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When we launched our Technology Integration Lead Teacher (TILT) courses 2.5 years ago, the challenge for participants was keeping up with the volume of work in the online course. Even district level teacher specialists had trouble adjusting to the amount of work that was a part of online courses offered by national elearning providers.

As a result, I decided to scale back the involvement, and instituted a mandatory online pre-requisite course. It is a week long course that serves as an introduction to online learning, and is designed to give participants a feel for what an online course can be like. While many have passed with flying colors, others have had trouble adapting to learning online…and they don’t dedicate the time (read this case study by Clare Gill at eLearn) to pass the course.

This kind of pre-requisite for online courses makes me wonder whether this will be an expectation for the virtual schools that are showing up in Texas. A conversation with Linda Gillis (ESC-4 veteran online course provider) definitely suggests this. She shares this advice regarding student screening:

• You’ve got to have a well-oriented and well-screened student. This is not particularly for students who are not on level or will not read. It’s also not for the student will won’t facilitate their own learning, unwilling to take chances or try to make things work. Kids who hit a snag need to try to figure this out on their own.
• Skills for Success in Online Learning – Help students learn the learning management system environment. It also serves the school district well in getting the technology working well. Also discuss plagiarism, tech skills and this is run by a counselor. A remarkable result of the 1 week course that if the student didn’t finish the course in the one week, they would not succeed in a 14 week course. If students succeeded, then this was a great screening indication that students would finish successfully.
• Weekly checklist for students
• Send school a weekly progress report
• Incentives/rewards for students
• Key to success – schools need to have a liason that can be assigned to the student and works as a member of the team. The more involved the liason is with the student and teacher, the greater the chance of student success.

When I consider what we do in the intro to online learning course for adult learners, it occurs to me that there aren’t that many differences in this “checklist” of things to do with learners online. Is this reflective of your experience?

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