Virtual savings? Online courses bring better access but little impact on the bottom line - Virtual High School

School Administrator, April, 2004 by Brett Schaeffer

For Mike Simeck, superintendent of the 900-student Dansville, Mich., school district, adding online courses to the district's high school class offerings means enhancing the curriculum, not necessarily saving dollars.

"The real reason we began to get involved with Virtual High School in the first place is the former superintendent was looking for ways to diversify the curriculum," explains Simeck, who took over in 2003 as superintendent after three years as the high school principal. "In an effort to diversify, the district signed on (with the Concord, Mass.-based Virtual High School) initially in 1999."

A nonprofit company, Virtual High School is one of the leaders in online course delivery on the K-12 level, offering more than 150 full-semester online classes, from the familiar (AP biology and American history) to the uncommon (bioethics, number theory and maritime history).

Rapid Growth

At first, Simeck admits, not many students in his district, which consists of three inter-connected buildings that house kindergarten to 12th graders, were interested in taking online classes.

By the time VHS started charging for its courses in 2002 (from 1996-2001 it was funded entirely by a $7.8 million U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant and school districts had free access), the state of Michigan had developed its own online courses.

The cost of a VHS course--$6,000 annually for up to 25 students each semester--was about 50 percent more than the cost of a course for the same number of students through Michigan Virtual University, a state-funded online course delivery program that launched in 2000. The Dansville district signed on with Michigan Virtual High School, a division of Michigan Virtual University.

"We initially set it up with a small group of kids," says Simeck, adding that the district tried to target students with a technology interest. He and other administrators quickly discovered they couldn't predict who would be interested in trying online coursework.

"Eventually we had Advanced Placement kids taking classes; we had special education kids; and we had dropouts," Simeck says. The online offerings have since become more popular. However, the cost remains an extra for the district.

"Our experience with it is that there's no way to get it to scale for us that would make it a cost saver," says Simeck.

However, in Florida, where the entirely state-funded Florida Virtual School provides online courses to instate districts free of charge, those online classes can be seen as a savings, says Jodie Pozo-Olano, a consultant to the statewide virtual program based in Orlando, Fla.

A small rural district in Florida probably can't afford to hire an instructor to teach Advanced Placement chemistry to the 10 students who may want the class, says Pozo-Olano. But at no cost, the district can arrange for those 10 students to take the AP class online.

"A district is able to serve more students without spending extra money, so in a way that is savings," says Pozo-Olano.

Quality Costs

Researchers who've been studying the newest approach to course delivery indicate there's not yet much information on whether:online initiatives can save dollars for school districts.

Andrew Zucker, associate director of the Center for Online Professional Education at the Newton, Mass.-based Education Development Center, co-authored the 2003 book The Virtual High School: Teaching Generation V. The book examines online learning's implications for K-12 education, primarily through a study of the Virtual High School.

While Zucker cites claims of increased educational access for students and teachers as probably the primary argument in favor of online learning, cost savings are not mentioned as a factor in the growth of virtual programs.

"We did indicate that we thought that claims of saving money were, in many cases, premature," says Zucker. "If you're talking about providing an online teacher to 15-25 students, you still have the same issue--that one teacher only goes so far and it costs a good deal of money for education whether it's online or face-to-face."

"Our goal was not financial," says Tom Scullen, superintendent of the Appleton Area School District in Appleton, Wis. "We researched it. If you're offering a high-quality [online] program there's no real cost saving."

By high quality, Scullen means an online program that involves personalized attention from a teacher, sometime even one-on-one attention.

The Appleton district contracted seven years ago with NovaNET, an online program offered by the Mesa, Ariz.-based Pearson Digital Learning, in an effort to retain students who might otherwise disappear from the radar screen.

"We started because we didn't want to expel kids," Scullen says. Instead, a student who was banned from campus for fighting could continue his or her education through online courses. The district then opened the virtual classroom to homeschoolers and students who were homebound because of health reasons.