UPDATE: One more reason for establishing more online learning: kids with illnesses
Ever since I read Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
Over the past several months we have also been dealing with an economic situation that has even threatened some school district budgets leading some districts to cut staff. And still, for the most part, we remain steadfastly married to our traditional structures.
One year ago I took steps to begin some part-time online teaching for two reasons: 1) to learn more about the pedagogy of the online classroom and 2) to diversify my skill set and expand my employment options. Fortunately I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in a subject area outside of education which makes it easy for me to apply for many college-level online adjunct positions in that content area. This has been a very rewarding and productive endeavor.
What I have discovered however, is that colleges and universities — and many private or for-profit K-12 virtual schools — include free training as part of the interview and hiring process, while some of the public (state-run) virtual schools require potential teachers to pay for their own state-approved training program (usually in the neighborhood of $500 per course) before being hired. There is a very strong message in both of those approaches — one says “welcome, come on in and we will prepare you for this” and the other says “sure, you can do this, as long as we don’t have to invest in your development…”
As I watch the current news about the potential Swine Flu pandemic and I read recent blog posts regarding the need for practicing online teaching and learning so that one can shift online if a state of emergency is declared (I love Brit’s suggestion of doing once-per-year weeklong “online drills”) and “laptops as response to emergency”, I can’t help but reflect back on my earlier thoughts about how unprepared our system is for anything outside of the traditional approach to education. We don’t even consider it a priority to train teachers (for free) to be able to teach online. At the very least we could set up state-approved certifications based on an exam rather than one-size-fits-all fee-based training, and allow teachers to just take a certification exam.
There are many good reasons to begin making the shift to more online or blended learning experiences in our classrooms — including emergency situations such as a major flu outbreak, snow & ice storms, or a hurricane — but we are not making the investment in this as we should be. I pray that we don’t see a widespread outbreak of this flu, but if we do then we are extremely unprepared for ensuring that learning continues even if the schools are shut down for health & safety reasons. It may be too late to prepare in this particular situation, but it’s not too late to begin preparing for future emergencies — as well as to just innovate to ensure that we can meet the needs of many students who aren’t well served by our current traditional structures.
A few things we can start doing now:
- Make more of an effort to implement 1:1 across all schools and districts
- Ensure that ALL teachers are trained and have experience in facilitating online learning
- Let go of our belief that “seat time” is the only way to measure learning or productivity
- Enable employees — including teachers — to access the network remotely via VPN
- As a society, realize that schools are not babysitters — students should stay home if they are sick
What else would you add to this list?
Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.
I totally agree with you. I think online teaching is the future of teaching
Today’s educational system was designed over 100 years ago and is not in tune with the changing world. Schools need to embrace online learning as one option for reaching students. The “Swine Flu” just brings to light a problem that schools are not ready to face if they have to shut their doors for and extended period of time. On-line learning is one solution to helping solve this problem of containment and stopping its spread.
When the 2003 outbreak of SARS occurred in Hong Kong, the government quickly closed all the schools. The Hong Kong International School moved to create their “Virtual School” for students remaining in Hong Kong and those who chose to return to their home countries. Many valuable lessons were learned with a major one being that the students needed their social connections more than ever as the isolation set in. We used simple Web pages, email, MP3 voice recordings, phones, etc. to run our online learning community.
A major follow up to prepare for the possibility of Virtual School to be initiated again was as Brit points out, the setting aside of one week each year to use the new Web 2.0 tools (e.g., Moodle, wikis, etc.)as a part of the regular curricular activities.
Another lesson learned was that the door to using more Information and Communication literacies as well as shifting our teaching practices to a more student-centered, digitally collaborative model was really opened.
Stephanie, you really have an important message for instructional technologists, curriculum coordinators and administrators to use the current situation to help their schools prepare for virtual learning while making the shift to more Learning 2.0 practices in their schools.
[...] on how to prepare for the possibility of school closure, check out Britt Watwood and Stephanie Sandifer’s recent [...]
Here is a link to a video that illustrates how 3D immersive environments could help in the event of school closure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL0buS1FZnk.
Companies, schools, universities and military and government institutions in many countries have been using 3D immersive virtual worlds for training, education and collaboration. I have been personally involved in this field for the last three years, helping companies to use virtual worlds for conferences, meetings, training, health care education, etc.
Based on that experience, I am convinced that these 3D virtual worlds would be well-suited to allow the school to continue to operate in the case of swine flu closure. Teachers could continue to teach, students present their homework assignments to the class, Hong Kong government officials answer questions about health issues, and parents attend meetings. All without the risk of infection.
[...] distance learning professor discusses how accessible online teaching credentials are for traditional campus professors, allowing them to expand their teaching options beyond the classroom when the need demands it. [...]
It is amazing that the swine flu outbreak brought so much attention to online teaching.
My company, Tutoring Match, is launching instant online tutoring with 24/7 live customer support this month. We will supply our tutors with free online training tools and tips. We have posted on our blog what we believe are the advantages to online learning. Take a look: http://tutoringmatch.wordpress.com/?s=online+tutoring.
Henry