What is going to happen in the fall? There is an ongoing concern by policymakers, teachers, and the public about students being prepared supported and nurtured n the upcoming school year. We need to figure this out soon; with current plans underway the challenge still exists; how do we meet the needs of all students. According to the Indy Star, in the state of Indiana, the number of F-rated schools climbed to 6 percent or 130 schools. Which is about double from the previous school year. Schools earning the highest ratings fell to 24 percent, a decline of more than 600 schools in the 2016 school year. This was pre-Covid-19. I often wonder how our schools will fair with this new change coming in the fall. Due to the lack of performance of students K-12, education was already under political scrutiny.

I think it may be time to prepare students to be responsible citizens and active and effective participants on a global scale. Online learning has one important goal, to improve the quality of student learning through different means of learning. Despite the rapid growth of online learning it is still designed using standard educational methods which does raise some questions about the learning experience.

Collaboration Made Possible

Technology has made collaboration easy and less expensive as in the past with free and flexible tools to help people with collaboration. There seems to be a never-ending supply of online spaces such as Skype, social networking, even mobile devices, to make collaboration a great tool for education.

Through online learning, students are benefiting from group learning by listening to and examining different perspectives on the same subject. Students can defend their positions with supporting evidence, using critical thinking skills by connecting viewpoints and bringing information together. They are learning to become productive members of an online learning community.  This idea is a great choice for the fall, but I often worry about online schools.

Online Schools in Indiana

According to Chalkbeat Indiana, Last year nearly 2,000 students never earned a single credit across Indiana’s six virtual charter schools, it was also reported that even though most of them were enrolled nearly all year and the schools received funding to educate them. Taking a look at the state funding it was about $10 million dollars of funding paid to online schools for students who didn’t complete any work or got failing grades in their classes. This makes me sad because the majority of those students attended Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy, two schools at risk of losing their charters amid allegations raised in February by their authorizer that they enrolled thousands of students who did not complete or sign up for courses, among other issues with test administration and serving students with disabilities. So what next, I only hope that we can make a decision that offers a hybrid model or support students in ways that they can grow as learners.

Resources

Vassiliki Zygouris-Coe. 2019. University of Central Florida, USA.

Indy Star: https://indls.k12.com/news/As-scrutiny-builds-on-virtual-schools-thousands-of-students-head-back-to-classes-online.html

Chalkbeat Indiana: https://in.chalkbeat.org/2019/4/10/21107858/indiana-paid-for-thousands-of-students-who-never-earned-credits-at-virtual-charter-schools