Online Schools - wave of the future for Second Life? 20x growth in last 5 years

Check this out,

http://news.com.com/Tiny+school+district+finds+bonanza+online/2100-1025_3-5568632.html?tag=nefd.top

Some interesting and applicable quotes:

(sigh)

Here's a question:

What can we do to make this happen? Any ideas?

I saw a news article last fall about the increase in state school funding going to online schools aimed at stay-at-home and charter learners. I sent Robin Linden an email about it, and she thanked me but said that LL intends to continue to focus on it's current entertaiment format.

Though SL now caters to college educators who want to use SL to explore various aspects of virtual gaming and culture with their students, I'm not sure that SL is quite ready for elementary or secondary educators to rely on as a dependable teaching tool. I think it would take a more advanced and stable platform and performance to warrant that next step.

As a parent with kids in elementary school, I am excited about the possibility of schools using online and/or virtual aids in a class setting. However, I would be very reluctant to set up either of my kids in a completely virtual class setting. I value the socialization aspects that school provides, and I just don't think an online learning environment would foster that as well as a "brick and mortar" school does.

I'd rather have focused socialization and team projects outside of the school. The time you save with all the classroom distractions and commuting could be used to engage in fully team-oriented projects.

I found schools (at least growing up) a very poor environment for learning proper team skills. Maybe things have changed, but I haven't heard that they have.

In my RL business I'm involved with a university that provides an online Bachelor's of Science degree applicable to the healthcare industry.

Some real exciting things are being offered within the existing education infrastructure and LL is best left to the entertainment business.

Sure, there are lots of great things happening in the online education industry.

Real time chat, live interactive 4d visual aids, group learning... oh wait, didn't I just describe SecondLife?

As soon as we hit a downturn in the economy the entertainment biz will be the first to go. SL is already living on the edge as it is, right now.

It needs something compelling and necessary, online education is the only niche that is compelling, necessary, and it has something to contribute.

The world isn't ready. Give it another 20 years.

Oh, true, SL is pretty much way ahead of its time. But that's what makes all of this so much fun

Online learning has a lot of exciting posibilities, especially for those who otherwise would not be able to attend a classroom due to geographic, physical, or other limitations.

For those that do have the luxury of being able to attend a classroom, however - I believe online learning is a poor subsititue.

At least, in 2005

I can certainly see Homeschoolers being among the first with younger children to use a platform like SL for learning, but I would still say it will be a few years from now. Then perhaps private schools a few years later, and then public schools a few years after that.

Actually, to digress a bit, history has shown that with downturns in the economy, entertainment expidentures actually go up, *especially* escapist entertainment. This is thought to be attributed to people wanting to forget about the Bad Stuff Outside (tm) and instead focus on something fun and diversionary.

To wit, millions of folks went to movies during The Great Depression.

LF

Ok, fine, then when the economy picks up entertainment will be the first to go!

Heh. Good point, LF, not sure what I was talking about there.

Heh, we live about a half-mile from our elementary school, and our middle and high schools are about one and a half miles away, so the commute is negligible; in fact, if it's not pouring down rain, we often walk to school.

It's not just team skills and learning skills that I value in a classroom-setting education, it's social skills. My son is borderline Asperger's Syndrome and tends to keep to himself if not given a reason to mingle with his peers. School gives him a chance to interact with other kids on a daily basis in a positive way. We have good public schools here and I think they provide a good education. My husband and I certainly expect to supplement our kids' schooling experience with camps, clubs, trips and other types of learning opportunities and aids that we provide ourselves.

Of course, this is in no way meant to say that alternative educational opportunities such as homeschooling or online schooling aren't valuable or useful to other people who choose it. I just have my own reasons for desiring a classroom setting for my own kids at this time. (Who knows, I might change my mind later.)

I also think that classroom schooling situations can and should make use of online or virtual learning methods and tools as they become available and prove to be effective.

How do you motivate students to perform in an online situation? It's difficult-to-impossible to motivate them in the brick-and-mortar medium, even when you're dealing with adults. Packaging attractive or interesting presentations or activities works - until you ask them to do work, too.

Online education will probably work very well for the very young, who are well-supervised, and the older, non-traditional, "returning" student, who is almost always very motivated. The in-betweens will continue to pose the same problem they do in a brick-and-mortar environment. The lack of supervision and the need to take initiative and be self-motivated may enhance the problem, unless new behavioral strategies are developed.

For the non-traditional student, or the supervised child, I think the online experience will be a very interesting way to go.

Excellent points Seth...

Well, now we're talking.

This solution is for home schooling where the state pays you a fairly significant yearly sum in order to home school your child.

Given the potential efficiences of an online educational system it could be quite possible to pocket 50% of that to help pay for a parent to stay home and use the other 50% for the online educational fees.

Now, my vision of education of the future is one where learning is interactive, where the student isn't merely copying down notes, but is doing constant critical thinking alongside the teacher as he/she is explaining the material.

Because it's online, everyone must have a computer, and the teacher gets instant and constant feedback as to how well the students are digesting the material and can therefore tweak, real time, his material as he detects certain weaknesses in understanding amongst his students.

This has many amazing benefits, among them that students will be actively learning, but also because the teacher gets a very fine grained understanding of how effective his/her course material actually is in conveying understanding amongst his students.

However, this could all work in many different online environments.

For me the beauty of SL is the sense that you are apart of a community. I can't prove it and citing here would probably be a good idea, but I believe the isolation of current online environments do not appropiately take advantage of the peer pressure effect. The peer pressure effect being - you see a bunch of other kids in the class, so shouldn't you be in class as well?

I know, it's pretty easy to go AFK, but I think there could be certain social cues which occur that indicate who in the class isn't paying attention and who is.

OK, still thinking about this. I have a question: Socialization and social discipline are a critically important processes for those students I called the "in-betweens". It's largely the reason why motivation is such a crucial factor, and why young children under supervision and older non-traditional adults do better. You say that Second Life can offer that socialization process by creating a sense of the classroom and school community.

I can see what you're driving at, and I'm willing to be convinced. But can you explain in some detail how this can happen? Can you say exactly why a school community, authority, and peer pressure will be as effective in an immersive virtual world as in an RL institution? Or will it be a rather weak facsimile of the real socialization process?

After all, the idea of an SL "community" is still the subject of debate among people here right now. After all, we have pointed out to each other again and again that behavioral compulsion is far less here because we can't die, we don't need to breath or eat or sleep, and the relative anonymity allows us to engage in acts that many of us would never think of doing in real life.

Are the immersive qualities of SL compelling enough to create a valuable peer pressure effect in world to get fellow students to learn from one another?

I think so. We might want people to be able to lock in their avatars, because changing them might ruin some of the identification process (I find after having a multitude of ALTS and changing my avatar a lot I feel less and less that my avatar represents me in any way).

I think all the possibilties are their, and I wish I had the resources or someone had the resources to fully investigate the details because I think online education can not become truly massive in the way it deserves without those details being solved, and I think the benefits of online education - cost efficiences and universal, democratic access (no longer do you need to live in the right neighbourhood!) - are so incredibly compelling that this is a world I would want to live in.

And I'd like to see health care somehow become more a part of SL. Education, Health Care, and Art in my opinion are the really the only worthy goals in life.