Week 11 Reflection

This week, I found how difficult it is to learn about virtual schools. Although f2f vs online courses should continue to be researched, I believe it's just very difficult to get the data needed especially because: 1) too many variance of LMS and online learning systems out in the market; 2) private for-profit educational companies like K-12 does not release its contents; and 3) technologies continues to evolve at a rapid rate.

Regardless, I believe it's critical we come up with a system to evaluate these classes, teachers, and students, to see if online learning is truly effective or not. I also think it'd be good to have an independent rater of cyber schools and courses so that consumers (parents and students) can know all about them before making important decisions.

Week 10 Reflection

This week, it was interesting to find out about two things: difficulty in comparing online vs. traditional f2f class and socialization in online schools. Reading through case studies and comparisons, I realized many were out-of-date or had sampling inconsistencies that made the research result almost invalid. The type of students, subject matter, and instructor involvement all factor in comparing the two models. Consequently, it's difficult to assess the true effectiveness of virtual schools and compare to the traditional f2f school, simply due to limited data. I believe there needs to be a transparent data showing the effectiveness of all virtual courses, not merely stating that the VS has met the state minimum requirement. There should be either governmental agency or a "watchdog" that monitors all virtual schools. In a f2f school, teachers and schools are often evaluated and watched. In an online environment, the same can be easily achieved or very hard to obtain - all data are accumulated online, making it easy to track progress and results; conversely, with so much variance in platforms and tools, schools can just as easily manipulate or hide damaging negative data. It's definitely a big challenge, but as more courses go online and online learners are expected to continuously grow, we must find a way to do a better research with virtual schools providing a clear and visible data.

The definition of socialization states, “the process whereby people acquire the rules of behavior and systems of beliefs and attitudes that equip a person to function effectively as a member of a particular society” (Medlin, 2000). According to this definition, I think virtual schooling would be good tool to prepare kids for socialization; the IESD research validates this, reporting that social skills of students enrolled in FT online public schools were either significantly higher or not significantly different than those attending traditional f2f schools. The result was somewhat surprising, although I had thought that although the socialization skills of online learners are different, I wouldn't have believed that they would be at least better or equal. For instance, many quiet or shy students tend to be much for sociable online compared to f2f in my experience, but they don't learn some other valuable social skill like public speaking. Like the study stated, more research needs to be done with more data, but I'm beginning to wonder if we'll ever go completely online one day and miss out other socialization skills necessary in the world; or maybe I might be wrong, and that's just how things will work in the future - maybe we'll come up with a virtual peer robots that studies and socialize with these kids!

Group Project

Although our group was the only group with 4 people in 3 completely different locations - NY, Seoul, and Sao Paulo - we were finally able to put everything together. It was not easy, to say the least, but along the way, I learned a lot about online learning environment. The pro was obvious; we were allowed to communicate freely with many tools such as the Instant Messenger (for our synchronous cyber meetings) and Google Docs (collaborate). On the other hand, we had difficult agreeing on few things because our interests were different. Additionally, being in different time zones with different schedule made it that much harder to fully collaborate together. I felt that the time zone variation significantly matters more than the actual distance (a student in FL and in NY would better collaborate than one in NY and the other in Beijing).

My job was the technical or the "fun" and engaging instructional design for a subject that can be deemed boring or difficult for ESL elementary students. I think "edutainment" combined with the right curriculum has great potential. Specifically, the social network educational games, if created right with the right set of supplemental materials (e.g. e-books) would make learning more "fun" and effective for younger students who are usually turned off by traditional learning methods. These are same students accustomed to growing up with the web 2.0 tools, smartphones, SNS; for us to expect them to learn like we did is unrealistic. I'm going to continue to design a gamed-based learning system that can be used in classrooms.

Week 7 Reflection

As I began to think about creating a unit for an online course, few things come to my mind. The key I suppose, is to make a course that can caters to various types of students no matter what background they are from. In addition, not everyone has access to all types of technologies, such as smartphones or laptops. My biggest worry is how to make the course "fun" and engaging while having just as powerful contents. There are guidelines such as iNACOL that we can follow, but to be truly effective in class, I think they need more than meeting minimum requirements. For example, although I love this class, I'm not sure if it'd be just as effective for typical K-12 students. From my experience, I just don't think students would participate more than the minimum requirement (i.e. number of posts per week). Not all students engage in multiple discussions on a discussion-based board online. It'd be the biggest challenge to have an online course both interesting and academic.

Week 6 Reflection

Looking at the two schools that I researched, Alabama ACCESS and Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS), my view of them has changed slightly. If I had to change anything on Google spreadsheet, it would be student-student interaction. Although these two schools are probably better than many other virtual schools or courses (especially given that blended learning allows f2f interaction in classrooms), they still don't allow much social interaction between the students. I definitely think that social interaction is just as, if not more, important than academic learning especially K-8 level.

In CVCS blended learning model, students focus on learning primarily with their parents at home using K-12 Inc. curriculum. There's hardly any communication at all with their peers. They look through web interactive lecture pages with adults and take assessments. In school, they are more likely to interact with their student friends, but it is limited to "playing" with each other or spending time with the teachers to ask questions. I'm a firm believer that learning together is very important skill to learn at a young age - learning about how others think will help them develop creativity and know what it's like to think outside the box. I have personally looked at K-12 Inc curriculum and it looks fantastic, but schools should teach social skills as well.

On the other hand ACCESS is mostly about taking a class, mostly advanced level or AP courses, for students who do not have resources at his/her school. As a result, there's hardly much student-student interaction, but many are high level students wanting to take extra classes. From my own experience, AP classes were lecture-style classes; consequently, I don't think students would lose out much, in term of student-student interaction, by taking real-time interactive videoconferencing (IVC) courses. AP courses are primarily designed to help students pass the AP exam to get an advanced college credit, so the motivation for actively following the class is already there. However, I still believe students would benefit by having greater student-student interaction (e.g. using an interactive board to discuss sample AP test Q&As).

I believe the two programs are headed in the right direction. Maybe it's because American students have lagged far behind many advanced countries in terms of scores and that is why more "academics" are in place, but I believe it will only result in lack of social skills and creativity if cyber schools don't start making changes for the better.

Week 5 Reflection

While reviewing the iNACOL standards, I noticed the changes that were made compared to traditional f2f teacher standards. I think more emphasis is placed on encouraging interaction and making a collaborative online learning environment. Additionally, prompt feedback as well as guiding ethical and safe usage were deemed important in the iNACOL standards. Although online contents should be more flexible in terms of teaching, I think the reality is that the teachers generally tend to follow rigid structure of course materials (e.g. K12, Inc. has a set curriculum and teachers don't deviate or use other materials as much as a f2f teacher using various supplemental materials in class).

I realize more and more that online teaching and f2f are really different even though it may look the same. Consequently, I think online teaching needs constant training and evaluation for quality assurance. There are more technology and resources available online and I think it's the teachers and administrators responsibility to implement and use them. I think that's where Chicago Virtual Charter School's "blended" learning method really would work well - using great K12, Inc. online curriculum and using various resources (e.g. doing a demo of a Google Map in a geography class in the f2f classroom) would really benefit the students. I'm really beginning to buy into the concept of the "blended" model - it has such a great potential and bring balance to f2f and online learning by utilizing the best of both worlds.

Week 4 Reflection

This week, I looked deeper into the two programs I have been researching - Alabama ACCESS and Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS). The biggest issue that I had was that Alabama state school did not have its demo session link working. I tried Google searching to search for a possible screenshot of ACCESS, but was unsuccessful. On the other hand, because CVCS was a virtual charter school, looking to draw more students, had more appeal and "open" sample courses and information. However, I did not like the feel that CVCS was a mere extension of K12, Inc. Browsing its website and comparing it to other schools like Utah Virtual Academy, they pretty much had the same look in different colors. However, I think K12 good job of making sure its online learning system adhered to the iNACOL standards.

In some ways, I think for-profit is better than state schools, at least in marketing itself. They have every incentive to attract clients and funding is not as big of an issue compared to state schools. I believe that state schools should be more proactive in promoting itself - just because its a requirement in some states that students take online classes or school does the marketing does not mean they can negate their "look" or appearance. One reason is because of the parents - they must get involved in the learning process of their kids or at least know what they are learning.