Educational Leadership - February 2011

restraints prohibited me from doing so during the school year. I knew the class would engage students, but I questioned whether it would be appealing enough to entice both teenagers and myself away from the coveted freedoms we enjoy over break.

As the deadline for proposals approached, I had an epiphany: Why not offer the class online? Students could participate from their homes, on their own schedules, without having to wake up early or miss afternoons at the pool. I could still take graduate classes at the local college and provide day care for my kids. Vacations, summer camp, part-time jobs—all would still be possible. I could reasonably guarantee high enrollment from students who would otherwise never take summer school, and I knew that our new superintendent would be supportive because he had been trying to jump-start online education in the district. It seemed I had stumbled on the perfect plan.

There was just one problem: Students don’t learn anything in an online class! That had been my experience, at least.

Sure, online courses were useful—I had completed a required statistics course online in a little under 16 hours one semester in college, and I knew many teachers who used online programs to advance steps on the salary schedule— but I had yet to meet anyone who actually received a meaningful education online. Online courses were like some of the worksheet-based classes I had taken in high school—fill in the blank without talking, get your A without thinking, and move on with your life.

I wasn’t going to compromise my professional ethics for the convenience of online learning. But after listing all my objections to online education, I found ways to overcome them effectively in designing my district’s first online language arts course: Creative Writing in a Digital World.

Understanding and retaining knowledge and skills require contact time during which students can experiment and critically engage with curricular content.

In an online class, however, contact time is difficult to regulate. In fact, this is often touted as a benefit of online instruction—students can work at their own pace, thereby experiencing differentiated instruction. However, true differentiated instruction provides enrichment for advanced learners; all students work for the full time allotted whatever their ability level. When students must merely complete a checklist of tasks and then take a test, as is the case in many online courses, learners miss opportunities for growth.

To maximize the amount of time students would spend learning, I actually designed my class as though I would be teaching it in person. When I planned lessons and activities, I tried to ensure that students had to spend as much time “engaged” online as they would have spent in an in-person class. If I would normally spend a class period reading, discussing, and writing about a short story, I made sure that all of those activities were contained in a single online lesson that would take the same amount of time to complete.

I was surprised to find that I often had to create more assignments for online lessons than I had originally anticipated because the oral discussion that normally occurs in an in-person class had to be conducted in writing. I felt that it was important to maintain the same amount of communication that an in-person class would provide, so I did not shy away from assigning a multitude of writing assignments online.

Objection 1: Online classes
require less work.
Educators place a high value on atten-
dance—so much so that many schools
refuse to award credit to a student
who has excessive absences from class.

Objection 2: Online classes lack meaningful interaction. Talk in the classroom offers learners a diversity of opinions, experiences, expressions, and ways of thinking about