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.
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.
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!
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.