America's First Public Virtual High School
The Virtual High School© is a consortium of high schools offering online courses taught and designed by cooperating teachers who are accredited in their respective states. VHS© online courses, called NetCoursesTM, provide students in participating schools with online access to advanced, technical, and specialized courses that often are unavailable in smaller high schools with limited course offerings (Kozma et al., 2000).
The Virtual High School originally was called the Concord Virtual High School. It was started in 1996 with an award of a five-year, $7.5 million Technology Innovation Challenge Grant to the Hudson (Massachusetts) Public Schools and the Concord Consortium, a nonprofit educational research and development company. Online classes were first offered during the 1997-98 school year (Kozma et al, 2000). At that time, the Concord Virtual High School offered 30 online courses to about 500 students in 27 schools in 10 states (National Association of State Boards of Education, 2001). Since that time, it has expanded greatly. The school, now called simply the Virtual High School, currently is operated by VHS Inc. as a not-for-profit corporation; during the 2000-01 school year, the school offered 155 courses to 3,000 students in 170 schools (Clark, 2001).
VHS students connect Web servers using browsers to access the instructional resources required to complete online assignments. Documents available on the VHS Web site include syllabi, course readings, and all supplementary course materials (such as graphics, audio files and videos); all are easily accessible via the World Wide Web. The NetCourses are delivered from external servers that provide 24-hour support seven days a week to ensure consistent delivery of VHS services.
In the NetCourses, students work independently or collaboratively on assignments, thereby providing scheduling flexibility that permits individuals and collaborative groups to schedule group sessions and complete assignments in a timely and deliberate manner. Teachers are able to monitor student progress via the Web site; they also provide periodic feedback to students and issue grade reports from within the course Web site on the Virtual High School's co-located servers.
The Virtual High School permits participating secondary schools to offer their extended online courses anywhere, anytime, and at low cost via the Web. Supporters believe that online courses allow students more one-on-one contact with teachers than traditional face-to-face instruction, because student are not competing for attention with other students in their classes. Supporters also believe that VHS courses "foster independent learning, hone computer literacy skills, and provide interaction with students from diverse cultural backgrounds, as well as level the playing field for minorities, low-income students, and those in low-income areas" (Hayes, 2001, p. B11).
In October 2001, the five-year U.S. Department of Education grant supporting the Virtual High School expired. VHS now charges an annual membership fee of $6,000 per participating high school; this fee allows each participating school to enroll 20 students in VHS courses during the fall and spring semesters (Clark, 2001).
The transition from financing VHS operations through U.S. Department of Education start-up funding to becoming a not-for-profit company financed almost entirely by payment for services may mean the loss of some participating VHS Consortium members. Schools unwilling or unable to pay higher annual fees for access to VHS online courses will have to look elsewhere, build their own courses, or abandon the use of online learning as a local curricular alternative.
In time, the approximately 44 other state and locally organized virtual high schools that have followed the lead of the VHS also may exhaust the initial grants or other funding sources that have subsidized their development and initial operations. Nearly all of the major virtual high school projects eventually may be forced to enter the more competitive fee-for-services arena.
As this foreseeable transition to market-driven financial status becomes a reality for more and more virtual high school projects, those with broader organizational support and geographic participation will have a significant marketing advantage. In fact, offering high-quality online courses to large enrollments over a wide geographic radius may enable competitive marketing of online courses on economies of scale.
Federal, state, or private investments to offset the high costs of online course development will not last forever. When the start-up support is gone, public and private developers of online courses that can offer the highest quality content—in the most interactive and best managed online learning environments—will become the virtual schools that survive.
About this issue | A Message from Gina Burkhardt, NCREL Executive Director | Virtual Schools and E-Learning in K-12 Environments | E-Learning Policy Implications for K-12 Educators and Decision Makers | America's First Public Virtual High School | E-Learning in the Real World | NCREL's Research on Virtual Learning Issues and Priorities | References | NCREL's Online Resource for E-Learning
