More families than ever are embracing online education as a viable alternative to the traditional brick and mortar classroom
Nancy Spadgenske knew she had a bright kid. At the tender age of five, her son, Noah, was grasping upper-elementary math concepts and reading at a fifth grade level — and he hadn’t even started kindergarten yet. So, when it came time to consider options for his education, she worried that the pace of a traditional classroom in her Cold Spring, MN town might be too slow to challenge him.
Spadgenske instead chose a route that more parents are embracing: online education.
Virtually non-existent even 25 years ago, online elementary, middle, and high schools have cropped up all over the country in the last decade and established themselves as a legitimate alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar schools. The New York Times estimated that about half a million American children took classes online.
In Minnesota, online schools have emerged in both the public and private school systems and have seen immediate and marked climbs in enrollment. Online schools like iQ Academy, Minnesota Virtual Academy (MNVA), and BlueSky Online School offer Minnesota students like Noah an alternative to traditional education.
Many of these schools are associated with public school districts, and must comply with the same laws and offer the same accreditation options. But besides their traditional administrative buildings, these schools do it all in the virtual world.
For Noah, who enrolled at MNVA in its early years of operation, online school was a successful choice. He was able to work at his own pace and with tailored curriculum, and thrived academically as a result. His mother was so satisfied with the experience that she has since put two more kids into the MNVA system; all three are still enrolled as online students. “We love the way we can make it work for each of our individual children,” says Spadgenske. “We love the flexibility that gives us as a family.” The Spadgenskes’ success speaks to the enticements of online education. While no two online schools are the same, most share the common strengths that Spadgenske identified; strengths that appeal to many students for whom traditional school simply doesn’t work: the chance to tailor curriculum to the students’ needs, and the opportunity to make school a lot more convenient.
specialization
Online high schools are swiftly becoming a viable solution for children who work too fast, or too slow, for a traditional classroom setting. The online structure places children on a lesson trajectory but allows them to move at their own pace, and often offers multiple ways of learning a lesson to maximize comprehension.
“The biggest benefit is getting to work with kids at their specific ability level,” says Justin Treptow, vice-principal at MNVA. “We can tailor the curriculum to find ways to challenge them. They can get a lot of one-on-one instruction.”
The ability to tailor education is built into the way most online schooling works. Students are usually assigned a “home-room” with a specific teacher who uses that forum (at MNVA, they use “Elluminate”) to conduct lessons and post announcements, assignments, exams, and grades. The school day is spent tuning in to recorded lessons and working through material; so unlike traditional classrooms, where teachers have to stick with a pace that often leaves some kids behind and others bored, online schooling gives students more control over the speed of their learning.
And while students are not exactly “face-to-face” with a teacher, they have multiple ways to seek one-on-one help on lessons they don’t understand, thanks to chatrooms, email, and video-calling to name a few. Online teachers are available throughout the day.
Spadgenske said that MNVA caters to the fact that each of her three children learn differently and have unique strengths.
“We can mold the lessons and methods so that it works for each of them,” Spadgenske says. “I love that part of the school.”
Gina Giesen of Belle Plaine, who has two high-school age children enrolled in online classes, says that the system takes differences in learning styles into account by incorporating reading, listening, and visual components and allowing students to watch lessons over and over again. And that specialization, Giesen says, has pushed her kids through the material both more quickly and more thoroughly than they experienced in traditional school.
“Being able to work at one’s pace means moving ahead on concepts understood and simply results in more advanced learning,” Giesen says. “Six hours is six hours of study. No waiting for teachers, moving from class to class, building to building.”
Online schools face the same requirements as traditional classrooms; students are expected to achieve at least a year’s academic growth in a year’s time. But MNVA Principal Angela Specketer, who has taught in both a traditional and an online setting, said that the structure of online education allows students to achieve that growth in a more individualized way.
“You can truly meet kids where they are academically,” Specketer says. “That is much harder to do in a classroom.”
convenience
For kids with time constraints — like vigorous athletic schedules or illnesses that require them to be in and out of the hospital — the flexibility of online schooling can be a grade-saver. Some schools also allow students to combine online classes with on-site education at another school to get the credits they need.
For the most part, students are free to put in their daily hours when it best works for them; pre-recorded lessons and curriculum allows for that flexibility. Online students can “go to class” anywhere, any time, as long as there’s an internet connection.
“A day in the life of an online schooler starts whenever it works best for them,” says Giesen. “They do their classes in whatever order they want. They spend as much time as they need. MNVA is a lifestyle.”
For Giesen’s kids, online school has opened up otherwise unfeasible opportunities. Her daughter Addie, a figure-skater, can practice during the day; her son can snowboard. Both children have taken on small daytime jobs, like letting the neighbors’ dogs out for a lunchtime break.
And contrary to the commonly held belief that online students’ social skills suffer, Giesen says her kids actually have more time to take part in social activities.
Spadgenske agrees. “Being enrolled in MNVA allows my kids the flexibility of doing more social activities that they enjoy,” like weekly volunteering, sports, and theater, she says.
MNVA, like many online schools, makes a concerted effort to connect its students with others in the community, says Treptow. The school constructs its “home-rooms” based on geography and offers events for kids in those areas; there are grade-specific events, class-specific gatherings, and less frequent schoolwide get-togethers. And like any school MNVA also offers clubs and societies. Students who want to participate in sports can do so through local brick-and-mortars.
All in all, Giesen says, it can add up to multiple event offerings in one week. “We have to choose what we will do and what we won’t.”
uniting factors
Whatever aspect of online education speaks to them most, Treptow says, most families who make the choice to switch to online schools have one thing in common: for some reason, the “traditional” route wasn’t working. “Students come here looking for a different setting. We try to help them to find that niche.”
For Giesen’s kids, online schooling was the best answer to a serious problem: bullying.
“Plainly put,” she says, “my kids were teased brutally and the public school system did nothing about it. The teachers loved my kids. But the [other] kids walked all over them.”
Both Addie and Jacob struggled to fit into the local public school system and suffered at the hands of their peers; Addie, who had always “loved school,” eventually stopped wanting to go. At that point, Giesen says, she knew “traditional” school was no longer an option, and withdrew her kids to home-school them herself.
She noticed an immediate change, she says, as both began to “blossom into their own person.” But the logistics of home-schooling were a challenge — their local school district didn’t supply textbooks and Giesen couldn’t afford to purchase quality curriculum, so she used the library to find and read material, write her own curriculum, assign and correct work and tests … for two different grade levels.
Then she discovered MNVA. After researching the accreditation and the curriculum, Giesen signed Addie up for a “trial year”; Jacob enrolled the next fall.
On paper, Addie and Jacob’s high school experience is the same as their “traditional” public-school peers. They study similar curriculum, take the same standardized tests, and earn the same high school diploma. But since they started doing it all online, they’ve had a much better experience than when they left the house for school every day. “I feel this is the future of education,” Giesen says.
challenges
Although virtual schools can end up looking like an easy fix, they still face a number of challenges in continuing to increase their enrollment. To start, there’s a basic barrier that prevents many kids from signing up for online schools: the need for parental guidance. Although online education is a far cry from home-schooling, it often calls for involvement from a designated ‘mentor’ (usually a parent/guardian), especially in the early grades.
At MNVA that ‘mentor’ is known as a ‘learning coach,’ and it’s a requirement in the earlier grades. Many elementary school lessons call for parents to engage kids in non-computer activities or help them assemble materials like crayons, markers, and scissors.
“In K-8, our students rely on having an adult at home,” says Specketer. “Our teaching model falls apart if we don’t have that.”
And while direct parent supervision is not explicitly necessary in the high school grades, the online system requires students to be very self-motivated — something that is not always a given in the teenage years.
There’s also the simple fact not all online schools are created equal. Ron Packard, founder of nationwide education company K¹² Inc., told radio host Bill Bennet that the online school system is fraught with challenges, and some systems simply aren’t up to the task.
“Not all online learning works,” Packard said. “We’ve learned over the last decade that it is very difficult to deliver high-quality online learning.”
Packard says he’s seen a tendency among online curriculum writers to sacrifice rigor and soften the content. But, he says, the most successful online schools offer rigorous and in-depth material, well-written texts and — very importantly — websites that are extremely engaging.
“A lot of people put a textbook on the web and think it’s a course,” Packard says. “Online learning shouldn’t be as good as sitting in a course — it should almost be better.”
There’s particular qualities of a great online classroom that administrators have picked up on over the last few years, Packard says, like providing content that flips through pages rather than scrolling, because students’ comprehension of the material below the scroll-line decreases dramatically. The best online schools factor in those dynamics.
Online teachers face the challenge of picking up on those details with only about a decade’s worth of research to pull from. To compound the problem, being an online teacher can seem like an entirely different job from heading a classroom, says Specketer. The cues teachers become attuned to in a classroom, like those that indicate a student’s level of understanding and engagement, are different than the signals students give out in a virtual environment.
“It’s kind of like removing a sense,” Specketer says. “You have to learn to use different cues besides the visual ones. You have to be ready to ask more questions, and different questions.”
controversy
Despite the challenges, online schooling advocates are waving success rates in the face of critics. Indeed, the industry has ways to address many of the same-old criticisms of distance education: that it’s ineffective, uninspiring, and leaves students lacking crucial social skills.
K¹² states that children enrolled in its curriculum from grades K–4 score an average of 20 points higher than their traditionally-schooled peers on state language arts tests, and 18 points higher on math tests across six states. A recent study by Indiana University found that online college learners reported deeper learning than their classroom-schooled counterparts. And a study put on by Interactive Education Systems Design recently concluded that in regard to socialization skills, “students enrolled in full-time, online public schools are either superior to or not significantly different than students enrolled in traditional public schools.”
But now that online schools are becoming more widely accepted and even popular, critics have a new angle: money. Some say that online public schools are diverting money and resources out of students’ home school districts. The New York Times reported in 2008 that, “opposition has arisen because many online charters contract with for-profit companies to provide their courses” (like K¹², which services schools in 17 states, including MNVA).
Some states are debating the financing of virtual charter schools after controversies like one in Pennsylvania, where the state auditor discovered that several online charters had received reimbursements from students’ home districts that surpassed actual education costs by more than $1 million.
continuing growth
Regardless of such examples, the success of countless online programs around the country indicates that they are here to stay. Enrollment in online programs is growing nationwide, especially among rural Americans, and may continue to do so as technology advances. Every year new tools — like Skype, Twitter, YouTube, Wiki, and GoogleDocs — make it easier to access and engage with information over the Internet.
The numbers for online college are skyrocketing too. The annual Sloan Survey of Online Learning, which examines online postsecondary education rates, found in 2009 that “online enrollments have been growing substantially faster than overall higher education enrollments.” It reported that more than 4.6 million
(1 in 4) college students take at least one online course. And Eduventures, a higher education research firm, projected that online-only course enrollments will have jumped from .78 million per year at the beginning of the century to a possible 3.97 million by 2014.
Experts say that despite such success rates, internet schooling will probably never replace traditional teaching. Eric Berg, Vice President for Enrollment Management at The College of St. Scholastica wrote in an article about online education that parents are too invested in the value of an “on-campus experience.” And in any case, online education is competing against a teaching style that’s been around for literally thousands of years.
But maybe, as Berg’s article hinted, it’s not about competition. Maybe it’s about cooperation — combining the best aspects of traditional classrooms with the benefits of a virtual learning environment. Many colleges and universities merge online teaching tools with the classroom experience, suggesting that the “distance” between distance education and traditional classrooms is not really so great.
“The interplay between in-person and online learning will certainly be an interesting trend to watch in the coming years,” Berg says.
But even if online and traditional schools don’t end up friends, Treptow says that the important thing is that online schools are another way to ensure that students’ needs are being met.
“This is my third year in virtual education, and I’ve been seeing kids do well academically since day one,” Treptow says. “That’s what being an educator is about.”
Matea Wasend was an intern at Minnesota Parent. She is a junior at Macalester College in St. Paul, where she is majoring in English and minoring in Media Studies.
