An emerging trend in education that has blossomed in Higher Education
and is taking deeper roots in k-12 education is online learning. More and more
subjects are being offered online especially for high schoolers. In some school
districts across the nation, high school students are getting the option to
take most if not all of their four years of high school online. A modern day educator
would probably say that this is something innovative and makes complete sense.
Let’s face it our world is changing and everything is becoming more embedded with
electronic technology and online components. It’s only inevitable that the way we are
schooling our children should be online so that they can keep up with the evolving
world around us.
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| photo from Edvisors Education Blog |
According to In the
Dark About Online High School? Here's Your Light... by Teresa Hall, there are many pros to online learning. Her supporting
argument ranges from how interactive, rigors, and academic sound online courses
are in comparison to traditional face-to-face learning. “Actually,
online education from an accredited high school program provides the same level
of academic teaching as traditional schools. Using discussion boards and chat
rooms, students and teachers participate in discussions, sometime they even
meet in person” (Hall, 2012).
I completely understand Teresa Hall’s argument but I must
admit that I’m somewhat skeptical of online learning for k-12 students. This
may sound like a contradiction, because I’m currently in an online class and a
great amount of my graduate courses were through online learning. However I
think the learning level, the capability, and expectation of college students
are much more different to a point more advance than that of middle or high school
students. At the college level the majority of our leaning theoretically comes
from us being more self-driven, being self-taught, and being able to breakdown information
in our own ways to gain a greater understanding of the subject. Middle and high
schoolers are still very much going through the mid-stages of Piaget’s cognitive
development level. This to me means that
the majority of middle and high school students are still in need of more
guidance and direct interaction with teachers, peers and/or knowledgeable
adults.
Now I understand that some students have proven to be academically
advance beyond the socially defined grade-levels and there are other students that
are likely to learn better through the online approach. I’m cool with these types
of students exploring the online learning and having it available to them in
various subjects.
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| photo from laureateschool.com |
However my skepticism on the pros of online classes for
middle and high schoolers comes into play from my personal experience with
online learning while in high school back in 2005. That year I took 2 classes
online; English 4 and Personal Fitness. Both were required courses for graduation.
Yes these two courses’ curriculum standards were very similar to most of my
face-to-face high school classes. The learning activities, projects, assignments
and exams were practically the same as it would have been in traditional face-to-face
classes. However the only difference is that there were no definite way of telling
who was actually doing the work, a teacher being present and available as it
would be in a traditional classroom setting, and I wasn’t able to gain as much
from online discussion as I would have from in-class discussion. I know for a
fact that most of us in the online physical fitness class were able to cut a
lot of corners to get by and still manage to receive a passing grade.
I’m sure that overtime online course developers will
continue to do adequate research to improve the quality and ensure the
integrity of online courses. However based on my high school experience and to
a certain extent my college online courses, I still somewhat find online learning
to be another reflection of how our society has become so distant from personal
interaction to becoming more of a fast-pace, microwaving society that at times
are willing to trade in quality for
convenience. Nontraditional schooling like online learning is no longer a thing
of the future. I understand it’s here and most likely will become the norm sooner
than expected. Nevertheless I must stress how extremely important it is to
continue to account for the various vital skills and concepts that we do gain
from having a face-to-face interaction learning process as we continue to
emerge nontraditional schooling methods into the mainstream.
Links
Teresa Hall's article: http://www.collegebound.net/highschoolalternatives/article/in-the-dark-about-online-high-school-heres-your-light/8757/
