Our Online Adventure - school district in Liverpool, NY, offers electronic education

School Administrator, Oct, 2001 by Laura Lavine

Hands-On Teachers

* Second, I ignored the suggestions of a veteran virtual school administrator.

He had advised against having our teachers create course content and learn the course delivery software. He suggested teachers be allowed to focus on the content, then use technical support staff to upload it.

If the teachers were trained in the use of the software, I thought they would discover more ways to make their content compelling and more robust and meet different learning styles of students. So we taught the teachers how to use the software in their training. In addition, we covered other topics such as state standards, online plagiarism, copyright laws, intellectual property rights, online assessment, use of streaming media and an all-important refresher on writing instructional objectives.

The course development process turned out to be more grueling, lengthy and expensive than I anticipated. The first group of 17 teachers participating in the training were invited--not required--to attend. As a result, they are a somewhat self-selected group who put forth incredible effort to meet their own high expectations of themselves. Subsequently, what looked like great work one week sometimes looked abysmal to them the next. They revised and revised until I had to tell some of them, "It's fine--move On!"

From this first round of training, we saw areas needing improvement, such as changes in sequencing of seminar topics, before we trained our second group this past spring. What is important, though, is that the teachers take great pride in teaching courses they have created and in knowing the software as well as they do--more pride than I think they would have if we had purchased commercial software or had someone else input the teachers' content.

Spreading the Message

* Third, we settled on who would be our target audience and how we would market the program.

Specifically, the groups we had in mind as online course enrollees included students in New York state's small, rural schools; medically homebound students; students who are home-schooled; alternative education students; migrant students; nontraditional students such as athletes who travel year-round; and students who move from Liverpool but would like to earn their diploma from here.

With the help of our communications specialist, I created a marketing brochure and packet, a slide show and a dedicated part of our school district's Web site. A colleague invited me to give my first presentation at an area college, and from there the word spread. Invitations started trickling in to present at other school districts throughout the state, while I applied to speak at various conferences.

Over the course of the project's first year, the number of requests increased to an average of two per week--invitations to speak at conferences, to deliver the keynote address at districts' technology planning days and to help other schools select students for online courses. I've also been interviewed many times by newspapers, while graduate students at Syracuse University have used our virtual school as a topic for research projects.