Another post...

Wow, I have people who ARE NOT IN THIS CLASS following my blog. (They commented on my links from last week). Thanks (or get a life).

I just wanted to share another element of online education. WKCE Wisconsin State 10th Grade Testing. It is not ONLINE ! I have spent 4.5 days and traveled over 1500 miles in the past week administrating WKCE tests Face-to-Face. How do we do it ? Meet the kids in a library or hotel meeting room and have the students take the test the good ole fashion way. Sitting at a table for 5-8 hours with a #2 pencil.

If anyone from the Wisconsin DPI reads my blog.. Put the WKCE Test online ! Student passwords, log-ins... It can be done. The test can be timed, we can have proctors that check ID's, etc.... DPI Please move into the digital era and save TONS of MONEY if you put it online. No printing and shipping the books. The results will be processed faster and you could develop a killer data warehouse in a short period of time.

I have never been a big fan of BEST PRACTICES in education. I prefer to take a student based approach and adapt to their learning styles. However, I responded to a discussion post this week and thought to use this as the basis for my post, this week.

Online education is student centered and each student basically develops their own online learning style. I am amazed at how creative students are at finding content online that relates to class material. I had a great bar closing conversation with an employee of Florida Virtual Academy, at a conference. (FVA is the nations largest online high school with over 10,000 students.) We both talked about how cool it would be to allow students to develop a course. Just give the students the topic and see what type of course they would develop and the resources they would suggest. We wondered if the class would even remotely look like what we provide the students. We also wondered how difficult and challenging the student created assessments would probably be. The FVA employee said he would email if his boss approved the idea. (It has been over a year and no email)

Online teaching methods are also based on course distribution and e-learning platforms. IQ academy uses Blackboard to deliver classes. The tools available in Blackboard are different than Moodle and D2L and vice versa. I have seen teachers teach an entire class off a BLOG they update and change daily. I have seen some classes post an entire semester of student work on a WIKI. I have heard of some online programs that require students to MAIL-IN completed workbooks each month. The entire content and expected student work for all the student's classes is put into a monthly WORKBOOK !

As I have mentioned before, we need to keep online education STUDENT CENTERED and unique. We can not just adapt the best practices of face-to-face education and allow online education to become another 'version' of face-to-face education with the same Best Practices. I consider the entire concept of Best Practices as a static concept. No Best Practices in Online Education !