Hintonblogger

(cross posted to Virtual Schools Symposium wiki at http://vss2008.wikispaces.com)

Utah Electronic High School

It is a credit-granting organization (different from many other states. It is open-entry/open-exit school and they finid that 50% of their enrollments are credit acceleration.

They are implementing proctoring - not many of the individuals raised their hand when asked if their virtual schools had implemented proctoring. Kathy Webb, the principal of UEH, said she thought we all will be doing that in order to be accredited.

They have 3 secretaries, 1 admin, part-time counselor, 73 licensed teachers. Staffing is very low compared to volume. She recommended not duplicating this. Their funding comes from a line-item - it has grown to 2 million per year. Schools do not lose funding because of students attending UEH.

They have a 6-month window to finish a quarter-credit class.

Pain Points:

• Lots of kids who want accounts but are finishing. Basically completion percentage.
• Accreditation process
• Managing staffing ratios and reporting
• Open entry/open exit process is not supported well in the LMS arena
• Vendor lock-in / commercial tool costs
• Proctor demands for out-of-state kids

Partnering with TAA - The American Academy - Rebekah Richards One of the big challenges they faced in helping their own company and the online high school was secure proctoring.

Custom-designed hybrid of an LMS/CMS/SIS. That turned me off right there - how are they supporting non-custom developed content? Does it support SCORM and SIF? Why would you custom-design things rather than leverage what others have done? How can they fund development for new features over time? Doesn't it make sense to build solutions that allow for greater flexibility - It seems like UEH is moving towards the same vendor lock-in but with another vendor? After hearing Kathy and Rebekah talk more, it sounds like they are using open-source technologies and frameworks so most of my questions are invalidated based on that info

Once again, a vendor who seems to be embedding the content, delivery, and reporting tool into one monolithic tool. Do they build their own content or buy it?

Their model is School as a Service.

Back to Kathy -

One of the challenges is working with the cost of multi-media learning objects. Talked about converting text-based elements into multimedia elements. That's a start, but will can it compare in quality to stuff that people like Pearson and their instructional and flash designers can produce.

Content is free - they are looking at creative commons licensing versus DRM stuff.

Kathy and I share many ideas here. However this is quite a challenging issue to deal with.

Pay for Teachers: Teachers provide a minimum number of hours a day - pay $535 a month for an hour a day. Interesting concept.