Access and Equity in Online Classes and Virtual Programs

The NACOL Virtual School Symposium was held this week in Louisville. They had initially hoped for 600, 800 registered. This conference grows every year.

The Research Committee (of which I'm a member) produced two Issues Briefs which were given to most all the attendees. (They ran out of the print version because they weren't expecting 800 attendees.) I was the primary author on Access and Equity in Online Classes and Virtual Schools. Bob Blomeyer contributed significantly to the paper which is freely available on the NACOL website.

I know of nothing else that provides the detail about the equity and access issues facing K-12 online education we do in that paper. We also connect the issues to the relevant Federal legislation, and we make recommendations for virtual education course and program design.

Our concern is that virtual programs are not meeting all their legal responsibilities in these areas, and not thinking at the depth they need to in order to address their legal responsibilities. I'm predicting that within the next year there will some sort of legal action against a virtual education program in K-12 for failure to address access or equity issues. Higher education has already seen legal suits on these issues.

Professional Development for Online Learning

NACOL's Virtual School Symposium took place this week. The Research Committee (of which I'm a member) has produced an Issues Brief: Professional Development for Virtual Schooling and Online Learning. This Issues Brief is freely available. I was co-author on that Issues Brief.

If you're looking for information about preparing teachers for the online environment this is a good place to start.

Interesting blog housing educational issues

A colleague and friend is posting on educational issues on an interesting site. Not one where I'd normally expect to see relevant education-oriented issues. Take a look at the Democrats.org site.

Universal Design for Learning

UDL isn't new. I was pushing UDL concepts when I wrote a piece for the Hot Technologies paper as part of COSN's Emerging Technologies Committee. I did push on UDL in Concord's Seeing Math project, but it took us a while to really understand all the implications and then we didn't have the resources to make the adjustments to the interactives, but we developed an understanding and appreaciation of the UDL concepts. Concord Consortium subsequently got NSF funding for a UDL Science project. I'm on the project's National Advisory Board.

Its taken a while for the issue to move into greater awareness, but it appears to have made it this week to EdWeek.

If you're unfamiliar with the Universal Design for Learning principles now is a good time to do some research.