…read all over?

Should we enrol our students in schools like Virtual High School (VHS) – http://www.govhs.org ?

I have been both a teacher and student in online learning milieus. I have launched experiences, as teacher, individually online in Moodle (on a 3rd party site) and other ventures, as well. I am today going to focus on VHS.

Virtual High School is well into its second decade of existence. They offer well over 300 courses and have been exceeding over four thousand students per semester for the last two years. I think it is an ideal addition to almost any school, but especially for smaller schools. If you have fifty seats per year it is well within the realm of possibility that your student s will take fifty DIFFERENT courses in the course of a school year-Think of how that broadens horizons.

The school has four membership options, as copied from the VHS site as follows:

• “Fully Participating School – Our most popular option!
  Sponsor one VHS course and provide 50 students (per year) the opportunity to experience an online course through VHS.
• Student Only School
  Provide 20 students (per year) the opportunity to experience an online course through VHS.
• Individual Student Tuitions
  Try VHS by purchasing one or more seats for a semester to see if VHS is right for your school.
• Consortium Memberships
  We offer a volume discount option for Educational Service Providers, or for a cluster of schools interested in creating a VHS consortium.”

There are several considerations that should taken into account:

• The cost of training (a one-time expense) and paying a Site Coordinator;
• The cost of a one time of and mailing materials for the course that is being sponsored if the course your sponsoring uses materials that are not online;
• Mailing cost for sending back materials your students have received from other teachers;
• Paying the annual fee to VHS;
• Paying for the training of your teacher and VHS for the sponsoring course development; A semester course for developing an additional section of an existing offering; A whole year to develop a brand new course. The annual expense of paying the teacher needs to be included.

In the best of all possible circumstances, in my opinion, a school or district would have the same person be the Site Coordinator and teacher. VHS would be a regularly scheduled class, with independent study allowed on a case-by-case basis.

The teacher would develop an additional curriculum component or use the services of VHS to extend the class for the full school semester.  VHS offers class fifteen consecutive weeks with NO BREAKS, so the students are at loose ends if nothing else follows the completion of that course.

This is the matrix for a small school in Washington state, except that the teacher teaches two online classes that provide the students with a hundred seats in VHS per year in any course in which they may enrol. This is a full-time position – two classes a day for the students in her school, two periods a day for her to teach her online students and one period for her coordinator and admin work.

On the other hand, if the Site Coordinator’s duties and teacher’s responsibility can be a part of the school day by reducing the face-to-face responsibilities, that ongoing cost would be negligible.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS