Will the Internet revolutionize education?  Hardly.  The article below
describes the expereinces of students in rural California and other
locations on taking advanced high school courses on the Internet.  It
appears that the company ofering the courses was prone to technical
problems, causing users not to be able to log on to its web site.

kelly

The New York Times





July 7, 2000

As Teacher in the Classroom, Internet Needs Fine-Tuning

By JACQUES STEINBERG


     WEAVERVILLE, Calif. -- When it learned last year that a private
     company was offering college-level Advanced Placement courses on
     the Web, the lone high school in this remote gold-rush town thought
     it had finally discovered a perfect way to mine the genuine
     academic potential of the Internet.

     For the school, Trinity High, with 500 students, the prospect of
     hiring its own Advanced Placement teacher had always been an
     unaffordable luxury, even though taking such courses has become a
     near necessity for students to get into the most competitive
     colleges.

     So the school in the redwood-dense mountains, halfway between San
     Francisco and the Oregon border, logged on. In essence, it took the
     Clinton administration up on its pledge that there was educational
     salvation in new technology, and that the Web could help the
     nation's poorest schools approximate the offerings of the
     wealthiest, particularly in a corner of the curriculum where the
     discrepancies are most stark.

     But so far the results here and elsewhere have been ragged,
     suggesting that a computer can be a crude substitute for a live
     teacher, particularly when the students are so young, the stakes
     for them are so high and the technology is so new.

     Several thousand students nationwide took college-level courses
     online this year through a private company, Apex Learning, or one
     of three state university systems. They included two teenagers
     here, each of them enrolled in an Advanced Placement government and
     politics class in which the lessons were transmitted through
     electronic text and animated short films, with grades reported via
     e-mail. The teacher was never seen.

     One Weaverville student dropped out midway through the spring
     semester because, he said, he could not summon the stamina to
     continue, absent a teacher standing in front of him; the other
     student finished the same course, but two weeks late, frustrated by
     countless technical glitches that often prevented him from logging
     onto the Web for hours.

     Similar growing pains were felt by other districts, including some
     of those that also contracted with Apex, of Bellevue, Wash., a
     leader in providing Advanced Placement courses online.

     Of the 600 students in 28 states who enrolled in at least one of
     the company's online Advanced Placement courses in the last school
     year, two-thirds did not complete enough of the course work to take
     the final exam, Apex officials said.

     "This is still pretty new and we are all learning about it," said
     Sally Narodick, the chief executive of Apex, incorporated two years
     ago.

     Much is riding on whether such efforts succeed.

     While President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have heralded
     the educational possibilities of the Web, most of what has been
     labeled instruction in cyberspace is supplemental at best -- SAT
     training, college counseling and virtual field trips.

     But online Advanced Placement courses represent something else, one
     of the first real opportunities to marshal technology to plug
     gaping holes in the core curriculums of financially pressed rural
     and inner-city high schools that cannot afford luxuries like
     college-level courses. Apex charges schools $325 to $400 per
     student. Hiring a teacher could cost more than $50,000 a year.

     Apex, one of the few for-profit ventures in the online Advanced
     Placement business, has raised $40 million from investors. Michigan
     State University, the University of Nebraska and Johns Hopkins
     University are also offering college-level courses to high school
     students online.

     All are seeking to close one of the widest gaps between rich and
     poor schools. First begun as an experiment in the 1950's involving
     fewer than 2,000 students and a handful of college-level courses,
     the Advanced Placement program, run by the College Board, now
     involves more than 700,000 high school students who took 1.1
     million final course exams for college credit this spring.

     Enrollment in at least one such course is regarded as an unofficial
     prerequisite for admission to the nation's most selective colleges,
     and the University of California system gives applicants who take
     such courses extra credit on their transcripts. Yet only half of
     the nation's high school students have access to Advanced Placement
     courses, which are regarded as a perk in districts strapped for
     cash or short on honors students.

     The Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, has proposed that every
     high school in the country offer at least one Advanced Placement
     course by 2002, and add at least one new course each year over the
     next 10 years. The Clinton administration has asked Congress to
     spend $10 million to help rural and inner-city schools purchase
     Advanced Placement courses online.

     Gov. Gray Davis of California has asked the State Legislature to
     spend an additional $20 million this year on Advanced Placement
     courses, much of it for online courses and hiring teachers.

     To Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, such online
     courses are a weak stand-in for what he says the country needs:
     180,000 teachers trained to offer college-level courses to two
     million more high school students.
     _________________________________________________________________

   Needing a human, not a computer, to provide a push.
     _________________________________________________________________

     But Francisco J. Hernandez, vice chancellor of the University of
     California at Santa Cruz, says such plans are pipe dreams,
     considering that many of the districts lacking Advanced Placement
     courses have a severe shortage of teachers in even basic subjects.
     Often, Mr. Hernandez said, an online course, however flawed, is the
     only opportunity a student has.

     This past school year, the University of California College Prep
     Initiative, conceived by Mr. Hernandez and operated out of the
     system's Santa Cruz campus, used state grants to pay for 800
     California high school students to take Advanced Placement courses
     online.

     "Our intent is not to be an alternative to a high quality teacher
     and classroom," Mr. Hernandez said. "Our intent is to be an
     alternative to nothing, and that's what they're getting right now."

     In Weaverville, a town of 3,370 people, many of them loggers and
     forest rangers, the experience of the two students who took Apex's
     online government course underscored the program's promise and its
     flaws.

     For Brian Jones, 19, a senior who wants to be a record producer,
     and Jeremy Forbes, 18, a classmate who dreams of becoming a
     cartoonist, taking college-level "U.S. Government and Politics"
     introduced them to the concepts of pluralism, federalism,
     liberalism and conservatism. Both said they now looked at
     presidential politics in a new light.

     But each was tripped up by shortcomings that, so far, are embedded
     in such courses.

     In mid-March, in the 7th week of the 15-week course, Mr. Jones was
     still doing work he should have completed in the second week. He
     said he was overwhelmed by the idea of writing a two-page essay
     twice a week and taking an exam every three weeks.

     And with his professor, Steve Sandweiss, 448 miles away in Tacoma,
     Wash., where he is a professor at a community college, Mr. Jones
     dropped out, enrolling instead in his high school's civics course.

     "I didn't feel like doing any work," he said. "I'm just not
     organized a lot of the time."

     Mr. Forbes was far more dogged, but he had continual problems
     signing onto the Apex Web site -- sometimes because of problems on
     Apex's end, and sometimes because of the limited capacity of the
     computers in his school.

     Mr. Forbes finished the course two weeks late, and took the
     Advanced Placement exam. He will know his grade soon -- a 4 or 5,
     on a scale of 1 to 5, is likely to earn him a college credit -- but
     said that for all the disruption he felt well-prepared for the
     exam.

     Apex officials said that they were already working to rectify the
     problems, smoothing software miscommunication, extending the course
     calendar by three weeks and providing training for mentor teachers
     in students' high schools. But Mr. Forbes's guidance counselor,
     Noreen Bradbury, said that even in their present form, the online
     courses were a godsend.

     Ms. Bradbury said she already had 11 students signed up to take
     advanced courses next year in history, statistics, psychology,
     government and economics.

     "It opens the world to our kids," she said. "They're not distant
     and different from everyone else out there. They're as good."


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