A few posts ago I noted that Clutha will now be recognised as NZ’s first fully virtual school, after a consortium of southern secondary schools and polytechnics, led by Catlins Area School at Owaka, was one of five applicants chosen to open trades academies in 2011. I thought it worth another blog post to recognise the establishment of what is claimed to be Australasia’s first “complete” virtual school, New Zealand Virtual School, due open in 2011 and cater for Year 9 to 13 children and adults from across the country and around the world.

Today’s post on the Second Life Education New Zealand (SLENZ) blog provides useful background to this exciting new initiative which will almost certainly become something of a poster-child for developments in virtual schooling and for major initiatives like the KAREN network which will make participation in second life virtual worlds more tolerable.

One observation I have to make,  however, is the depiction of what this virtual classroom will look like in Second Life. While the concept of virtual education, with its promise of anywhere, any-time and any-device participation excites me greatly, I can’t help but be bemused by the fact that the ‘virtual classroom’ is depticted as looking like the same sort of classroom I sat in through school – chairs facing the front, desks in rows and shelves of text books in the background – and presumably teacher located at the front – all suggestive of the sort of didactic, teacher-centric pedagogy that we keep being told we should be moving away from.

Tell me I’m missing something here?

I’ve recently begun working with a tertiary institution to help them work through the process of working in the online environment, translating courses previously only taught face-to-face. For those who have done this sort of thing before you’ll realise there’s a lot more to this effort than simply putting the course material up onto a learning management system and giving students access.

The trend to moving courses online isn’t confined just to the tertiary sector. After nearly two decades of working with clusters of schools in NZ, and the development of the Virtual Learning Network, I noted yesterday that Clutha will now be recognised as NZ’s first fully virtual school, after a consortium of southern secondary schools and polytechnics, led by Catlins Area School at Owaka, was one of five applicants chosen to open trades academies in 2011.

All of this activity is very exciting, and certainly moving in the direction that I strongly believe is where we need to be heading, but it is going to require significant changes in policy, programme design and teaching practice in order to succeed – and none of that happens easily, or without confronting the tensions that exist when the way we’ve done things for years are suddenly being challenged and changed, and when our relative autonomy as teachers becomes ‘exposed’ in ways we’re not used to.

So it was with great interest I read this week of the release of the National Standards for Quality Online Programmes,  published by the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL). This publication is designed to provide states, districts, online programs, accreditation agencies and other organizations with a set of over-arching quality guidelines for online programs in several categories: leadership, instruction, content, support services and evaluation. This is the third in a series of publications from NACOL, the first being Quality Standards for Online Courses (PDF) and the second being Quality Standards for Online Teaching (PDF).

In the work I’ve been doing over the past 15 years in this area, I’ve seen lots of attention given to the development of effective online courses, and participated in discussions around what makes for effective online teaching – but in this publication we have what I regard as something that’s been missing, the emphasis on whole programme design and implementation. This is surely a sign that the whole area of online provision is maturing beyond the point where we’ve got collections of ‘pilot’ courses that are part of a larger programme. For us to truly move online learning onto centre stage we must be addressing the range of issues that are highlighted in this publication.

I now look forward to a fourth publication – Quality Standards for Government Level Policy Developers. We certainly need that in New Zealand, where the current policy framework within which initiatives such as the Clutha Virtual School and the Virtual Learning Network must struggle to become established is based on a 20th century view of schooling. For example, policies around the way funding is provided for students and staff, how assessments must be attested to, how ‘attendance’ is regarded and how resources are allocated are all based on a ‘physical school paradigm’, and will continue to be problematic until they are changed.

In browsing through some of my RSS feeds this weekend I came across a couple of sites with lists of useful online resources for educators.

The first is a list of 25 Incredible TED Talks for Educators, compiled by the team at Bachelor’s Degree Online. For those who are regular watchers of the TED Talks online videos many of these will be very familiar, but for those who aren’t this list provides a useful link to many of the videos that will be of particular interest to educators.

Some of my favourites that are on this list include:

• Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
• Richard Baraniuk on open-source learning
• Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves
• Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas
• Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child

That’s not to say that these are the only interesting ones, just that they’re among those I’ve seen in the past and been inspired by. Something that is interesting about this list is the number of videos on the list that deal with education in Africa – certainly an area to keep an eye on!

The second list is from a group called Ace Online Schools titled 25 Awesome Virtual Learning Experiences Online and contains links to 25 websites that feature virtual learning experiences, exposing online visitors to everything from history to geography, astronomy to anatomy, literature to government. The majority of links are to US-based experiences, but serve to illustrate just what sorts of things can be done in the online world to provide a virtual experience for those unable to attend or participate in the real thing.

The Learning@School conference is rollicking along in Rotorua at the moment, with keynote speaker on day one, Andy Hargreaves, setting the scene with challenges to us all about the need to take account of the whole context and culture of our school when considering change and development. Pam Hook had the audience spell-bond also with her “Hooked on Thinking” ideas and strategies.

Unfortunately for me I am missing the conference, and have had to rely on my Twitter feeds, text messages and the odd call to keep me posted. Having made it to the opening of the conference I’ve had to return home for family reasons. That didn’t stop the presentation I was scheduled to do from going ahead – with my colleague from the Ministry of Education, Douglas Harre, stepping up to share thoughts, insights and ideas based on CORE’s Ten Trends for 2009. This is the annual list of trends developed by CORE staff to represent a view of some key areas of interest for NZ educators with regards to the impact of ICTs on teaching and learning.

This year’s trends are:

1. Mobile Technologies for learning
2. Netbooks
3. Cloud Computing
4. Learning spaces/environments
5. Open Education Resources
6. High Definition Video conferencing
7. Advanced Networks
8. Cyber-Citizenary
9. Green computing
10. Digital Literacy

The slideshow used at Learning@School is provided here:

For links to other research and lists of trends and predictions for 2009 check out the following:

Horizon Report, 2009

Looking forward to 2009

100 Top Sites for the year ahead

The Future of the Internet III

Horizon report – Australia/NZ edition

World Environment Day is looming – Wednesday 5 June – and to celebrate this event schools from throughout New Zealand and around the world are being invited to make a pledge and decide on some sort of eco-action to make a difference in some way. These ideas and actions can be submitted on the WED Website. Every New Zealand school, wharekura, kura, early childhood education centre, and kōhanga reo can use this website to share their plans to contribute to a sustainable future and participate in World Environment Day (WED) on 5 June 2008.

Overseas schools can also share their own sustainability thinking on a day when New Zealand’s students will be first to see the sun and to show the way today! The organisers are currently trying to get schools from as many countries as possible to participate, so that the maps that become active on 5 June will show a broad coverage of participation from across the whole world. If you know of a school that might be interested in participating please pass this message on.

I had an unexpected skype call yesterday with Joe Rigby from MellaniuM, a Toronto-based startup specialising in the development of 3D real-world virtual environments. Joe and his development team have leveraged the Unreal2 engine used in Unreal Tournament game to create this very impressive 3D virtual world – capable of having up to 32 avatars working together in a private virtual world.

MellaniuM works differently from Second Life, in that is it is a Client-Server operation – you need first to download a piece of client software and install it onto your computer, after which all of the processing happens on your desktop, and doesn’t rely on this being done across the web. The result is a very impressive, highly detailed 3D virtual environment that you can navigate around with ease, and includes some of the most impressive light-source rendering that I’ve seen in this sort of thing.

Part of the secret of the very impressive graphics in the environment is that they are rendered directly from Autocad designs to dimension the model to exactly what they are in real life – you can see some examples of this in the video clip.

The other really impressive thing for me was that Joe was able to ‘walk’ me through the demos of the software using skype – another little innovation that he and his colleagues had worked on.

Already interest is coming from engineering and real estate companies who see potential in these sort of environments for their businesses. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think of ways in which these environments could be used in education – for virtual field trips, virtual science labs, and virtual classrooms… as we’re already seeing happening in places like Second Life, but in this case, in a richer, more graphically detailed environment that “lives” on your own computer.

Gone live today, this new project called Skoolaborate which has been developed by staff and pupils at MLC School in NSW, Australia, which they describe as:

Basically a collaborative work with the best ideas from around the globe, specifically targeting the Asia Pacific time zone (China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and other interested Asia Pacific countries). Skoolaborate aims to bring together like minded schools from around the globe so that their students may collaborate and learn from each other through a variety of educational experiences. We hope that Skoolaborate will act as a vehicle that promotes Global Awareness and Understanding.

I’ve already spoken online tonight with a colleague from a school here in Christchurch who is looking at joining the project!

In their opening post the team announce that they are beginning with a Teen Second Life project – this will be one to watch as it evolves!

I read with interest another post on their site titled “Is Second Life For Real?”, most of which is based on what the author’s son found after doing a little research based on this question. A quote in this entry caught my eye:

“…What’s beginning to catch the attention of IBM and other huge corporations is something potentially far more profound than a new online pastime. It’s the ability to use Second Life as a platform for a whole new Net – this one in 3-D and even more social than the original – with huge opportunities to sell products and services.”

There’s also some interesting discussion on how the line between game and non-game is becoming blurred in the emerging 3-D online world, and how, as a result, we???re looking at new communities, new forms of communication, new areas of socialization…

MMmmm – more to ponder! I’m off for a cuppa to do so.

This new report just out makes for challenging reading. Although based in the US experience, the principles that are discussed are applicable in other contexts.

For those whose interest is in outcomes, the report identifies that the small body of research focused on the effectiveness of K???12 virtual schooling programs supports findings of similar studies on virtual courses in higher education which have found “no significant difference” in student performance in online courses versus traditional face-to-face learning.

But the report goes on to show that in K???12 education, the Internet is enabling deep structural changes. In each case, new organizations are developing alternative management structures, distribution methods, and work models.

The report compares the way that virtual schooling is driving transforming changes in public education with the way Apple’s iTunes has changed the music industry.

Where successful, virtual schooling demonstrates that innovative reforms can be readily integrated into the public school system. As a result, it is increasingly important to understand both the innovations that are emerging from online schooling and their potential to leverage reform on a far larger scale in public education.

It has long been my contention that the introduction of online/distance learning options such as what is happening in the NZ video conferencing clusters has the potential to do far more than simply cater for the needs of students in rural schools where some subjects may not be available. This report is certainly worth considering in the NZ context with the numbers of schools that are now participating in the Virtual Learning here. The section on policy recommendations in particular is worth considering in terms of how some of these might be generalised outside the US context.

Laboratories of Reform: Virtual High Schools and Innovation in Public Education (259K) [download]

I’ve finally decided to begin my own community in Ning, and have chosen the theme of Virtual Schooling which is an area that I’ve had a particular interest in since the early 1990s when I worked alongside the CANTAtech cluster. I’m impressed so far with Ning’s features and usability – I’ve easily been able to include the RSS feed from Michael Barbour’s Virtual High School Meanderings for instance.

Anyone with an interest in this area is welcome to share their thoughts and experiences! Please pass it on to others who may be interested.

The people at the eLearning Guild have produced yet another great e-book, available free to guild members online, called a handbook on synchronous e-learning.

Anyone who is venturing into the fun-filled world of online teaching using synchronous technologies will find this book a mine of useful information. The main focus of the advice is aimed at users of systems such as Elluminate, WebEx, Centra, Acrobat Connect (formerly Breeze) etc., the advice given is equally applicable to users of traditional video conferencing set ups.

Reading the book took me back to the early days of audio-graphics and video conferencing in NZ when I ran workshops for teachers and we produced pages of notes etc – the contents of this book reflect the same sorts of advice, including;

• designing for the virtual classroom,

• preliminary planning
• setting up
• showtime!
• wrap-up and follow-up

The advice itself is very practical, with useful lists of tips and suggestions that could easily be used in any context.

In addition, there’s a useful introduction to synchronous e-Learning that provides a comprehensive rationale for why you might choose to tech in this manner. One thing I was pleased to see was reference to the use of an LMS as an adjunct to the synchronous tool (some may argue it’s the other way round!) – which reinforces the notion that e-learning is often about choosing combinations of tools rather than focusing on a single modality. to this end there’s a useful table comparing the features of synchronous and asynchronous learning included in the introduction.

Overall, another excellent publication from the eLearning Guild containing ideas and advice that is applicable across all areas – business, tertiary, schools etc.