specialized topic. The ability to use new kinds of teachers to reach new, widely scattered and specialized audiences means that netcourses can have an impact both within the traditional structure of the high school and far beyond that structure as well.
Virtual High School can never replace the experience of being in a positive social learning environment within a school. Yet this project opens a new medium for education that can merge the best in instructional practice with the best in current technology.
