1/12/2024 0 Comments Virtual arkansas phone numberIn response, Swan reached out to colleagues at the Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership (TICAL) who introduced her to Leading Edge Certification, a national nonprofit that conducts training and certification programs for schools in a number of disciplines, including blended learning. Even more worrisome, they might not have any exposure to critical online teaching skills such as sifting through digital resources, managing the online platform, and hosting strictly-online discussions. Without formal training on how to teach courses for an online environment, Swan worried teachers would approach their courses as they would traditional ones. Instead, teachers and students meet twice a week for synchronous lessons and class discussions delivered in real time. The distance naturally makes the face-to-face component of blended learning tricky, so the program has dispensed with it entirely. Students and teachers could be located in any of one of 200 districts across the state, rural or urban, nestled deep inside the Ozarks or right across from downtown Little Rock. Depending on the quality of the course they’re teaching, that’s all they have.”īlended learning - Virtual Arkansas’ preferred term to describe its model - might strike some as a bit of a stretch. “When you talk about online and blended learning, they don’t have the background for that. “It’s a special skill set that our training programs do not generally cover,” said Cathi Swan, the state coordinator of digital learning and superintendent at Virtual Arkansas. Most teachers hired by Virtual Arkansas are brought on for their subject-matter expertise few have ever taught an online course, let alone worked through the rigors of translating traditional curriculum to the online or blended environment. Currently, about 30,000 students in the state take courses through Virtual Arkansas and the program employs dozens of teachers, whose experience with blended learning might be spotty at best. The idea is to provide a full range of services, from catering to students in rural areas looking for a hard-to-find class to districts turning to online in the face of teacher shortages or budget cutbacks. The state’s official response was to create a new program, called Virtual Arkansas, to manage its online courses and work with districts to find students who want to take them. While most students still take at least some of their courses in a face-to-face setting, the need to scale online learning opportunities for thousands of students has required new infrastructure, new curriculum, and, of course, new teachers. In Arkansas, as in most states, student interest in online learning is skyrocketing.
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