Virtual School: How to Get Started
Session 1
Introduction:
Dave Glick- consults in starting online courses/schools
Keith:
Insight schools-build online public schools-fulltime with fulltime students-statewide operation-tuition free in state-bringing kids back into public schools in alternative way
Provide everything needed to start a virtual school (tech-staff, start-up dollars) -Their first school cost 2.5 million
Now working on creating a nationwide network
Talking about marketing:
Important because we will need to reach kids (who aren’t in school) and because of need to raise enrollments
It’s expensive and so we need to get numbers!
Talking about meeting student needs:
Fringe kids (gifted, need faster pace, teen parents, struggle in public schools, course access to AP, homeschool)
Think about mission and model of the school we are designing
Think about funding-tuition because of state funding
Reach through school officials-describing what we have to offer and asking them to identify kids OR reaching families individually/directly (how can people find us-need to be on web) Can buy lists to get access to names
Howard (school management and budgeting)
Not much help in people to help teach how to manage
Enrollment management is hardest challenging part because of being in a virtual environment
Set up an enrollment team and a separate management team (often size gets bogged down at 800 students)
THEN create an instruction team (need key subject area person-4- to make sure content is aligned, prepared, supplemented)
Student information system can help with core operations (how many kids with each teacher for ex)
Online teachers spend 75% on administrative function-getting academic data to determine what to do with students
Budget:
Look at daily items
Thinks we should lease curriculum-10%
65% of personnel costs
Recommend SREB (Southern Regional Educational Board cost guidelines report-look at this!
Bruce: (curriculum)
They will come back if doing a good job!
Good marketing, good technology, good curriculum being delivered
3 questions:
1. What will we offer?
May not be our choice-targeted group of students may dictate it
What does our customer base want? (Bruce can help answer this)
Do a needs assessment to determine the curriculum to offer-listen to Bruce’s session tomorrow on this
2. What will we look for when looking for the courses?
Range from textbook online and online video gaming and whole lot in between
Budget will be a factor in what we get for online content
Instruction model will be a factor (computer based or teacher based)
Consider the target audience (remediation or credit recovery, AP, etc)
3. How will we acquire the course? How to get it?
3 ways:
1. develop self
Do we have staff to do this? Not inexpensive and have to staff resources
2. purchase it-is content portable and can be used in a number of different tech systems and how can it be modified
3. lease it-how will upgrades be handled-look long term
Vito (Sysco System)
Think about –understand the business requirements!! How will it be used for the business? Staff and tech people have to talk from an instructional perspective to implement the infrastructure to meet the business outcomes
This is a huge lack to understand what the business outcomes are to be
Marriage of the instruction and technology
Have to understand the technology, the application with the business results
What he has learned:
Don’t build your own learning management system!
Can’t have one system to cover all-don’t try to build one! (CRM vs LMS requirements)
Scale the program and plan for growth-think of all the implications on video-end user will want grapics/video
Ex: Miss Education Initiative-have no plan but want to use telepresence (high definition conferencing) Have to make sure these can be balanced
Make sure that all stake holders have high level of awareness on what technology needs are required
Kay (staffing the virtual school and PD)
Need to grow both the teachers and students
Corner stone= “e-facilitator”online courses for teachers, best practices, tools for the courses so the teachers understand what the students will see-
PD is limited-Kay’s school wrote their own (NaCol is a good resource)
Have levels of PD (initial learning, best practices, creating courses)
Offer for college credit! This is incentive for teachers
Always changing even in the PD courses offered
Spend upfront time on training staff!!
Using course tools-driven by the platform used
If teacher is to be successful, they must use the tools well (threaded discussions, student participation, rubrics and evaluation
Teachers don’t understand and assume that students understand what they are saying-be very specific in teaching
Learn and grow is the pattern! This is how PD will be!
Attracting teachers-marketing is important for this
State lists all the schools/entities that provide online courses (what is asychrontist?)
George (k-12 with 37,000 students and growing) Policy stuff
Pitfalls: people like status quo and don’t like change
Online courses are the way world is going-we need to address it
Have a vision for what it looks like –postsecondary model
Do a field study (like a pilot program)-do research based student and see if it floats and define policy from that study results
Challenges for policy
Most teacher contracts aren’t ready for this
No option for noncontiguous hours
Who’s eligible?
Is training involved
Parent-student contact issues
Charter or not?
Administration issues
Can’t “see” how to evaluate and measure success
Testing? How is it going to be done?
Who is playing? How will kids know what is happening?
Technology plans
Extra curricular activities-how many classes on campus
If we don’t move on this, colleges will do this for us
Need to have supt as the champion of this!!
Changing K-12 (can’t think “this will pass!”)
Steering committee (need to have parent, student, union rep, dist office)
Must have teachers and administrators singing same song
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