Predictions for 2006 for Virtual Schooling

The guys over at Slashdot - the techie news service, have posted an entry a few days ago that ooks ahead to the coming year and makes some Technology Predictions for 2006? While I usually just skip over this blog in my Bloglines, as it is usually more technical than what I can manageor have an interest in, but this one stuck out at me for some reason.

It may be because around the same time that I saw this entry, I was also preparing a list of trends about virtual schooling - trends about the practice of virtual schooling and I felt that the activities of assessing the current trends of virtual schooling was much like trying to predict what the future year may hold for us in technological advances. For those in the know, both activities involve some level of uncertainty and both items could easily be debated, but in both instances you just have to use what you know about the topic and lay it out there.

In this end, I came up with five trends about the current practice of virtual schooling. They were:

1. The number of states with virtual schools and the number of students taking virtual school courses is growing.
2. Virtual schooling is moving from primarily targetting the secondary grades to being available for middle school and elementary school students.
3. Virtual schools are moving away from their initial focus on advanced level mathematics, science, and other specialty courses to cover a wider variety of the mandated curriculum.
4. Virtual schooling is becoming more and more popular with students and parents looking for alternatives to the public school system.
5. Recent research continues to focus upon student performance and the nature of students served by virtual schools.

Now, I thought that since I have this blog and, if you believe the information presented in Statistics for December, a fairly steady readerhip, I wanted to see how on or off base I was with these trends. So...

If you agree with any of these five, which ones do you agree with?

If you disagree with any of these five, which ones do you disagree with and why?

If you feel that I missed one or more, what are they are why should they be included?

I look forward to your response...

Tags: virtual school, cyber school, high school, education