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 Reading through case studies and comparisons, I realized many were out-of-date or had sampling inconsistencies that made the research result almost invalid.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!