Posted on 07/24/2008 10:45:18 PM PDT by Amelia
...Educators who supplement or replace their day jobs with online teaching for local public schools are discovering that the perks of working at home come with hurdles: grappling with awkward or confusing lines of communication with their pupils; gauging student performance without seeing facial expressions; and struggling to withstand the urge to check e-mails from students during weekends.
Online courses, mostly in high schools, have proliferated in recent years despite debate about their effectiveness compared with face-to-face instruction. The number of times students enrolled in distance education courses connected with public schools (using Internet, two-way video or other technologies) rose from about 317,000 in 2002-03 to more than 506,000 in 2004-05, the National Center for Education Statistics reported in June. That's a 60 percent increase. In at least 66 percent of the cases, the report says, students earned credit with a passing grade.
Such students could be taking advanced courses unavailable at local schools, fulfilling graduation requirements or pursuing online schooling for other reasons. Prince William's Virtual High, for instance, is open to all students enrolled in a regular high school and rising ninth-graders; it also accepts some home-schooled students....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
To the author of the article:
Oh, boo hoo.
Big surprise that a job has benefits and “hurdles.” NOT.
There’s nothing insurmountable or earth-shattering here. These courses are the wave of the future, except the future is now. Sure, there are things to work out, but they will be worked out. More and more students will choose to get their education in a variety of formats, with the traditional on-campus classroom becoming less and less primary over time.
Some of these jobs pay full benefits. $300 per student per course is more money than I make now, assuming the same number of students per year.
By teaching at a virtual school, I could teach sitting at home in sweatpants or running shorts, work fewer hours per day, probably also have the house cleaned and supper cooked before my husband got home, FReep a little during the day, and not have to worry about high gasoline prices.
Oh, yeah, and like the article said, no cafeteria duty!
What's not to like? ;-)
Exactly!
Also, I have always said that the quickest, cheapest and most efficient way to fix traffic woes all across the fruited plain is for everyone who can work from home to do so.
Sign me up
I do this. I teach virtual part time.
It does have some rather nice perks, like being able to work from home, in your pjs, etc.
These perks do come with drawbacks. To wit:
1. You are not guaranteed anything. Yes, you get paid on a per kid basis, but you may not get enough to justify living expenses. One of my colleagues has five (5) students for the fall.
2. You are an independent contracted individual. That means no retirement, insurance or taxes. You pay taxes once/year.
These drawbacks are minimal as the technology allows all but true face to face connections. We use a program called Elluminate which has real time conversation capability. Works wonderfully for world language teachers such as myself.:)
Also, it provides opportunities to some smaller, rural schools to get AP courses. Georgia Virtual has about 20 AP offerings, and we are working on more. Wanna take Japanese? We got that.:) AP French? Oui. AP Math/Science/English/Econ? Yep.
If I thought I could make it working on line, you bet your boots I would do it.:)
Ping for later read.
I would love to do so!
Wow! Count on the government not to know about or use **web cams**!
The math tutors in India use them routinely. They can also check work **immediately** through e-mail, scanning, and fax.
Highly experienced teachers, with masters and Ph.D. work for $200 to $600 a month!
sweatpants or running shorts,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
With web cams you may not want to do that.
That's very cool - so you can check pronunciation in addition to grammar, etc, then?
I am not sure if I would totally like being an online teacher. I think I'd miss the whole-class interaction sometimes.
Also, it seems to me that this form of instruction would work best (at least right now) for visual learners and more motivated students. Many of my students are more auditory and kinesthetic, and we do a lot of hands-on activities that would not translate well to online.
Oh boy! Outsourcing education! I hope these tutors are easier to understand than the Indians manning tech help lines...
The link to that you provided me yesterday did not work, so I googled and found a couple of articles: here and here.
It looks as if most of these tutors charge $20 an hour or more, and since costs of living are much less in India, the tutors are making a relative fortune.
The article notes that there is an oversupply of people with math and science degrees in India, and a shortage of qualified math and science teachers in the U.S. (probably because we can make much more money in industry) so maybe it's a good match.
Tom Friedman states that accent reduction classes are common and often mandatory for those working on call lines. I expect that the accent problem will fade in time. These jobs are **highly** competitive and the motivation is there to reduce the typical Indian accent.
Tom Friedman reports that the tutors working for tutoring businesses make about $200 to $600 a month.
This is a brand new field. The independent Indian tutor may be charging $20 and hour or more because that is the going rate now in the U.S. I expect that the prices will drop considerably as this industry matures and more Indians catch on to the idea and more education companies are established.
One more comment.
It took my son about 3 months to finish the entire first grade Calvert homeschool correspondence course.
So....Why not extend on-line learning to elementary and middle schoolers? Many elementary students could zoom ahead in selected subjects on the weekend, summers, and vacations. Math would be especially adaptable to this format. Other subjects well suited might be social studies or foreign languages.
By the way, EducationNews.Org has an interesting interview concerning on-line education on today's blog. I will start a thread on it. Unfortunately, again, the on-line learning is confined to high school.
Anyone who thinks a webcam is a good idea is plumb crazy and naive to a stupid level
Indian teachers can surely advertise on Craig's list, and they too can later build their professional practices through word of mouth. It is for this reason that I expect the cost of tutoring to drop dramatically very soon in the comming years.
Also, given the technology of webcam, e-mail, fax, scanning, PC tablets, etc. I see no reason why children in the U.S. couldn't have their own personal and inexpensive elementary or middle school teacher. As I have previously posted, personal tutor is amazingly efficient. ( about 2 hours) a day.
Finally,...I think drawing the line at high school for on-line tutoring is an artificial boundary for age.
By the way, I enjoyed the links. Thank you.
That should be “niece” and “coming”.
Webcam in the bedroom? Unsupervised tutoring?
Well...These parents are so stupid that **indeed** their children should be institutionalized.
My children are homeschooled and I used a writing course with teachers called Write@Home. Very good program and the children progressed dramatically.
Between the programmed self instruction courses like Teaching text book and the dvd courses like the Teaching Company, school is going to look very different in the next ten years.
actually I think the REAL future of education is to have MORE online offerings. this will make it far more easy to have something closer to homeschooling.
Of course the need to to have it be more automated for the base courses so a human (see NEA incompetent) is not in the mix.
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