How Things Work:
Program Goals

Program
Goals

The Internet is perhaps the most transformative technology in history, reshaping business, media, entertainment, and society in astonishing ways. But for all its power, it is just now being tapped to transform education. . . . The World Wide Web is a tool that empowers society to school the illiterate, bring job training to the unskilled, open a universe of wondrous images and knowledge to all students, and enrich the understanding of the lifelong learner. The opportunity is at hand. The power and the promise are here. . . . Web-based education is just beginning, with something of far greater promise emerging in the middle distance. Yet, technology, even in its current stage of development, can already allow us to realistically dream of achieving age-old goals in education.

To center learning around the student instead of the classroom.
To focus on the strengths and needs of individual learners.
To make lifelong learning a reality (Web-Based Education Commission, 2001, pp. 3-4).

So proclaims the Congressionally-appointed Web-Based Education Commission (2001). Are claims such as these hype or reality? Only time will tell. What is certain about e-learning is the reality of its inevitability. Regardless of whether or not e-learning reflects sound educational practice, it is changing the landscape of education. E-learning has already captured the attention of the corporate sector and much of higher education, with 70 percent of colleges and universities in the United States now offering at least some courses online. Forty percent have created online degree programs, and this fall Arizona becomes the first state to formally recognize an online graduate degree in educational administration toward principal certification. The leader in the field, University of Maryland University College, had more than 62,000 online enrollments last year and offers 20 complete degree programs online (Russo, 2001). Web-based training is the fastest growing segment of the $60 billion corporate training market (Baer, 1999).

And the e-learning trend is spreading to K-12 education. Twelve states have established online high school programs, and five others are developing them. Twenty-five states allow for the creation of so-called cyber charter schools, and 32 states have e-learning initiatives under way (Editors, Education Week, 5/9/02). Ten states are piloting or planning to administer online testing. Oregon and South Dakota are already using Web-based assessments. Roughly 15 percent of high schools provide access to online courses. About 5 percent of classroom teachers and students have firsthand experience with an online course. With the arrival this fall of Bennett's K12 and the anticipated entrance of other media companies into the field, many predict massive growth in online education over the next few years (Russo, 2001).

These K-12 e-learning programs are opening the doors of online education to tens of thousands more students. In fact, recent estimations suggest that as many as 40,000 to 50,000 K-12 students will have enrolled in an online course by the end of the 2001-02 school year. As it is, most of those youngsters are high school students. But the momentum is building to make online courses available to elementary and middle school pupils (Clark, 2001). "The virtual school movement is the 'next wave' in technology-based K-12 education (p. 3)."

Ultimately, however, teachers are the ones responsible for transforming lifeless equipment into valuable learning tools. Creating high tech educational tools and insightful pedagogical models that capitalize on these tools without educating teachers to use them would be “as useless as creating a new generation of planes, without training pilots to fly them" (Web-Based Education Commission, 2000, p. 10) or like giving students paper and pencil and telling them they can only use the eraser. Teachers must learn to use these tools well or investments in high tech educational resources will be wasted. It is the teacher, after all, who guides instruction, shapes the instructional context, and facilitates teacher-student and student-student interactions. It is a teacher's skill at this, more than any other factor, that determines the degree to which students learn. Teachers must be knowledgeable about technology, able to apply it appropriately, and conversant with new technological tools, resources, and approaches (Web-Based Education Commission, 2000, p. 11).

With the spread of e-learning as either adjunct, supplement, or replacement to face-to-face learning, there is an urgent need to understand what good e-teaching is, what e-teaching strategies promote learning, and what knowledge, skills, and dispositions facilitate effective e-teaching. Most e-teaching today – even “good” e-teaching – depends on teachers’ intuitions, experimentation, and best guesses. E-teacher education consists primarily of local, word-of-mouth, shared wisdom and depends on extending existing practices to e-learning environments. If e-learning is to be more than conventional classroom learning “put online,” it is essential that teachers who want to teach virtually come to understand what good e-teaching is and master a knowledge base, strategies, and experiences that promote good e-learning practice.

The Online Academy for Teachers is a George Mason University certificate program designed to assist teachers to develop competencies associated with teaching online. Specifically, teachers completing The Online Academy for Teachers certificate program will:

1. Understand the history and current state of virtual schooling to include virtual learners, virtual learning environments, and benefits and challenges associated with virtual schooling;

2. Understand the design of and processes associated with The Online Academy, a GMU virtual high school:

3. Understand the role of the online mentor;

4. Be able to build effective online relationships with virtual learners, to question them appropriately, to listen to them actively, and to support their social and emotional growth and their ability to face the world and others with openness and confidence;

5. Be able to support online learners' ability to self-regulate their learning, to use effective learning strategies, and to develop as self-efficacious learners;

6. Be able to enable virtual learners' content and intellectual development through creating thinking environments that emphasize the language of thinking, thinking dispositions, mental management, strategic thinking, high order knowledge, and the transfer of learning;

7. Understand the process of moderating electronic communications especially those that involve multiple learners and be able to facilitate online discussions both synchronous and asynchronous;

8. Understand the design principles used to create instructional materials for The Online Academy, GMU's virtual high school, and be able to use those design principles to create online learning modules for virtual high school learners;

9. Understand design principles appropriate for the design of online learning embedded in course management systems (i.e. Blackboard) and be able to use those design principles to create online learning opportunties structured by course management systems; and

10. Complete a practicum experience in a virtual learning environment in which effective interpersonal, self-regulatory, and content learning strategies are implemented.