I’m not sure why I was surprised when I came across this last night, as I had featured The Quick and The Ed’s Guest Blog: The Realities of K–12 Virtual Education here earlier, but when I found Gene Glass‘ The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education yesterday it was like I was reading it for the first time for some reason. It was even mentioned in the entry Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S. at the BCTF Blog. Anyway…
The report is described as:
The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education
By Gene Glass
In a decade, virtual education in its contemporary form of asynchronous, computer-mediated interaction between a teacher and students over the Internet has grown from a novelty to an established mode of education that may provide all or part of formal schooling for nearly one in every 50 students in the US. In a non-random 2007 survey of school districts, as many as three out of every four public K-12 school districts responding reported offering full or partial online courses.
There can be little question that virtual courses in certain areas (e.g., math, English, social studies) produce tested achievement results on a par with those of their conventionally taught counterparts. Nor is it debatable that more complex areas of the curriculum (e.g., the arts) are beyond the reach of these new arrangements. Nevertheless, the rapid growth of this new form of schooling raises questions of cost, funding, and variable quality that require the immediate attention of policymakers.
Full Report / Executive Summary
I wanted to mention it here for a couple of reasons. The first is to let everyone who might be as surprised as I am that it exists. The second was because of this section.
Recent Developments
The technology underlying virtual education has remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. Adoption of the technology is spreading rapidly among conventional school districts, which are increasingly exploiting the affordances of the Internet to create hybrid courses or for credit recovery.34
The endnote for 34 reads:
34 The single best source of current information about virtual schools is the Blog maintained by Michael Barbour at
http://virtualschooling.wordpress.com/
Now I thought this interesting, as it was the second time in 24 hours I discovered this blog being noted as a place to go for updates on K-12 online learning (the other was the EdTech Leaders Online lesson “Establishing Goals and Defining a Model for a Virtual School Program” described in the earlier entry Statistics For October 2009) – granted, I’m not sure what this blog and current information about virtual schooling have to do with the specific sentence the endnote appears after. But I’m not complaining with the promotion – thanks to both groups…
A reminder… The call for the November Blog Carnival edition reads:
As of midnight on 31 October 2009 there were 6673 hits this past month for an average of 215 a day (which was actually a decrease of 2 hits per day from September – extra day and all). The busiest day this past month was 15 October – which was the day I posted entries on 
I posted an entry about this back at the end of August (see 
