Week #11

What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week? 

It seems like all research studies, face-to-face and online, have their flaws or limitations but that doesn't mean that we can't learn from them. For example, I have to say that I really appreciated Haavind's attempt to look for concrete evidence for promoting learner interaction. I think her findings provide really practical information that a teacher can use and I think that this is really important. I think I mentioned in my previous post that I would love to see more studies along these lines -- ones that really focused on practical strategies. Having just returned from AERA, I keep thinking about if (or how?) online instructors get access to research in online learning. I know that some of the virtual schools that we studied do provide training/professional development for their teachers, including VHS, but I wonder how many these opportunities focus on what's currently being studied. And while AERA provides a great for sharing the latest research in online learning (although I felt like the options on this topic were limited this year) I wonder how many online teachers take advantage of conferences such as these? Does dissemination only happen among researchers and graduate students?

Week #10

What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week?

One thing that I learned in this week's readings/discussions is that some the factors that make it difficult to study f2f courses are the same factors that make it diffult to study online courses. For example, there are too many variables that can't be controlled for including the student's history with the content (perhaps this is their 2nd time in the course or they've had exposure to the content through their parents, the variations in the curriculum and the way in which the content is taught, and whether or not the student is getting (or not getting) extra help at home. All of these uncontrollable variables can have an impact on the study results. This can also make study results difficult to generalize to other situations.

I also thought that it was interesting that there do seem to be a lot of studies affirming the fact that online learning is as effective as f2f learning but few studies on what makes the online course effective. I think this is interesting because in our earlier readings, there was a lot of discussion about the transparency of online interactions -- it's easy to monitor teacher-student, student-student, teacher-parent interactions. It would seem like virtual schools would be able to, with a lot of careful planning, run some sort of qualitative study that carefully analyzed these interactions to determine what worked and why? Perhaps in the future...