In the first article of this four-part series, Corporate eLearning Realities Part 1: VR, AR and MR in Learning and Training, I provided definitions of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality along with hints of what they bring to the tasks for workplace learning and training programs. This second article of the series takes a closer look at how companies use virtual reality learning to impart skills and knowledge to employees for a variety of purposes. Each example is a real-world mini case-study to reveal the range of potential applications, what they replace, and their effectiveness.

Common Sense in How Companies Use Virtual Reality Learning

As mentioned in part one of this series, developing and implementing a full-blown virtual reality environment is neither easy nor is it inexpensive. Learning professionals will need to increase their technological acumen in order to properly sort out what’s worth pursuing and what is not. An immersive VR version of a company’s offices for an onboarding workspace orientation experience would be a clear case of overkill. Then again, taking a walk around the workplace using an AR app with mobile device in hand that gives information about what is being seen via the device’s camera might be totally worth it. Learning professionals don’t need to know how to create VR applications, but they will need to know enough about what’s involved to make decisions about specific project ideas. When is a VR solution potentially the best solution? Here are the factors to consider:

• Rarity: If the knowledge needed is very rare, VR might be the best solution, such as diagnosing or treating extremely rare illnesses. By their very definition, real-world learning opportunities to study such illnesses are few and far between.
• Observability: When you can’t see what’s happening at a molecular level with the naked eye, creating a virtual environment where you can blow it up to human-scale in order to explore what’s happening in microscopic environments can bring a whole new perspective and understanding of all kinds of phenomena.
• Replicability: When the experience or skill needed is something that is just too expensive to repeat over and over again in the real world, recreating it in a VR environment can actually save resources over time after the initial investment to create it.
• Danger: Think of all the truly dangerous real-world experiences that are dealt with by first responders, law enforcement, soldiers or any other jobs that involve significant risk to life and limb. Real-world training can only go so far when you get to the point that failing a training exercise proves fatal – but in the VR environment you can engage in the dangerous activity as many times as needed until you get it right, and no one gets hurt.
• Complexity: Gaining the knowledge needed is one thing, but applying it complicated actions or synthesizing it with other knowledge or making adjustments based on context can happen more readily in the VR environment.

Keeping all of that in mind, what follows are real-world examples of how companies use virtual reality learning:

Walmart Using Virtual Reality for Training Associates

How do you train a new associate or manager on what it’s like in a Walmart store on Black Friday? Sure, you can explain it. You can show them a video. You can talk them through how to interact with customers the right way. You can even engage in role-playing. But if you want them to really experience it, drop them into a VR Black Friday and voila – they will very quickly get it.

This qualifies as a great example of applying VR in a retail environment. Black Friday is arguably the single most important work day for the retail giant that has 1.5 million associates in the US alone, but it only happens once a year, which makes it an instance of the “rare” factor mentioned above. It’s not something that can be easily replicated for training purposes. And let’s face it, the customer interactions that can happen in a Walmart on a Black Friday can certainly become surprisingly complex. But it’s not just the rare events like Black Friday that Walmart is leveraging with VR training – it’s also making use of it for many of the day-to-day scenarios with which associates must contend. With the VR trainings, new associates can learn all the ins and outs of handling a wide variety of difficult situations, including making plenty of mistakes along the way, without ever disrupting a real-world location’s shoppers.

Is it effective? Walmart’s initial results were good enough to convince the company it needed to incorporate the VR trainings into all 200 of its Walmart Academy sites that collectively train 140,000 new associates each year. And now the company will also be shipping out multiple Oculus Go VR headsets to all US stores in order to train another million existing associates with Academy content. Both confidence and retention are getting a boost, and test scores among associates who have gone through VR training are seeing improvements in the 10-15% range.

Boeing Uses VR Training for Engineers Who Wire Airplanes

Building airplanes is big business for Boeing, but it’s also a highly complex undertaking where errors can have catastrophic results. One of the many aspects that have to be exactly right is the wiring in a plane. There are huge lengths of wire laid throughout a plane, and each connection has to be 100% accurate. If not, there will likely be a failure in testing, which then results in a very costly delay while the problem is identified and remedied. By creating a VR recreation of the plane, engineers get to really see what has to be done to get the wiring correct, which has greatly reduced the amount of time it takes to train new engineers in the process. In general, Boeing is aiming to reduce the overall training time for all its new engineers by 75%.

KFC Uses VR to Accelerate its Secret Recipe Training

Kentucky Fried Chicken, now known as KFC, is the world’s leading fast food fried chicken franchise with nearly 17,000 locations around the planet. That means there are a lot of employees who need to be trained in how to prepare the chicken with the secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices created by “Colonel” Harland Sanders all the way back in 1940. The company recently rolled out a VR training program to teach the process, and the VR version has reduced training time from 25 minutes per person to just 10 minutes. That may not sound very significant until you realize the scale at which a chain like this is operating. Even minor adjustments to such basic tasks can have a huge cumulative effect in terms of reducing costs and thereby boosting profit margins, which is always the Holy Grail in large fast food chains. A bonus for new cooks is that the VR training is game-based as a kind of escape room scenario that makes it fun as well.

Linde Uses VR for Training in Dangerous Work

Linde is a company that supplies industrial gases, which means it is delivering hazardous chemicals to thousands of locations day in and day out. Some of the gases are highly flammable while others might be kept at extremely cold temperatures (-320° F) that would instantly freeze any exposed skin. How do you train new drivers without risking injury or death from the training itself? The answer, of course, is VR training. In the VR environment, trainees can go through as many repetitions as are needed to prepare them for their first real-world deliveries. These VR trainings don’t just give them the skills they need, but also innately impart to them an understanding of the underlying concepts that allow them to react to all kinds of unexpected situations that could come up on the job.

With this wider understanding of how companies use virtual reality learning to teach employees in all kinds of businesses the skills and knowledge they need, the next article in this four-part series about corporate eLearning realities will examine the ways in which various businesses are utilizing augmented reality in their workplace learning and training programs.

Featured Image: Eddie Kopp, Unsplash.

The post Trends in Corporate eLearning Part 2: How Companies Use Virtual Reality Learning appeared first on eLearningInside News.

A key challenge faced by online programs has been their perceived prestige. Indeed, in some professions lingering concerns about online degrees being subpar, continues to push such programs to the sideline (as an example, see eLearningInside News‘ recent article on the continued marginalized of both online and blended law degrees). But at least in some professions, online degrees are beginning to gain considerable prestige, and computer science is one such field.

In 2014, Georgia Tech’s graduate program in computer science, which is consistently ranked among the very best computer science schools in the nation, launched a 100% online degree. The Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) was developed in partnership with Udacity and AT&T and costs about $7,000, which is less than one-sixth of the $45,000 out-of-state students pay for Georgia Tech’s in-person computer science master’s degree. Tuition and admissions criteria were established to attract a much larger number of students than the in-person program but without compromising the integrity of the degree. Most importantly, the OMSCS is not labeled an “online” degree but is considered on par with Georgia Tech’s on-campus programs. A recently released study on the program suggests that the program is not only making graduate-level education in computer science more accessible to a large number of adult learners but also bringing new prestige to online graduate degrees in the process.

Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education?

A recently released study by Joshua Goodman (Harvard University), Julia Melkers (Georgia Tech), and Amanda Pallais (Harvard University), “Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education?,” highlights the early success of the Georgia Tech experiment, and part of the program’s success pivots on the fact that the program is reaching a demographic that would otherwise not pursue a graduate-level degree program in computer science. As the researchers explain, “There is nearly no overlap between the applicant pools to [the on-campus and online] programs, with few individuals applying to both. The average in-person applicant is a 24-year old non-American recently out of college, whereas the average online applicant is a 34-year old mid-career American. Eighty percent of those admitted to the online program accept those offers and enroll, suggesting few find compelling alternative educational options. Large demand from a mid-career population uninterested in its in-person equivalent and a high matriculation rate both suggest the online program is drawing in students who would not otherwise enroll elsewhere.”

There are other key differences between Georgia Tech’s on-campus and online programs. Most notably, the online applicants tend to be from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and to have more diverse academic backgrounds (e.g., engineering, math or physical sciences). The study also found some differences in attrition rates, with online students more likely to fail to complete their program than their on-campus counterparts. However, the study further found that, “Comparisons of student achievement across the online and in-person formats suggests that OMSCS students finish their courses with at least as much knowledge as their in-person counterparts.”

Combining Educational Equity with Prestige

The success of the Georgia Tech program rests on more than its demonstrated ability to make graduate-level education more accessible and affordable to a demographic who may have previously lacked access to higher education. When launched, OMSCS was described as the first “large-scale program offered by a highly-ranked department, priced much lower than its in-person equivalent and culminating in a prestigious graduate degree.” Indeed, this was true. Previously, the programs available were generally either offered by highly-ranked institutions but at a high cost or by lower-ranked institutions. In both cases, this meant that students were taking a risk (either by going deep into debt or risking investing less in a degree that may carry little weight with employers).

Since Georgia Tech’s success with OMSCS, a growing number of high-ranked institutions and graduate programs have embraced online education. As Goodman, Melkers and Pallais observe, “Yale University is currently developing a fully online version of its Master of Medical Science degree for physician assistants” and “In the fall of 2016, over a dozen highly ranked universities affiliated with the EdX consortium started by Harvard and MIT announced plans to offer micro-master’s degrees. Such degrees will be open to any student willing to pay a total of roughly $1,000 for exam proctoring at the end of each course and will consist of between one-quarter and one-half of the courses in a traditional version of each degree.” Some examples of these degrees include a supply chain management program at MIT, an artificial intelligence program at Columbia University, and a social work at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  As the authors of the Georgia Tech study conclude, “That more highly-ranked institutions appear to be entering the market for inexpensive online degrees suggests our results may be increasingly relevant to the future of online education.”

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The opioid crisis continues to grow across the United States with increasingly devastating results. As local and national authorities struggle to find ways to educate users, their family and friends, medical practitioners, and first responders, eLearning is emerging as a vital tool.

Measuring the Depth of the Opioid Crisis

In 2015, 2% of deaths in the United States were connected to the opioid crisis. But deaths are only the most visible part of the crisis. A recent report published in the New York Times, reported that over 2 million Americans now have some problem with opioids and in 2015, over 97 million people took prescription painkillers (12 million without being directed by a doctor).

Reasons for the current opioid crisis range are difficult to tease out. Opioid addiction, of course, is not new but dates back centuries. Since the 1980s, however, prescriptions for pain have been on the rise. A recent report by Opioid Action found that on average, American doctors collectively write 650,000 prescriptions per day.  With this, the pharmaceutical industry started to flood the market with new options, including OxyContin. Eventually, this would lead to an increase in pill mills. Along with the spread of prescription pain killers (acquired both legally and illegally), in recent years, the cost of heroine has plummeted and distribution networks have moved from urban centres to small towns nationwide. Finally, in 2014, yet another culprit, fentanyl, came on the scene, further deepening the crisis.

The Vital Role of Education

Opioid Action, among other organizations continue to emphasize that to address the nation’s current drug crisis, more education is needed. As the organization emphasizes, “It is said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and this certainly applies to our efforts to fight the opioid crisis…By approaching prevention and education efforts with the same urgency and determination with which we work to reverse overdoses and arrest drug traffickers, we can begin to create the cultural transformation needed to free our communities from the grip of the opioid crisis.” Notably, the education called for by Opioid Action and other groups is multifaceted and aims to target users, potential users, caregivers, and health care professionals. Some also believe herbal medicine has a role to play as well. Of course, meeting all these groups is a challenge, especially in a nation the size of the United States. This is where eLearning is emerging as part of the prevention strategy.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine’s eLearning Initiative

The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) was founded in 1954 and is a professional medical society representing over 5000 physicians, clinicians and other professionals working in the field of addiction medicine. As detailed in their mission statement: “ASAM is dedicated to increasing access and improving the quality of addiction treatment, educating physicians and the public, supporting research and prevention, and promoting the appropriate role of physicians in the care of patients with addiction.” To reach as many people has possible, ASAM has recently poured growing resources into its online education options.

ASAM’s eLearning Center offers over 300 hours of eLearning courses, some at no cost to participants, focused on all aspects of addiction medicine. Free eLearning courses include those on how to prescribe opioid’s in a safe way and transform lives, research-based clinical strategies, and how to educate the public about opioid addiction and its dangers. In addition to free courses targeting practitioners and the public, ASAM offers online courses preparing doctors for Addiction Board Prevention Medicine (ABPM) certification/re-certification.  This online learning tool includes study materials, chapter overviews, definitions, and practice test questions and answers.

With education at the top of ASAM’s priority list, it is no surprise that their site also includes links to many other online educational tools related to screening, treatment and assessment, and prevention.

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eLearning company Degreed recently announced a new partnership with Bridge by Instructure. The collaboration between the two companies opens new doors for lifelong and professional learning, with intuitive platforms for content delivery via Degreed along with powerful data capturing and learning management systems provided by Bridge. Both of these companies are making their mark on the eLearning industry.

New Partnership Offers Expanding Opportunities for Professional Learning

In a press release from Marketwired, Degreed CEO and co-founder David Blake expressed his excitement about the opportunities that will arise from the partnership with Bridge. Regarding the focus of his own company, Blake stated, “There is no single path to expertise, which is why Degreed enables L&D teams and individuals alike to discover, curate, share and track learning experiences from any source, in any format.”

Blake added that through the integration of Bridge and Degreed, “organizations can measure both informal and formal learning activities, giving them deeper insight into workers’ skills and expertise. We are pleased to partner with Instructure and help more companies inspire and recognize lifelong learning.”

The leadership of Bridge was equally optimistic about the collaboration. “Through our partnership with Degreed, our clients will benefit from an integrated approach to measuring the learning experienced by employees, in whatever form it takes. The result is a comprehensive approach to understanding the knowledge and skill set of their teams and the value they can deliver to the organization,” said VP of Platform and Partnerships at Instructure Melissa Loble.

Degreed Looks to the Future of Digital Education

Degreed is one of the fastest growing companies in the eLearning industry, with an expansive library of more than 3 million courses, videos, and articles from almost 1,400 sources. The company, founded in 2012, is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Amsterdam and Salt Lake City.

The leadership team of Degreed focuses on continually looking to the evolution of eLearning as an exciting space where new technology offers wide-ranging possibilities for lifelong learning. In an article from Chief Learning Officer, Todd Tauber, vice president of product marketing for Degreed, emphasized that eLearning is a rapidly changing industry. According to Tauber, while basic online courses aren’t yet outdated,  “they’re not the only tool in the toolkit anymore. They’re changing; MOOCs are a really good manifestation of how they’ve evolved, and they’re continuing to evolve beyond that.”

Tauber explained that the future of eLearning is not a matter of replacement, but rather of building on existing foundations. “[Online courses] are going to increasingly be augmented, blended and supplemented by new technology like video and apps, augmented in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, chatbots, data, analytics, even things like online portfolios and microcredentials,” Tauber said. “All of those things will come together to change the face of eLearning.”

Bridge Leverages Technology to Help Learners of All Ages

As the creators of Canvas, a popular learning management platform that’s used in educational settings ranging from elementary schools to Ivy League institutions, the team at Instructure has a history of delivering innovative solutions for leveraging technology to help learners of all ages and abilities achieve their full potential.

Their latest effort toward that goal is Bridge, a native cloud-based learning platform that aims to offer consistently sleek, streamlined experiences across desktop and mobile devices for administrators and content creators as well as learners. Bridge emphasizes its actionable reporting and data analysis capabilities to help companies “learn from your learning.”

The recently announced collaboration adds Degreed to Bridge’s already impressive list of partners, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, eSync Training, and eLearning Brothers. The courses offered through Bridge are highly customizable and easily integrated with existing digital infrastructure; available course topics include Selling for Success, Emotional Intelligence, and Presentation Skills, among many others.

Corporate clients and the eLearning industry as a whole can only benefit from the expanded collaboration between the creative minds at Bridge and Degreed, as increased integration promises to provide new opportunities for professional and lifelong learning.

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Summer is fast approaching and many people are beginning to prepare for summer adventures. Of course, some adventures take more planning and care than others. Anyone who wants to go on a dive, for example, must first become a certified diver. In the past, this meant finding a dive school and attending classes for several weeks. Fortunately, PADI training online is now transforming scuba diving certification by creating opportunities for people to complete the initial portion of their diving training on land.

PADI Training Online

Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) Training is a carefully designed progressive education program for adolescents and adults who wish to dive anywhere in the world. PADI training started in the 1960s when two friends, John Cronin, a scuba equipment salesman for U.S. Divers, and Ralph Erickson, an educator and swimming instructor, decided the world needed to come up with a safer and more efficient way to learn how to dive. In short, they wanted to give more people a chance to experience the amazing underwater world while reducing diving’s associated risks.  Over the years, Cronin and Erickson built up what is now a worldwide organization committed to diving education and safety.

In the beginning, PADI training was an in-person experience, but this approach has several limitations. After all, many people who want to dive do not live in a location where training is possible or live in a climate where training is only optimal at certain times of year.  It is also the case that many people want to certify because they are planning to dive while on vacation, but cramming eight hours of book-based instruction into a short holiday is not necessarily ideal. PADI training online addresses these obstacles that once faced aspiring divers.

This is precisely why Angela Carson, an attorney and mother of two teen girls, is currently enrolled in an online PADI course. Carson plans to spend two weeks in Greece this summer and recently enrolled in an online PADI course to get a head start on her diving vacation: “My daughters are 14 and 17 and want to dive when we are in Greece this summer, but training while on vacation isn’t ideal. I called around and realized that we could begin our PADI training online but complete the exciting part of the training – the actual dives – on our trip. I like the fact we can start in advance, and I don’t want my girls rushing through the crucial safety training while they are sun stroked on a beach.” Carson is not alone. Thousands of people become certified divers every year and most now begin the process with PADI’s eLearning option.

Steps to Becoming a Certified Diver

First, register for PADI’s Open Water Diver Online. The videos, audio, graphics, and quizzers will introduce you to the key components of diving, track your progress, quiz your knowledge, and give you tips on which modules to repeat if your knowledge is not up to PADI’s high standards.

Second, find a local PADI instructor or look for a PADI center in your summer vacation destination whether it be the Great Lakes, Florida Keys or Greek Islands. If you’ve mastered PADI’s online course, you’ll already have the background, knowledge and terminology needed to start working with a certified instructor who will take you under water and help you put theory into practice.

PADI Training Options for Divers at All Levels

Jennifer Idol, who has done dives in all 50 U.S. states, explains, “I became a PADI diver because I believed the education was safe and thorough. The educational materials were the most professional I had seen in the industry and the people I encountered were friendly and professional.” Idol further explains, “I did not set out to earn more than 20 certifications, but the educational experience has been paramount to my diving ability and accessibility. The community PADI fosters is important to my continued support for this training organization.”

If you’re like Idol and want to bring your diving to the next level, PADI’s online training options include Advanced Open Water Diver, Rescue Diver, Enriched Air Diver, Digital Underwater Photography, Divemaster, and Instructor Development.

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In a society where 62% of Americans get their news from social media and the President tweets his political opinions, children are engaged more than ever with digital methods of gaining knowledge. It seems natural to incorporate digital learning in the classroom as a necessary skill and an augmentation to educational tools.

A 2013 survey by PBS found that 69% of educators surveyed believed technology propels student education quicker than before. 74% of those educators believed technology is vital to expand on classroom content and is an effective motivational tool for children. 73% said digital resources enable teachers to better respond to different learning styles of children within the same class; this would enable more success in the same amount of time.

The U.S. Department of Education firmly believes that technology, especially blended learning, “ushers in fundamental structural changes that can be integral to achieving significant improvements in productivity.”

Despite all the potential good of a digital classroom supplement, technology may not be producing this desired improvement in productivity. Teachers and administrators hit significant roadblocks that are disabling them from using digital resources as a means of connecting students to learning.

Standardized Testing

The biggest issue seems to stem from standardized testing. Teachers feel that administration policies do not promote digital reading, as standardized tests do not measure digital skills. While these tests are often administered on computers, they do not measure skills in search engines, understanding online data, and more.

If teachers are forced to teach towards standardized tests (which is a problem in it of itself), promoting digital skills feels to be a waste of precious time in the classroom. Harvard Politics’ Quinn Mulholland wrote in The Case Against Standardized Testing: “This increased focus on test prep has had a profoundly negative impact on the quality of education many students receive.” This limits their ability to learn digital skills necessary in our modern-day era.

Digital Natives

Many teachers and educators wrongly believe that students are already proficient in technology. They’ve grown up with phones and tablets in their hands, so why spend time on it in school? However, research suggests that students struggle with comprehending and utilizing digital content just as much as previous generations of students.

In fact, recent findings show that students often use online information without knowing how to determine credibility or highlight important facts and statistics. While many students may be able to type a search keyword into Google, most do not understand how to use the results as an appropriate learning tool.

Educators’ Deficiency

Educators are, for the most part, not taught on digital platforms, so they are not personally familiar with it. Similarly, they are not trained on how to teach digital courses to their students. Bass, the innovation coordinator in Chesterfield, told EdWeek, “We fall back and rely on the way we were taught, and that’s a barrier.”

Common Sense Media has come out with a lesson plan that helps teachers to navigate cyberbullying, privacy, safety, self-image, information literacy, relationships, and communication. The goal of such curriculums is to help students navigate the internet safely; it also teaches how to use safe practices to collaborate with new, advanced methods of teaching.

But, administrations and higher-education schools seem unwilling to invest in teaching educators these digital-rich programs. Thus, a lack of professional development of teachers, in turn, creates a skill gap in students. Although this skill gap is unmeasured, it will begin to raise more issues as the world becomes even more digital.

Distraction and Procrastination

Of course, another major concern is distractive behavior. Students can easily flip to thousands of sites when their teachers aren’t looking or when they don’t feel like doing their homework.

However, distractions always happen. It’s a part of life that we all deal with every day. Digital learning is an ideal platform to teaching skills to overcoming distraction and procrastination. Teachers are able to monitor their classrooms’ use of online learning; they can also encourage students to use the Internet to learn, rather than just play games.

Ultimately, the importance of introducing technology in the classroom overwhelms the perceived barriers. Learning should be about connecting children to the world around them—past, present, and future. Technology enables exploration and curiosity while augmenting traditional learning platforms in ways that have never before been accessible. The solution? A nationwide acceptance of and push towards blended education of classroom eLearning.

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President Donald Trump’s nomination for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, has been a controversial topic throughout the political realm. When asked about her opinions on virtual charter schools, her response created a similar frenzy of confusion. She supports virtual charters, especially as an option for kids in rural areas with little access to public schooling.

While this virtual charter question took backstage to her other statements, several still criticized her declaration that virtual charters were the solution to rural school systems. In response, Edweek made a splash with their investigation that seemingly found significant problems in this sector of schooling.

What are these newfound criticisms of virtual charter schools, and are they entirely valid?

What Is A Virtual Charter School?

A virtual charter school is a publicly-funded school, which is often privately run and for-profit. They are exempt from many regulations that apply to traditional public schools. All or a portion of the instruction is provided through the Internet through virtual courses, e-mail, and online discussions.

What Are The Reluctances To Virtual Charters?

In Edweek’s investigative article, they reveal a Colorado virtual charter school named GOAL. One can invariably see problems with the GOAL system throughout the article, from money siphoning to conflicts of interest to simply stunting students’ growth. Is this always the case with virtual charter schools?

A major reluctance to virtual charters is the abysmal attendance rate. Although enrollment is high, attendance appears to be low. In Colorado, 45.8% of the enrolled students not using the learning software. However, the Center for Public Education found that only half of the districts monitor students’ activity or time spent online. Thus, it’s possible that this 48.5% is GOAL specific, as the nationwide data is not available.

Virtual schooling may stunt the education of students not naturally motivated. Virtual charter high school completion rates are at a low 25%, as found by a The Center for Public Education. These virtual schools appear to have higher dropout rates and lower test scores than the traditional brick-and-mortar schools.

Also, A virtual classroom setting cannot offer all classes. Thus, students lose out the traditional class experience. Finally, in response to Betsy DeVos’ statement about students in rural areas, many critics said that those who live in rural areas do not have access to the broadband necessary for virtual charter schools.

The Problems With These Claims

Removing GOAL’s issues and looking holistically, it seems that the reluctances appropriated to virtual charter schools are caused by human error as opposed to virtual learning error. This human error is also present throughout public schooling, outside of the virtual charter realm.

The attendance rate is certainly at a low and unprecedented rate with virtual charter schools, and we cannot ignore that number. However, it is not the inability of the virtual platform that causes the low attendance. There seems to be no accountability with parents, teachers, administrators, and the government to ensure these kids stay in school.

If we assume that those students not attending their online classes have dropped out, the Colorado 45.8% dropout rate is significantly higher than the 7.4% national dropout. However, the pool of students is also smaller for the Colorado rate. Over 1.2 million students drop out of traditional high school every year in the United States. Thus, it is not a problem with virtual charters alone—it is a problem of the entire school system. If virtual charters encourage the dropout rate, the Internet-based platform itself is likely not the cause.  The reason is the current utilization of these platforms.

Solving These Claims

The method of solving these virtual problems is twofold: support and regulations. Students in online classes need teachers who are equally (if not more) engaged in their learning as classroom teachers. They need parents, guardians, guidance counselors, and administrators rooting for them, encouraging them, and disciplining them.

Students also need the government’s regulatory support. The government should institute practices that discipline inappropriate behavior from school owners and administrators. The school board should not be siphoning off money or lying about attendance rates, as found in the Colorado investigation. There must be monitoring systems in place. Employing and utilizing in-depth tracking tools—which are already available through many eLearning software—will keep school boards honest and students on the path to growth. But this is a solution not yet mandated.

Blended learning is another solution. Online platforms cannot offer all courses, such as art or gym. However, the most successful virtual charters, such as the South Carolina Virtual Charter School, blend online courses with academic and social outings and activities.

What Are The Positive Results of Virtual Charter Schools?

Although getting a bad reputation, virtual charter schools are the right solution for some students. Edweek’s investigation found that virtual charter schools are successful for 15% of students.

Students in rural areas, who want to learn but cannot easily get to school, benefit from the ability to have publicly-funded access to teachers and resources. Many motivated students learn faster online, without the worry of the pace of their fellow students. Similarly, those who struggle in school can take more time to go over material on their own with a virtual system.

Edweek wrote, “The problem is that such success stories are the exception, not the rule.” The argument, in contrast, is that the same is true for traditional classroom settings. Students in the classroom must also be motivated and disciplined in order to learn; otherwise, they tune out, act out, become frustrated with school, fail, or even drop out.

The difference between the classroom and the virtual classroom is the access to a support system. Those students involved in virtual charter schools in tandem with a strong support system show marked improvement in independence, self-discipline, and professional determination over their peers.

Conclusion

While virtual charter schools may not be the solution for everyone, traditional school systems are not a universal solution either. DeVos appears to be wrong in that rural areas are be the right target for virtual charter schools. However, blended learning could be a possible next step in the realm of charter eLearning. Blended learning environments incorporate rich online experiences with significant teacher and administration support and supervision. This works together to mitigate the criticisms of the current virtual schooling system.

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