Teaching in Virtual Schools

A while ago, like back in July, I asked What Does Teaching in a Virtual High School Look Like? Over the past few months, there have been a number of entries from other blogs that are starting to look at this very questions.

• "Teachers Invisible Presence in Net-based Distance Education" by Agneta Hult, Ethel Dahlgren, David Hamilton and Tor Söderström, Pedagogiska Institutionen, Umeå Universitet, Sweden (from International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning)
• Breaking the Barriers of Time and Space: More Effective Teaching Using e-Pedagogy - Peshe Kuriloff, Innovate Online (from Online Learning Update)
• Evaluating Online Teachers Is Largely a Virtual Task - Education Week (from Online Learning Update)
• 834 Tips for successful online instruction (from Teaching and Developing Online)
• Blend of Classroom and Online Teaching to Be Most Effective Learning (from Teaching and Developing Online)
• Introduction to online teaching (from Teaching and Developing Online)
• Evaluating Online Teachers (from Teaching and Developing Online)
• What does it mean to be an online teacher? (from Teaching and Developing Online)

I think these last two entries in particular hit the nail on the head. The other entries all deal with the how of online instruction and how one can become a better online teacher.

But these last two entries ask how is an online teacher different from a face-to-face teacher and how do we then evaluate this teacher because of these differences?

Good questions to ask... I'll come back to the evaluation one a little later, in the meantime what do you think about these two questions?

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