Getting Ready To Take A Virtual School Course

I've come across a couple of things lately that speak to the issue of student readiness for taking virtual school courses. The first was the Student Survival Guide from the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation (CDLI) in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. particularly liked the "Student Accounts" section, which provides advice from actual CDLI students to future CDLI students.

The second thing I had come across through Google, but then Darren over at Teaching and Developing Online also posted it to his blog - Student Online Readiness Tool (you can see Darren's entry about it by clicking here
here). This one was created by one of my former professors, Dr. Lynne Schrum, at the University of Georgia - which means that this tool is really designed for post-secondary students.

Anyway, I mention these because one of the projects that I hope to be working on next year is to extend the Educational Success Prediction Instrument (ESPRI) of Dr. Margaret Roblyer to include remediation modules to assist secondary students in identifying their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the skills needed for being successful in a virtual school environment, and to provide some form of support in the areas that those students are weak. I'll let you know if this line of inquiry comes to fruition, and if so, how it progresses.

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