One of Wikipedia’s co-founders, Larry Sanger, is making noise about the need to make online learning more available to K-12 grade children all over the world. Writing on his “Citizendium Blog,” Mr. Sanger offers a petition that everyone in the world is invited to sign, and send to a philanthropist. If you don’t happen to know who your local major philanthropist is, you may have trouble figuring out what to do with this. If you do, however, you can use the petition to add your voice to Sanger’s call the people donating money to improve education should seize the “low hanging fruit” by funding the transfer of textbooks and educational videos into high-quality, easy to use digital formats so that kids all over the world can have equal access to information. While there is free educational content available online today, Sanger says, most of it “lacks either detail or high quality.” Copyright owners may not agree with his assertion that rich philanthropists can digitize any content they want without asking anyone’s permission, but his passionate call for making the best information available to all school kids worldwide sounds pretty good. One can’t help but notice his comment that other things than a lack of digital content may, at times, be to blame for the sorry state of American K-12 education: “Perhaps it has to do with teachers being low-paid, or parents not being involved, or something else. We do not offer an answer to that.” Read Citizendium Blog & petition here

Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has found a way to the social messages in that good old rock n’ roll to teach history more effectively to high school students. Through it’s videoconferencing program, the hall has brought a program called “Ball of Confusion: Rock Music and Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s” into live classrooms in over 25 states to stimulate discussions about women’s issues, the war in Vietnam, the cold war and more. Teachers report that students are tremendously engaged by classic rock music, and enjoy debating how the issues raised in it are playing out in this year’s presidential election. Read more.

I leave it to you to judge whether or not high school students pushing themselves to take tons of “AP” courses to boost their college admission chances is a good thing or not. However, it seems pretty clear that there’s no reason they shouldn’t have all of the same advanced learning opportunities as kids in brick and mortar high schools. That’s been a problem, because there’s an expectation that AP courses should be the highest quality courses offered, and lots of teachers have felt a little uncomfortable about trying to deliver that quality via elearning. Here’s an interesting article by a teacher who as found a portal application called WiZiO and made some lower-tech tweaks to the way his students work that have made his AP courses work beautifully. Read more about high school online advanced placement courses.

Public school districts have long resisted the idea of vouchers, that allow students to leave and take their public funding with them to private schools. But public schools everywhere are trying to offer distance learning courses to their kids, which has them paying other schools to teach their kids out of local tax dollars. Some see e-learning as a force that will kick the door open to vouchers. Read More In Online Degree News

In spite of all you read about the fierce competition among students to get into ivy league schools, the overall learning picture in American high schools is pretty dismal. Consider this: according to the U.S. Department of Education, a full forty per cent of all students entering U.S. colleges today need to take at least one “remedial” course to bring them up to a level where they can handle college-level learning. Companies like Blackboard and some state universities are trying to respond to this by making more college courses available over the internet to high school kids, to try and get them into educational “shape” for college.

While many schools, and even some states, seem to want to use high school online learning as just another way for students to pile up nice-looking resumes to get into fancy private colleges, North Carolina seems to be taking a more useful approach. Governor Mike Easley has announced a new program called “learn and earn” that will make career-oriented courses available online to high schools students so they can potentially ean a college degree while they’re stlll in high school. This approach is designed to deliver real benefits to students who need to go into the work force after high school graduation, and who can’t possibly afford to invest the time or money needed for a traditional college or university degree. Read More…

A really interesting example of how internet learning can knock down lots of different barriers at once comes from this story about a Vanderbilt University professor who has set up a project to get rural high school kids wifi access to science classes during their long bus rides to and from school. Thanks to the efforts of Billy Hudson, a professor of medicine and biochemistry, kids from Grapevine, Arkansas (the good professor’s home town) will now be watching video classes on their 90 minute ride to school each morning. Most have been given iPods, “in a ceremony” according to the article, while a select few have received wifi-enabled laptop computers which will allow them to interact with the classes they’re viewing online - classes being conducted at Vanderbilt University. In one fell swoop, this project takes a shot at erasing the boundaries between college and high school, between urban and rural students and also at bringing quality science teaching to parts of the country where it’s sorely lacking.
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Ever wish you could have taken a class in screen writing, a specialized science topic like DNA technology or basic criminology when you were in high school? Obviously, most high schools don’t have teachers with expertise in these topics. But some, like the Catholic school in this profile from Tuscon, Arizona, are using an online education consortium called Virtual High School to bring wider choices to their students. Private schools find that Virtual High School can suddenly give them hundreds of elective courses to offer, which they consider a big advantage in luring more students. An interesting story about how e-learning is making big inroads beyond the college level.
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The Sloan Consortium (which offers a very good guide to accredited online schools at http://www.sloan-c.org/programs/index.asp) reports that k-12 kids are rapidly taking more and more school courses online. Interestingly, e-learning seems to appeal primarily to kids at the ends of the spectrum: advanced students and those who need extra help to keep up. Kids who fall in the middle are, at present, less interested in online courses. Rural school districts, which have the most limited resources, are making the heaviest use of online courses. A total of about 700,000 K-12 students are now either taking “blended” courses that combine classroom and web learning, or taking some courses that are delivered 100% online.
Download the Full Sloan Report on K-12 Online Learning Here