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

School Administrator, April, 2004 by Brett Schaeffer

The Fairfax district is paying $185,000 this year to Apex Learning, a proprietary provider, for 14 courses, mostly Advanced Placement. The district's contract with the Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, allows it to include as many students as it wants in those courses.

"We still have to pay teachers to teach those courses. And that's only a one-year use," Winter says. "If we created the online courses ourselves, we could use them year after year."

That's the approach the district is taking toward its online professional development programs, in part to address the requirement for fully certified teachers in every classroom within two years under the No Child Left Behind Act. "We've bought some courses for our teachers,

and we are building some," says Winter. "We have a [software] developer who's working on a beginning teacher course."

Fairfax is trying to bring greater convenience to its newest teachers, says the district's director of staff development and training, Sylvia Auten. In February, Auten began a pilot pro gram for second-year middle school teachers. Courses on curriculum preparation and assessment that in the past would have been run in a workshop outside of the classroom now are conducted online. If Auten's pilot online program proves successful, the district will try to expand online teacher training courses, she says.

Finding Savings

While school districts haven't necessarily found cost savings by offering online programs for students, some school leaders believe online professional development programs for teachers can save money. Lisa Ciardulli, educational technology specialist for the Georgia Department of Education, says a greater potential exists for cost savings with online professional learning.

"If you have to pull a teacher out of class, you have to pay for a substitute. If the teacher has to travel, the school or the state has to reimburse him or her for mileage and meals," she says. "By having something that's online, we, or the schools, don't have to pay for meals, mileage or a hotel."

Her state agency is creating an online course that will help Georgia high school teachers address upcoming changes to the SAT.

"It would be expensive to send someone to talk with all those teachers around the state," Ciardulli says. Instead, the online course, which teachers will be able to access at any time from any Internet-connected computer, will allow the teachers to learn what they need to know in five or six hours, she says.

The advantages of virtual staff training are even more obvious in the remote outposts.

Michael Opp directs Alaska Online, a consortium of four distance education programs and five school districts throughout the state. He coordinates online programs among small schools scattered across Alaska.

"More than half of Alaska's schools have fewer than 150 students," says Opp, which he explains makes it difficult to find qualified teachers in some fields. These smaller schools often look to online programs--a more convenient alternative to face-to-face courses for time-pressed teachers--to provide students with certified instructors.