In Michigan, educators have partnered with colleagues in China to offer virtual education exchange opportunities that allow students to communicate with each other, often through videos, online. During the next school year, students will have the chance to attend a real Chinese school, taking virtual classes according China’s time zone, at their own schools during the hours of 8 p.m. and 4 a.m.

For the rest of the article, go to Virtual Education Offers Global Opportunities for Students and Teachers

It will join this year’s online startups — Turlock Unified’s eCademy Charter at Crane and Modesto City School’s Modesto Virtual Academy — as well as current district online programs and at least a dozen independent charters.

Online schools have, it appears, gone viral.

The Stanford Online High School (OHS), previously called the Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY), was established in 2006 and currently serves more than 400 students, including both full- and part-time students.

EPGY was founded to provide classes that academically talented students could use to supplement their regular high school curriculum.

For the rest of the article, go to Stanford Online High School grants diplomas to academically advanced students

Last month, the California Charter Schools Association announced an initiative that would have tragic ramifications for some public charter schools. Under this proposal, any charter school failing to meet the association’s arbitrary standards would not be permitted to renew its charter. After close examination, though, the educational community may want to rethink CCSA’s assessment and its effort to limit parental choice under the guise of accountability.

For the rest of the article, go to Another View: Data can bedevilcharter schools

Less than a third of the “virtual” schools managed by for- profit companies made adequate progress toward meeting state standards last year, compared with about half of all public schools, according to the report from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The findings demonstrate that online public schools, which educate more than 200,000 students nationwide, don’t have the results to justify their growth, said Gary Miron, lead author of the study and a professor at Western Michigan University.

For the rest of the article, go to Pearson’s U.S. Online Public Schools Fall to Bottom of Class

As parents, we want to give our children a chance at a bright future. However, it seems that even those with the best of intentions can sometimes stray from their original goals and neglect the interests they originally sought to serve.

Recently, the California Charter School Association (CCSA) announced a new initiative that would have tragic ramifications for a number of California public schools. CCSA suggests that any charter school failing to meet its (CCSA’s) arbitrary standards not be permitted to renew their charter. After close examination of CCSA’s assessment methodology, the educational community may want to rethink CCSA’s assessment rubric and their ability to bully individual schools and limit students’ academic opportunities. Included in their list are two public virtual schools: California Virtual Academies at Kern County and Insight School of California-Los Angeles.

For the rest of the article, go to Opinion: Fighting for the future of California education

The report summarizes lessons learned from the pilot year (2010-2011) of the Virtual Learning Lab program, a collaborative effort between the Miami-Dade County public school district—one of the largest in the country—and the Florida Virtual School—a state-wide, Internet-based public high school with the highest enrollment in the country. SRI researchers collected information on 5,500 students in 38 public high schools through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and site visits to seven schools.

For the rest of the article,  go to Study of Miami-Dade’s Virtual Learning Lab Reveals Key Success Factors for “Blended Learning” Programs

This month, Haglund, principal of the Riverside Virtual School, an online independent study program run by the Riverside Unified School District, introduced a statewide ballot initiative that would give students unrestricted access to publicly funded courses — wherever they are.

The California Student Bill of Rights Initiative is “designed to eliminate control by ZIP code,” Haglund said.

Under the proposal, schools, districts and county education offices would be required to make available to all students the courses needed for admission to the state’s universities. Those courses, known as A-G requirements at the University of California and California State University, could be offered at a student’s school or district of residence or any other publicly funded school, and they could be classroom-based, online or a blended model of the two.

For the rest of the article, go to Ballot initiative seeks to expand access to online education

In the US, more than 2,300 school districts have begun programmes using iPads – and a growing number of classrooms have one per pupil.

But what will all this mean for the future?

“Virtual schools” have become an increasingly common feature of the US system, teaching children who are mostly at home. Along with the arrival of charter schools, there are also virtual charter schools, funded by taxpayers.

For the rest of the article, go to Screen test for the online classroom

Start with money. AZVA is free to students. The state gives it somewhere in the $6,500 to $7,500 range per student. SOHL is private, and expensive. It costs $14,800 a year, or $3,200 if someone wants to take a single class.

AZVA has a 50-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio. That’s not a typo. It’s really a 50 to 1 ratio. Kinda makes you wonder why a school without buildings or sports or drama or music programs and which has about half as many teachers per student as bricks-and-mortar schools gets the same amount of state funds per student as the other schools, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t conservative budget hawks be all over this waste of taxpayer money?

For the rest of the article, go to A different model for online schools