By Bill Jackson

Valuable piece about online learning at the KQED MindShift site (KQED is the public radio/TV station for the San Francisco Bay Area). Author Sara Bernard interviewed Maureen Cottrell, a teacher at iHigh, a virtual high school in San Diego. A few ideas stand out:

• Some students may not realize how hard online learning is. If you think about it, doing most things “virtually” is harder than doing them “in person.” Would you rather have a meeting with a group of people in a room or via Skype? Would you rather get extra help learning a difficult concept with a live tutor by your side, or via email? This is not to say that virtual learning is a bad idea, just that students and parents shoudl not assume that it will be easier.
• Teachers are less able to adjust the pace on the fly. Cottrell describes how, in a traditional classroom, shed often slow down her pace to match the learning pace of the majority. But that does not happen in her virtual classrooms. The plan is the plan; students may come in for extra help, of course, but the train keeps moving. This could be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on whether students can ultimately keep up.
• Virtual learning is often a “hybrid” model in practice. As Cottrell says,”Students can come in and meet with a teacher face-to-face if they need more attention . . . our teachers don’t get to work from home. We have a classroom set aside here. About 20 to 30 kids come in at any given day, voluntarily — there is no mandatory attendance. It puts the ownership in the students’ hands. At iHigh, how you’re going to succeed is up to you.”
• Dont forget the socialization. “Teenagers love to be social,” says Cottrell, with seriousunderstatement. iHigh works to provide opportunities to students. But this may be a more complicated issue than meets the eye. Im currently reading The Social Animal by New York Times coumnist David Brooks. In the book, Brooks asserts that the most cognitively difficult thing a teenager will do is to sort out the social pecking order in high school. An exxageration perhaps, butthe point resonates. A lot of valuablelearning comes frompeer-to-peer interaction,beyond the realm of academic standards.

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