Week 11: Research on Virtual Schools and Virtual Schooling

What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week?

This week, as I read through the reports, I am struck by the repeated cautions made by authors on the causality between variables and outcomes tested. For example, in IESD, Comprehensive Technical Report 2009 Evaluation of social skills of fulltime online public school students, self-assessments of the socialization skills of online students are not found to be lower than f2f students. The author further his claims that this does not mean online schools made them sociable; in this study, there was no pretesting done so students might have a active social life right from the start. The articles this week made me realized that it is easy to jump into causality, and we should practise caution when looking at these results.

Week 10: Online vs face-to-face

What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week?

This week’s activity has set me thinking about the measurement of effectiveness of virtual schools. I used to think that measurement is straightforward and now realized that comparisons are sometimes irrelevant since there are too many variables in the first place. It has taught me that we should perhaps play more attention to what makes a system successful in the first place, rather than focus on the minor differences.