My Takeaways From Virtual Learning in a Public ISD - a Parent Perspective

Maybe just for background, as an early adopter of MOOCs (remember when Coursera was free across the board and wild in their course offerings?), graduate of an online Masters program, strong supporter of the Open Source and crowdsourcing movement and father of two students, I have some insight in what can be done with virtual instruction. I had the pleasure to apply this knowledge professionally during a brief stint as Technical Development Manager in charge of training our engineering and field staff in an era of increased virtualization and still enjoy dabbling in the subject matter, both for subject matter and content production when invited.

Therefore I was very interested to read about research the RAND Corporation had put out on the future of virtual instruction in public schools

I wanted to share our experience as a datapoint. We are living in a suburban ISD in Texas with about 120k students. They started offering virtual classes for the school year 2020/21 after a period of experimentation during general lockdown in early 2020 as a choice, concurrent with in-person education. Initially they kept virtual instruction separate from in-person instruction using a commercial platform. They then switched to hybrid teaching of in-person and virtual classes. For 2021/22 they planned to dedicate one school to virtual instruction only, contingent on funding legislation, which at least initially did not come through, leaving the virtual instruction plans up in the air.

F2021/22, the district moved on extremely short notice to offer virtual classes to students not eligible for COVID vaccine (K-6) and provisionally until vaccination was qualified for that age group, returning to virtual-only classes with dedicated teachers (rumored to be volunteers) seconded to this effort.

Here my learnings in very brief

- Hybrid classes do not work very well, as the in-person vs. online rhythm do not mesh well. There are long periods of idleness on each side offering opportunity to goof of and depending on the teacher, claims of preferential treatment to the other group.

- There is a deficit of knowledge how to structure online training. It is important to understand that virtual learning is not effective when understood as frontal instruction delivered via a video platform. The video platform and network infrastructure at times creates a bottleneck, which can be compensated with other forms of instruction and possibly scheduled 1:1 time to address individual needs of a student. But this does not fit in a 6-7 contiguous periods schedule.

- Asynchronous elements with shorter live instruction sessions are better than long zoom sessions with limited opportunity for the audience to engage.

- A lot of the options on online learning are not being used, e. g. peer-assessed assignments, collaborative editing, Wiki-based assignments, use of graphics- or modelling- or specialized software beyond basic Office.

- Virtual training is more difficult for students, who have not achieved literacy, as written/read interaction becomes a lot more difficult, e. g. for Kindergartners.

- It appears that on the side of both systems procurement and hardware procurement, the requirements were not very clear when specifying what was needed. There are opportunities ifor using open source platforms and systems. With the students as a resource and becoming expert users, they can not only use the resources, but also become expert users with an opportunity to shape them to their needs, if they are guided appropriately. This might also generate increased engagement and more fun when allowed to experiment and work on real world projects. As an example you could imagine an English Language Arts class to produce an audiobook version of a public domain work on the Librivox platform. Or both from an art- and a design/technology perspective to design 3D objects in an open source modelling or CAD platform learning the system at the same time.