Sunday Notes by Marcia

Marcia’s notes
How to Start a Virtual School
November 5, 2006 1:00-5:00 PM

Dave Glick—
Keith Oelrich--Founder/CEO Insight Schools
Howard Liebman--School mgmt and budgeting
Bruce Friend—North Carolina Virtual School, now NACOL
Vito Amato-ed tech consultant
Kay Anderson—virtual campus curriculum coordinator
George Williams policy development
Kim Ross—Houston, Minnesota special education
Todd Hitchcock—Florida Virtual school
Kimbell Kenner, virtual campus
Lisa McClure—School Dist. Of Waukesha student characteristics
Jim Barnes—Curriculum

Marketing for Online Schools
Keith Oelrich— Insight Schools
Insight Schools are online fulltime school w/fulltime students
Statewide, tuition free for students in the state
Bridling the online public high school
Insight Schools are a full time alternative for the students who are not thriving in regular school
When planning, fund the creation of the school, then collect FTE dollars.
Create nationwide network.

Marketing important
need a way to reach kids who are not currently in school (the Insight program is for kids who are not in school)
Raise enrollment
Expensive
This program is for kids who are around the “edges”—gifted, teen parents, drop out to work, kids with careers, those who struggled with traditional school, homeschool, retakes, course access to AP

What kind of model is yours?
Full time or supplemental?
State funded or locally funded? Private?

How do you reach families to recruit students?
School officials—email, direct mail, conferences, word-of-mouth
Direct market to families—web marketing, also same as above (email, etc.)
50% of students find the info on web
market to centers that provide youth services

School Management and Budgeting
Howard Liebman— U of Miami

Create an “Enrollment Management Team” and an “Instructional Team” and keep them separate

Enrollment Team can handle all leads, course analysis, and placement

Instructional Lead person for each core subject (Language Arts, Social Studies )
They prepare pace charts.

Student info system helps with administrative duties-- teachers are spending 75% of time on administrative data instead of curriculum

How do other budget?
10% lease online courses

Bruce Friend—Curriculum
“They will come back to you if you are good.”
Quality content is key.

3 Questions:
1. What will you offer?
Once you know what you will offer, what will you look for in an online course?
How will you acquire that?

1. What will you offer?
This may not be a choice, depending on individual school parameters.
What does customer base want? NACOL can help with this.
Needs Assessment (seminar tomorrow) will help

2. Once you know what you will offer, what will you look for in an online course?
Currently there is everything from online textbooks to video-game styles-
Instructional model=--is teacher in control and based on teacher, or is it online controlled?
Consider target customer (remediation, credit recovery etc)

How will you acquire online content?
Develop it yourself
--do you have the bandwidth—the staff—to develop and maintain it?
Purchase it
--Is the content portable? Usable in a variety of tech systems
--what is necessary to change it?
Lease it
--How are upgrades handled?
--Long-term—is it sensible to lease or purchase?

Vito Amato CISCO
Pro bono consulting for customers prospective customers
Theme—Understand your business requirements
How will the technology be used?
Tech and staff need to get together and agree—Vito moderates this
Lack of understanding of IT people—do not understand what you are trying to accomplish instructionally
Articulate the business requirements clearly to all involved
Will you use vender specific or open tech stuff?

LCMS and LMS have research available to NACOL members

We have learned--
Don’t build your own Learning Management System.
Find out the difference CRM/LMS
Building vs. buying
Scaling program—make it a plan for growth
Think about it—end user wants interactive --video
The technology can be very expensive and require bigger bandwidth--telepresence, high definition video conferencing needs 10 mig pipe
Collect business requirements and balance needs and implementation
Determine what you actually need (may think you need one thing when actually you need something else or something less)

Kay Anderson—Staffing And Staff Development

Efacilitated course for teachers –training for teachers to teach online
Limited amount of staff development available
Her office creates materials for BEST Practices in online classroom, 2nd part of staff development
College credit for these courses for teachers

Course tools—successful teacher will be very skillful using the tools your system has
Threaded discussion: how do you get all to participate? Rubrics?
Directions for students must be very specific because instruction is not face-to-face
Staff development must be ongoing and constantly changing

George Williams--Avoiding Policy Hazards and Creating Online K12 Courses
Pressure to offer online courses
A myriad of online obstacles challenge traditional K12
--contracts for teachers don’t work hourwise
--what are the qualifications for teaching?
Parent/student contacts necessary—how will you do it?
Will you charter or not?
ADM
Looks like good classroom—how do you assess/measure success? How are tests administered?
What is your age/grade minimum
What will you do about orientation/passwords/expectations?
Tech problems on either end—what do you do?

What will you do about extracurricular activities?
Online schools—state run, private, college run?
Superintendent needs to be champion
Need a steering committee—teacher, parent etc
Charter—see $ from state?
Unions, teachers, administrators must get together
Students—how many?
Research based field study important—define policy from data