Even! But No Longer Odd
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Once regarded as an unconventional alternative for atypical
students, virtual schools have achieved mainstream
acceptance, and are now seen as providing an education equal
to-- if not better than-- what their traditional counterpart offers.
CAN A CYBER DIPLOMA BE FOR REAL? One need only consider Jacob Swink for an answer to that. The
17-year-old 12th-grader has been attending Connections
Academy, a K-12 virtual school, for the past three years. He's
a solid B+ student. "The only reason I'm not an A," he says, "is
because of a tough AP computer science class."
This fall, he'll go on to Bloomsburg University, a four-year
public college in Bloomsburg, PA. He is proof positive that
online learning offers a competitive alternative to traditional
brick-and-mortar schools. "I heard about Bloomsburg at a
college fair and talked to them," he says. His application sailed
through. "I never even got a phone call-- I just got accepted a
couple of weeks later."
Swink's experience is becoming commonplace. With hundreds
of K-12 schools routinely offering online courses, the idea of a
full-time virtual school is no longer as outlandish as it once may
have seemed. Thanks to giant improvements in technology and
the quality of their academic instruction, most virtual schools
now hold a trump card they had not possessed: credibility.
"There were many questions five years ago and not enough
experience with online learning in the K-12 arena," says Dawn
Nordine, director of instructional technology services for Cooperative
Educational Service Agency (CESA) 9 in Tomahawk,
WI, who also serves as the director of Wisconsin Virtual
School. "I think there was doubt as to the academic progress a
student could achieve online and the quality of the experience."
"There used to be a lot of the same concerns with traditional
schools as well," says Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the
International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL),
a nonprofit group, and former director of the Office of
Educational Technology at the US Department of Education.
"Until there was online learning, when was the traditional
school the gold standard?"
Whatever skepticism lingers is being put to rest by early
research that affirms the value of online instruction-- and the
value of the students receiving it. "All of the preliminary data,"
Patrick says, "shows that virtual school students are equal to or
better than students in traditional schools."
A Dubious Beginning
The prevailing view of online schools had been as a nichefiller--
a fringe alternative for students whose circumstances
or geography prevented them from pursuing the conventional
classroom-oriented education, according to Gary Lopez, executive
director of the Monterey Institute for Technology and
Education (MITE), the parent organization of the National
Repository of Online Courses (NROC), a nonprofit network of
educators, administrators, and technologists that provides
online course content for high schools, colleges, and advanced
placement programs.