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...
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...
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