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Find more Kappan articles in the Power Tools: The Virtual School WITHIN the next year or so, one or more virtual schools will come into existence. I nearly said come into existence in the U.S., but, of course, virtual implies "without place." Like more traditional schools, a virtual school has a curriculum, a faculty, students, maybe an administrator or two, and facilities -- except all of these entities lack many attributes with which you are familiar. The curriculum will invite students to inquire. Students, faculty members, and staff members will "plug into school" from locations in school buildings, businesses, homes, churches, or wherever. A class will comprise students who are both local and remote. Indeed, it is likely that groups of students will move about from place to place -- an attendance center being defined as a high-speed Internet connection. If this sounds like science fiction, read on! The Reasons Why create a virtual school? The answer is easy. An enormous amount of hard work, brain power, and money has been devoted to reforming K-12 schools in the U.S. in the last decade or so. Pick up any education journal, and you will read all about it. Everyone in sight has a plan. The trouble is that most plans are not working, and those that do work, work only for a short time. I have spent years of my time and helped spend several million dollars on reform efforts. The following case in point is particularly disheartening. After several years of gut-busting work at a local urban school, we were making good progress. Then 40% of the faculty members transferred to other schools. That's not likely to happen in a virtual school. A few years ago, Harold Hodgkinson said in the Kappan that reformers were trying to re-wallpaper a schoolhouse that had a leaky roof. Hodgkinson understated the problem: it's time to build an entirely new house -- a virtual school. Faculty for the Virtual School Unless you start with a great faculty, hand-picked by a very wise person over a number of years (a very important point), you cannot build a great school. I've personally helped try to build more than eight great schools, and the only time we really succeeded was with a faculty that had been hand-chosen over 10 years or more! Choosing faculty members for a virtual school must be a highly selective process. First, faculty members should be considered only when they apply in pairs. That is, if you have not established a close working relationship with a distant colleague -- preferably in cyberspace -- you need not apply. Collegiality is the first required trait. Obviously, creating a faculty in cyberspace requires people who are very comfortable with technology, and this is the second requirement. If you are the last person at your school who learned to use a computer, you need not apply. Learn about technology first. The third requirement in the faculty selection process is that you must be someone who "has never met a kid you didn't like, or at least never met one you weren't willing to teach." (You might run into some pretty strange kids in cyberspace.) A fourth trait is obvious: if you like whole group instruction, you need not apply. Cyberspace facilitates one-on-one and small-group conversations. Since I believe in technology and advanced expertise, I would even use a state-of-the-art personality inventory -- or at least a structured interview with a semantic differential being run on the transcript -- to screen applicants. (Some of the psychometricians among us really know their stuff.) Of course, the virtual school may not have a discrete faculty. It will probably gain and lose faculty members on a regular basis, and it might just as well be composed of grandparents as certified teachers. As the song lyrics go, "People on the river are happy to give." Lots of people in cyberspace will be happy to give their time and talents! Virtual Schoolhouses Okay, they're not really school "houses" -- more like learning pods. A learning pod is made up of eight or more well-configured computer workstations with access to a number of servers and a high-speed Internet connection. In addition, each computer will function as a desktop video-conferencing workstation, so the cyber school faculty and students can meet face-to-face with fellow students around the world. The servers are the central things. Servers -- whether on-site or in a distant place -- will make the world's accumulated knowledge and literature the virtual school's curriculum. I suspect that servers at NASA, the National Park Service, art galleries and museums around the world, universities, the Library of Congress, and the National Geographic Society will be among the most popular destinations. Students will do their "knowledge work" all over the world! Moreover, lots of businesses already have children's areas on their servers and would be glad to furnish space and programming to accommodate the members of a virtual school community. Imagine the learning potential, for example, when children access a railroad's server. The children will be able to track such goods as lettuce and orange juice as they move across the country in real time. How's that for a geography lesson? Naturally, children working in a learning pod will become excellent writers. How else can they communicate with their pen pals in Europe or Africa? What about career education? No problem. Just fire up the desktop video-conferencing software and call up an accountant, computer operator, secretary, lawyer, engineer, banker, air traffic controller, doctor, or nurse; talk with them about their work or just hang around a while and watch them actually working. More and more companies are developing computerized training modules for their employees. Examples include hands-on training in such skills as typing, using a calculator, fixing a robot, rectifying an account statement, repairing a computer, learning to use Word Perfect, tuning an automobile motor, telephone etiquette, and using a military global positioning system. Employee training in human relations includes conflict resolution, sales, and dealing with disgruntled customers. I am confident that the companies with these high-quality computerized training modules would be happy to let virtual school students use them. Business and the military will also contribute to the virtual school by letting students use their computer training and desktop video-conferencing facilities. One group of students might use the learning pod at the old schoolhouse on Monday, use the learning pod at the municipal library on Wednesday, and travel to a local business or military installation on Friday to use their learning pod or flight simulator. (Students may need Tuesdays and Thursdays to assimilate the flood of information received or to practice the new skills learned on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.) After all, lots of sites have similar high-speed Internet access! Of course, problem students can either be left in the old library at the school or assigned to the Marine drill sergeant's virtual learning pod (ha!). Teacher Planning in Cyberspace We know from research such as John Zahorick's that teachers today plan largely by selecting activities from textbooks. Indeed, this is a limiting factor in the quality of schools today. If the activities come from the textbook, then the activities are only as good as the textbook authors made them. In addition, the activities are often paper-and-pencil ones -- not especially stimulating. Teachers in a virtual school will most likely do their planning on-line. While innovation will be encouraged and a variety of approaches tried, I suspect that three principles will guide virtual teachers' planning: cooperative learning, appropriateness, and inquiry. Since teachers start their careers at a virtual school in geographically separated pairs, their first goal will be to get students to work effectively in cooperative learning groups with half of the members at each site. Naturally, the Internet is a very large "place," so a lot of planning time must be devoted to selecting appropriate destinations, servers, and activities. I suspect that a project orientation will develop. The traditional subjects will develop into themes being investigated by student teams. Student investigation will look a lot like what is best known as inquiry teaching. The inquiry thrust of 20 years ago didn't work well because supplying the source information was difficult; today, it's everywhere on the Internet. Because teacher planning will be so critical to the success of a virtual school, teachers will probably work with children only three out of five days and spend two days planning. Because virtual teachers will be so adept at using technology and have so much technology at their disposal, few support staff members -- such as media center directors, paraprofessionals, and secretaries -- will be needed. For example, instead of sending a handout to the office to have it duplicated, virtual teachers will just dump it to the high-speed network printer that does 50 pages per minute in full color. Of course, teachers in the virtual school will be "power users" of technology and probably "early adopters" of new technologies. Virtual school teachers will know how to use technology to magnify their productivity. Teacher training institutions will no doubt be slow to create this new genre of teachers, so others may have to step in and do the job for them. Enabling Technologies Many places that will house the learning pods of virtual schools already have the requisite equipment. The workstations in the learning pod will be well-configured workstation-class computers: 150 MHz or faster computers, 64 MB of memory, 2-4 GB hard-disk drives, and color desktop video-conferencing software and hardware, probably using the H.320 protocol. Each workstation will have such features as a color video camera, exter-nal microphone, and a high-speed network card, such as a 100 megabit/sec Ethernet card. These workstations must be connected to a fast hub/switch that has the capability of providing enough bandwidth to sustain the video streams produced by the desktop video-conferencing software. Because of the high bandwidth requirement, learning pods will appear in metropolitan areas where the local telephone or cable company has aggressively improved its physical plant with hybrid fiber-optic cable. I would even predict that, 10 years from now, attending a suburban or urban school in a large city will be much more advantageous than attending a school in a small town. Small towns just won't have the bandwidth to compete with their urban counterparts. Virtual Schools and Virtual Universities Today a number of virtual universities are beginning to emerge on the Internet. For example, the Western Governors' Association is creating such an entity. As virtual K-12 schools develop, I believe that they will function quite differently from the virtual universities. Virtual universities exist to deliver college credit in the form of content-filled coursework. Virtual K-12 schools will pursue goals that are much less focused on existing courses. The content of the virtual school will develop in the minds of teachers and children; it will not come from course syllabi. If you have begun to design or create a virtual school, please send an e-mail note to: rvanhorn@unf.edu. I'd like to devote a future column to initial efforts to create virtual schools. ROYAL VAN HORN is a professor of education at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville (e-mail: rvanhorn@unf.edu). |
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