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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