When someone was too far from a school to attend school, we created the correspondence course. As new technologies evolved the correspondence course morphed into the Online Courses. I have been involved with many Online Courses over the years as both as a student and as a teacher. The need for Online Courses is pretty obvious. Time and distance from a place of education, access to programs geographically impossible to surmount, conflict with work, family, age, health, and other situations; provide the justification for the need and use of Online Courses, at all levels of education. Currently, higher education is the main user of Online Courses, not K-12. We have seen a growth in Home Schooling over the years, but not Online Courses at the K-12 level that equals the growth of Online Courses in higher ed or of Home Schooling.
Online Courses in K-12 are far and few between, because schools depend on seat time and live bodies in the schools for their budgets. An archaic use of lunch applications determines attendance and therefore allotted monies to the public k_12 schools. Over the years, with the growth of the Internet and programs like BlackBoard, Moodle, and the Google toolbox; schools can provided substantial Online Courses for their K-12 scholars.
Why would we need them? I'm in a transfer school now. It is a school for students who already have some credit for high school but not enough to graduate. They need to complete high school, and returning to the high school in which they started is not possible for a myriad of reasons. For many of my students, access to Online Courses would be perfect as they balance work, parenting, and living. It isn't that these students are incapable of doing the work, it is that many of them don't have the time. Yes, they got themselves into a bad situation and now we need to help them right themselves so that they don't become bigger burdens on society in the future.
I was reminded of this the other day. A student arrived at summer school on the last day of our second week of a six week summer school. She had been ill, her baby had been sick, and she couldn't make it to school. She had all the notes verifying this dilemma. We admitted her and provided her a schedule that included my technology class and would allow her to makeup work online from home. I have always been an advocate for the Online Course in a K-12 environment. I recall I had a young man in the mid 90's who had AIDS doing all of his work from home. He attended about 25% of the classes. His work was brilliant, the best work in the class. He earned an A in the course and my supervisor was livid that I had given this student an A and he was absent so many days. I showed her his webpage and then some webpages of the other scholars in the class. She concurred, and yet begrudged the A. It stood and I was admonished about my behavior and told not to do that again. Well, here I am in 2008, in a school with a great need for such Online Courses and I have a principal supporting the notion. We are working things out on a case by case basis, we have a CyberSchool, and we are assisting our students who find themselves in waters over their heads and who need some compassion, assistance, and a helping hand to become fruitful, useful, good citizens, rather than bad statistics.
Technology use is the future for education.
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