The Chronicles of Online Education
Monday, January 23, 2006
A lot of people ask me how online schooling works and perhaps more importantly, if I like it. I generally provide some canned response similar to “it’s flexible”, though lacking much insight into what I actually think. For a change however, I’m going to give a more legitimate answer. Before we get started, this post is unprovoked: merely containing some criticism for a fairly respectable institution in its own right.
For those of you who didn’t know, I’ve been attending Myron B. Thompson Academy, a charter school under Hawaii Department of Education titles. It’s a school that promises a progressive agenda in education, notably offering most of its curriculum over the internet. This sounds great, but in reality, it’s a mixed bag. It’s not so much the fact that the school is online or anything else, as it is an administration that doesn’t venture far from conventional wisdom. Instead of pushing the limits of what one could do when offering courses, old, stale obligatory standard content is presented exactly the same as it would be in a classroom anywhere else in the country- just online.
I never really learned all that much in conventional schools. I’m not learning very much here, either. I’ll tell you this much though: I’m peddling through more work than I’ve ever done in a typical public school. It’s highly bothersome, and the result is no different.
On flexibility, it’s only marginally more so than a typical school. There’s such a great potential for portability in this formula, especially with the advent of students tugging laptops wherever their journey takes them. Taking advantage of technology, one could expect students to turn out highly creative new media projects, instead of worksheets, to illustrate competency in a subject area. In that, open ended deadlines should always be realized as policy, where it can finish the equation for an open education- both for a school and its students. Why implement policies that prohibit real flexibility? I shouldn’t need to seek approval from anyone weeks in advanced to leave this island, much less need explain myself as to why. If an unfathomable response of “no” were to come about, one could only predict the storm that it would unleash. This is not a dictatorship, this is education. Staff at my school, all schools, should get the message.
So that’s what I truly think. In hindsight, I probably should have opted to 4140 myself, but alas, I thought Thompson would offer so much more.
