Sorting Through Vendors - electronic education - includes related resource information

School Administrator, Oct, 2001 by Jim Hirsch

Before committing your dollars, consider quality of offerings, graduation credits, staff support and likely burdens

Choosing a vendor or multiple vendors to provide online courses to students in your school district is somewhat more involved than selecting a textbook series or new instructional software. The number of companies providing virtual learning in K-12 education has continued to grow, even as many other segments of the dot.com economy have begun to shrink.

The Wall Street Journal earlier this year estimated the online market for K-12 was at $1.3 billion and predicted it would grow to $6.9 billion by 2003. This translates into millions of students enrolling in courses delivered primarily through electronic means.

Before a school district makes any significant investment or commitment to an agreement with an outside vendor to provide online courses, school leaders ought to consider several issues, including the quality and content of offerings, awarding of graduation credit, staff qualifications and support, requirements placed on the local school, district or student and pricing.

Gauging Quality

A first step in considering online courses marketed by proprietary firms is to develop a common understanding of what constitutes quality in the type of online courses you will make available to students.

Ask these questions: Does the course meet national, state and/or local curriculum standards? Does the course contain engaging, interactive methods of learning, assessment and effective delivery? Is the course content accessible via any standard Internet browser application or does it require non-standard plug-in technologies or offline material?

Determining an acceptable level of quality can be difficult. One good resource is the Virtual Resource Site for Teaching with Technology (www.umuc.edu/virtualteaching). This site allows you to review various teaching pedagogies that can be used in online courses.

Graduation Credit

Since vendors design course content to fit a wide variety of customers, much of that course content is created using national standards. This is good news because that often translates into comprehensive content and a rigorous structure. Unfortunately, in today's state-by-state accountability culture, aligning to national standards does not guarantee that course content will address the necessary state curriculum standards.

If you want to offer online courses for which you will grant students state graduation credit, it is not enough to take the vendor's assurance that its courses have been aligned to your state's standards. The credit-granting institution may need to perform the necessary correlations by assigning curriculum specialists or master teachers the task of thoroughly reviewing the courses and reporting on discrepancies.

As an alternative to this time-intensive task, you can grant local credit for online courses run by all vendors. Ask the firms to share any national or state standards correlations they have completed on their courses.

Class or Course

Many vendors offer a small sampling of online courses and make no pretense of providing a comprehensive curriculum. While the quality of individual courses may be excellent, you must consider the consequences of offering these non-articulated courses if a student intends to complete a sequence of content offerings through a combination of online and in-class experiences.

If the vendor has not considered the importance of articulation, there is no reason to think your students will be as prepared with the prerequisite skills and competencies for subsequent courses in a series. Only a handful of vendors purport to offer a comprehensive curriculum or one that is diploma-granting.

Because most online course vendors depend on individual or small groups of educators to construct courses, no guarantee exists that the authors of an Algebra I course have spoken to the authors of the Algebra II course, for example. Without careful attention to articulation, student progress in future courses can be hampered.

Whose Equipment?

Some vendors will only provide courses for students who register and use the online material from their own corporate servers. The advantage to this model, known as an Application Service Provider, or ASP, is that the vendor is not only responsible for course content, but also for course delivery.

Because this allows vendors to aggregate students on typically more powerful servers, issues such as backups and redundant power for improved availability are taken care of for the school district. That advantage also turns into a disadvantage if the vendor's server or network connectivity becomes over-subscribed, slowing student access or leading to a catastrophic failure in which students are left without online access.

If a vendor provides school districts with the option of licensing the courses, a district just entering the online market may not want to outlay the capital dollars to equip its own servers until there's a proven demand for online courses. The ideal situation is one in which the vendor can support either preference for course delivery. That allows a district a great amount of flexibility and can provide an immediate disaster-recovery plan should one delivery service fail. Any school district able to host its own course delivery also has an option of hosting courses from more than one vendor if the hardware/software platform is compatible.