Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
Ontario’s Ministry of Education has announced a plan to make it mandatory, by next year, for high school students to take four online courses in order to graduate. That should give everybody involved with education — kids, parents, teachers, administrators and school trustees — pause for thought.
Education is not simply a matter of the transmission of traditional content and some applicable skills. Highly educated and experienced people called teachers need to be involved.
For some time, students everywhere, especially in higher grades, have enrolled in single e-learning courses for a variety of reasons: to fast-track and get to graduation early, to catch up in credits, to accommodate their learning needs or because particular courses are not offered in their communities.
So far so good.
Five U.S. states — Michigan, Florida, Alabama, Virginia and Arkansas — require one e-learning credit in high school, but nowhere in North America are students mandated to take four online courses.
The concern for educators in Canada would be that politicians who find public education expensive might be looking for ways to download costs. E-learning is much less expensive and, at the same time, not as irritating and inconvenient as classrooms, where class size is restricted by contract with those pesky members of teaching unions.
The Ontario government has engaged in public consultation about class sizes that would increase the limit for face-to-face courses to 28 students and increase the limit for e-learning courses to 35 students.
Educators also understand that the impact on the growth and development of children is not just about how much education costs.
Educators, at the risk of seeming self-serving, are genuinely concerned that an expansion of e-learning, apart from single users for the reasons described above, can lead to the isolation of individuals who miss out on the “hidden curriculum” of public education.
That term refers to everything that kids learn in school other than what is specifically taught in classrooms: How they should interact with peers, teachers, and other adults; how they should perceive different races, groups, or classes of people; or what ideas and behaviours are considered acceptable or unacceptable.
A recent study in Psychological Science suggests that the absence of those experiences normally shared with peers has a social cost in that kids become alienated from others.
A report in the Chronicle for Higher Education found that e-learning institutions report dropout rates ranging from 20 per cent to 50 per cent for distance learners, and administrators of online courses quote dropout rates that are often 10 to 20 percentage points higher in distance offerings than in their face-to-face counterparts.
Further research on the online environment shows that interaction among students and between the instructor and students is critically important for student satisfaction and retention.
None of this is to diminish the role played by legitimate online education programs, which are approved by B.C.’s Ministry of Education and listed as DL (distance learning) schools along with the province’s other several hundred independent schools.
The issue is whether online learning will not be by choice, but will be a mandated requirement for high-school graduation, as it apparently will be in 2020 in Ontario.
An analysis of the Ontario plan by education think-tank People for Education cautions that “in order to be implemented fully and successfully, policy changes must be accompanied by appropriate communication with stakeholders, capacity building and resources for practitioners and students, as well as support for troubleshooting. However, a first step will be to explicitly state the purpose of the policy move.”
The last sentence raises the question “why” about mandatory online learning.
Beyond that, People for Education’s analysis produced a good news/bad news result.
A study published in the Quarterly Review of Distance Education identifies that “there has been very little study of the transition of high school distance e-learners to further study at the post-secondary level. “
On the other hand, students who chose to take a course online said that they felt more prepared for post-secondary learning because they were prepared to be independent learners.
However, none of these studies take into account the implications for children from families which, for one reason or another, cannot afford the costs associated with extensive online use.
