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I stumbled across this while doing my daily general online browse of "the news." This study was cited in various articles warning about the dangers of virtual online schools. The authors of the article are especially concerned about the nefarious objective of making...profits! Quelle horreur!! What I actually found amusing were these little tidbits in the main text: "Partial or "blended" approaches to virtual education have existed for some time and have been studied extensively...research has shown the virtual courses to produce test scores comparable to those from conventional face-to-face courses" Reading and math scores have not improved (and have remained flat, in fact) during these last forty years despite the gazillion dollars we have spent on public education. Should I be glad to see that it, at least, won't get worse than conventional face-to-face instruction? The authors referred to a meta analysis conducted by the US Dept of Ed on the subject of online instruction. This refers back to the studies done on virtual education: "Only five studies included in the meta analysis were conducted at the K-12 level...In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the k-12 population." Well there you have it. Meanwhile back at the ranch we're off to the newest new thing in education. Whoohoo!

Great article on using Bloom's Taxonomy with online instruction. Wow! Some of the things we are doing are at high levels!

Great article Deena! I love Bloom's Taxonomy. Putting it to use in an online setting is a great idea. I copied some of the pages for quick reference!

Interesting article on the history of online education

Interesting article about how some teachers and professors are relying too heavily on their technology in teaching their classes.

I would argue that it's not the use of technology that is the problem. It is HOW technology is used. Powerpoints have their place - but they are not a true implementation of student-centered learning. Online, self-paced, math tutorials may be effective in some cases, but are definitely not the only way to test student knowledge. We've got to start thinking about teaching and learning differently and not simply transfer what we do in the face-to-face classroom to the online environment. Just my two cents.

Thanks for sharing this information!

Straight to the point with a lot of things to consider, interesting....

This article deals with online learning and the special education student.

Research is the best way to find out if something works. This is an interesting study, which by the authors own admission, shows us there needs to be more research done in this area. The blended classroom, which offers both technology based learning and face-to-face learning appears to be get the best results.