Week 15: Final course reflections

After reflecting on my semester's worth of blog posts for this class, I realized many of my views about online schooling aspects have changed:

• How I viewed online schooling as a disruptive innovation has shifted. In week 1, I viewed online learning purely as a “shift in the learning platform” and as “an opportunity” (Christensen, Chp. 4, “Disruptively Deploying Computers”). By Week 14, I saw the effects of disruptive innovation in a more complex light, recognizing the value of a blended traditional and online schooling approach. (I wrote about this extensively in the class discussions forums).
  
• I am much more skeptical of for-profit virtual schools than I was at the start of the semester; I wasn't aware of the online schooling marketplace, its stakeholders, and the power many wield. With the resources some for-profits have, they're able to produce more professionally marketed web sites and can offer more multimedia in their courses. On many of the district virtual school sites, their sites look very “template-made” and they offer little in the way of multimedia; this less-professional look could put them at a disadvantage in the marketplace, even though their product may be equal or better than what is offered at for-profit outlets. (Sometimes these entities aren't in direct competition for the same students, however.)
  While I think for-profit virtual schools can offer a quality education, research we read definitely pointed to instances where, time and again, online schooling was used to either save money for a school district or make money for a for-profit company. This issue has stayed with me because in a for-profit world, if these schools ever stop making money and their investors decide they are too costly to continue operating, what will happen to the education they offer and the role they play in the school world (and marketplace)? Where will their students go if they close? I think that non-profit and not-for-profit models must be supported to provide stability in a rapidly changing and uncertain marketplace. (Could online schooling for-profits be experiencing some sort of bubble? I don't follow their stock prices -- I'm just curious about this based on other bubbles the U.S. economy has recently experienced.)

• After taking this class, I thoroughly know what virtual schooling is and how it will continue to play a huge role in every aspect of education, presently and increasingly in the future. I spoke to a representative from K12 on the phone, looked at many other virtual schools' web sites, read what other students in the class discovered, interviewed other online learners, and delved into the assigned studies and articles. I now have first-hand experience with the online school world outside of TC classes (which are the only online classes I've taken), and this knowledge has made me both an “educated consumer” and an “educated educator."

• The mid-term project creation, and review of other students' work, provided me with direct experience and a wide perspective of how different online curriculum must be from f2f/traditional curriculum in order to be successful. Online schools offer such amazing possibilities to support multimodal expression and learning.

• Student-to-student interaction, synchronous vs. asynchronous discussions, offering how-to-succeed in online class orientations vs. not offering them, credit recovery motives vs. extra enrichment reasons to take online classes, professional development to help new online instructors understand what world they're stepping into, accountability and assessment in online schooling with so many different course providers – all these issues are vitally important to understand, and I wasn't as aware of them at the class's start.

• While virtual schooling is a very strong educational platform, it is not appropriate for elementary and lower middle school grades. Before I took this class, I wasn't aware that anyone had even considered online schooling for younger children; I now know with more surety that this format isn't developmentally appropriate for all ages.

Overall, I am an even bigger supportive of online schooling now because I've learned how it can be made an optimal experience, the factors that can detract from quality, how popular this format is becoming, and how important it could be to guaranteeing more access and equity in education -- IF it is done in thoughtful, carefully designed ways with the priorities on quality education for all. In addition, more and more online schooling opportunities are being offered, of varying qualities and for many different reasons and student groups. Because of this, there are countless areas of research which need to be looked into as this new field grows.