http://file2.ws/web16

It drove me up a tree to hear administrators say that we may have to cut back to a four day school week when the price of fuel was skyrocketing. In the face of that pain, throughout most of the communities in our country, the response should have been that we need to work our way to having our schools open seven days a week, not closing them an extra day. And, if needs be, convert some of our space to emergency shelters for folks who cannot keep their homes heated and buy and cook their food.

It did my heart good to see the worship services in our cafeteria when one of our local churches was damaged in a flood.

I am in school often on the weekends and here during the week often after most of my colleagues and students have left for the day. The feeling is the identical to the feeling I had in the churches I served in when I was a parish clergyman. I felt then and feel now as though we are squandering a tremendous resource: that we are not being good stewards of what we have been given to manage.

Our school now has Saturday Academy, Distance Learning, and expanded ’school day’ through the funding that comes through the 21st Century Grant. This is just the beginning. We should ultimately be doing so much more.

This is the beginning of our discussion of being lifelong learners.

1. Best individual blog

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2. Best group blog

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3. Best new blog

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4. Best resource sharing blog

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5. Most influential blog post

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6. Best teacher blog

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7. Best librarian / library blog

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8. Best educational tech support blog

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9. Best elearning / corporate education blog

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10. Best educational use of audio

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11. Best educational use of video / visual

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13. Best educational use of a social networking service

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16. Lifetime achievement

David Warlick

1. Online learning for professional development;

2. The applicablility of online learning for the community-at-large.

After these issues are reflected upon, we can begin to build our ’school for lifelong learners’.

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.

This is a difficult call to make.

I feel it should be a requirement for a high school diploma and for an associate’s and bachelor’s degrees for students in our country. And, just as firmly, I believe that there should be suspensions or modifications allowed to the requirement, as well.

I have taught online for more than five years, completed a master’s online, and have continued to take courses on a pay-as-I-go basis ever since. I have explored adding moodle to my face-to-face courses. I have looked at several other options including commercial options (of which I have taken advantage).

Obviously, my skillset and learning styles make online learning something that is workable, desirable even, for me. We are really in the first few seconds, metaphorically speaking, of the Digital Age. If we can manage to survive the current economic and environmental  crises intact, we will continue to rocket into this the Digital Age that has only two other events in history of comparable impact. If we are going to become a community of life-long learners; If we’re going to leave no child behind; We are going to do it by embracing the tools, and the lives we fashion with these tools.

Online learning is one of these tools.

Since teaching is my third career, I’m a rather a newbie at this. The first time I had heard the phrase ‘life-long learner’ in context  was six years ago. It sound so bright and exciting and I could understand the lack of enthusiasm on the part of my colleagues who had been teachers for a while.

It wasn’t long until I realized that every district or school mission statement I came across contained that phrase. For my colleagues it had become a cliche. Worse, it was an empty cliche – No one ever explored or discussed what this meant and how it would be facilitated.

One of the paths that can be provided for people to be life-long learners is through online learning: Joining classes on the World Wide Web.

There are several places a prospective online learner can go to read enumerations and discussions of the pros and cons of online learning including:

http://www.edu-center.org/distance-learning-pros-cons.htm

http://www.learn-source.com/schools/pro_con_online.html

http://www.elearners.com/resources/elearning-faq5.asp

If you are out of school-either high school or college-online learning should be an option in continuing your own personal growtth and development.

Online learning is growing by leaps and bounds.

I am a teacher for Virtual High School (VHS), the longest-lived virtual school in the United States. I think that virtual learning as in a virtual ‘classroom’ is a rewarding experience for my students. Michigan now requires  passing an online course as a graduation requirement. Various school districts and schools around the country either have or are contemplating doing the same.

Is online learning worthwhile? Why?

Do you think online learning should be a graduation requirement?

Should we enrol our students in schools like VHS?

Should states step up and build statewide, online schools?

How will this education be funded, if it’s not on the local level?