More Blogging Items About High School Students in Online College Classes

Over the past few weeks, even a month, I've seen a lot more items in my Bloglines account about secondary school students who have enrolled in dual credit, advanced placement, or simply college level courses in an online environment while still in high school. These have included:

• UNL to offer online classes to high schoolers from Distance-Educator.com's Daily News
• Dual Enrollment allows students an early start - Melanie Hughes, The Morning Call from Online Learning Update

I've also seen some items on how online learning has opened up opportunities for rural students, not all of which have been at the secondary level. For example:

• Online learners Students, teachers take advantage of more flexible options - MELISSA GARZANELLI, The Times from Online Learning Update
• Technology brings special class to small school - KANIQUA S. DANIEL, The Oakland Press from Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old
• Online Courses Not So Distant from Teaching and Developing Online
• Going for Distance from vSKOOL.org: Linking Hurricane Victims to Online Educational Resources

See, for me, these are the reasons why we should have virtual schooling... To provide opportunities for students to excel beyond the confines of their own high school experiences. To allow students access to opportunities that they wouldn't otherwise we able to take advantage of.

One of the questions then becomes, how do we structure an environment so that these students will be successful? I believe this is where the ideas from this paper, Evaluation of an Online Student Induction and Support Package for Online Learner -Catherine M O'Donnell,Deborah J Sloan, Clive W Mulholland, EURODL (which I found at Online Learning Update), comes in.

While not necessarily the solution, this particular paper discusses and evaluates an online student induction and support package which is utilized with both face-to-face and online to prepare them for learning online. An interesting read and something that we all need to consider more... How do we get students, who we are designing these opportunities for, better prepared to not just take advantage of them, but succeed in them?

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