Considerations for Planning a State Virtual School, SREB

iNACOL National Primer on K12 Online Learning, John Watson

Virtual Schools and eLearning: Planning for Success, Tom Clark and Zane Berge

Take some time to explore Michael Barbour’s Virtual High School Meanderings blog for regularly updated resources and commentary on current virtual school issues.

For this session, you and your team will identify important components of your virtual school program. To complete the activities for this session, first download the Virtual School Planning Template, which has been provided for you to use in this session and throughout this course. Save the document to your computer.

During this session, complete Part I of the template by drafting your goals and mission statement, identifying the audience for your virtual school courses, identifying the model you are planning to use for your courses, identifying the e-learning platform you will use, and defining how your content will be developed and delivered. Although you can complete Part I as a team, you may want to consider having each team member download a copy of the Planning Template and fill in ideas prior to the meeting to help inform your discussions.

Helpful hints for using the template:

• Save the template to your hard drive before typing in your information.
• Use the tab key or arrow keys to move through the template.
• Remember to save the document on your computer so you can add additional information in later sessions of the workshop.

Use the discussion board to share your mission statement and describe what you anticipate being the greatest challenges and benefits of providing virtual courses for your students.

Your feedback is very valuable to your colleagues as they develop their plans. Be sure to return to the discussion board frequently to review the potential challenges and benefits shared by your colleagues and provide your response to their comments.

Please be sure to post an original response to the discussion question as well as at least one substantive reply to a colleague using the ETLO Discussion Board Expectations.

K­12 Online Learning: A 2008 Follow-up of the Survey of U.S. School District Administrators, The Sloan Consortium

Laboratories of Reform: Virtual High Schools and Innovation in Public Education, Education Sector

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Please contact ETLO to report any broken links within this course.

Note: We can only update links that are on our course pages. If you find a broken link within a course resource, please contact the Webmaster of that website, as only that person will be able to fix internal links.