Statewide Cybersolutions: ALASKA

"Do what's best for Alaska" is the motto of that great state's U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, according to his Web site. That certainly seems to have translated into concrete support for the development of online education in this vast state.

Alaska is one-fifth the size of the United States and, by and large, it's roadless. Distance education has been part of the territory since the early part of the 20th century. By mail, phone, fax, audio, video, TV, and, now, the Internet, countless students have received their schooling. Thanks to about $75 million in E-Rate funds over the years, Alaska has connected nearly all of its school districts to broadband Internet.

Half of Alaska's 506 public schools have fewer than 100 students, and many of these very small schools lie in remote communities loosely sprinkled across Alaska. Practically speaking, most of these villages are accessible only by "bush" plane. Senator Stevens believes that delivering distance education over the Internet is a very viable option for helping to educate Alaska's children.

"Senator Stevens has been very supportive of distance education, not just in Alaska but around the nation," says Michael Opp, director of Alaska Online, a new consortium of online schools that serves students in rural school districts.

In 2003, Stevens, who is the senior-most Republican senator in Congress and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, earmarked $500,000 in federal funds to help create Alaska Online, a consortium of about 14 school districts that share online courses and resources. The founding districts are Delta/Greely School District, Kenai School District, and the Yukon-Koyukuk School District. In 2004, Senator Stevens earmarked another $750,000 for the consortium so that it could expand its services to better meet the learning needs of Alaska Native students.

There are, in fact, two statewide consortia in Alaska that provide online education to public school students, and both emphasize synchronous online learning: Alaska Online and the Alaska Distance Learning Partnership.

Alaska Online provides Blackboard for asynchronous interaction and is promoting synchronous Web conferencing using APEX as a better and cheaper alternative to videoconferencing. Web conferencing allows students and adults to engage in synchronous activities in which they can speak and share computer applications and documents online. They cannot, however, see each other.

The Alaska Distance Learning Partnership was started by General Communications Inc. (GCI), Alaska's largest telecommunications provider. The company has partnered with rural school districts to provide online education programs primarily through videoconferencing, a synchronous application that allows participants to see each other on-screen as well as to share applications and documents.

Interaction is key to the success of any online education program, says Michael Opp. Students who are able to interact in real time in an online course are more likely to complete the course and to do well, he says. But he believes Web conferencing is a better choice for schools than videoconferencing. Web conferencing uses much less bandwidth—thus, fewer technical difficulties, he says—and it costs a lot less than videoconferencing.

"If you want to get into videoconferencing for half a dozen sites or so, you've got to be willing to spend perhaps half a million dollars," he says. "For Web conferencing, you only have to spend about $15,000."

Logistics are simpler, too, he says. People can connect to a Web conference from any computer with Internet, rather than having to go to a special room set up for videoconferencing.

Three years ago, when Opp was director of Alyeska Central School—the state's oldest correspondence school—he says state officials urged him and three others from rural school districts with online education programs to form a consortium. As a consortium, the member school districts share online teachers and resources and avoid duplicating services while delivering standards-based courses to their students. Some of Alaska's first online schools were created to serve homeschool students, but state officials were eager to serve public school students with online education options, Opp says, and to help small schools meet requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act.

"We [provide] the supplemental courses that kids don't get in the small schools in Alaska," such as advanced math and language arts courses, says Opp. The consortium also helps small schools to meet the requirement to have "highly qualified" teachers teaching core academic courses. The NLCB Act requires teachers who are teaching core courses to be certified in those subjects and to have passed exams demonstrating their mastery.

If a school doesn't have a staff of a dozen or more teachers, Opps says, there's no way that it can provide highly qualified teachers in every core subject. Small schools in Alaska might have six or eight teachers, at most. By virtue of their posts, teachers in these small schools must be generalists. "It's just not possible unless you have a critical mass [of teachers]," Opp says.

The consortium provides Blackboard, an asynchronous course-delivery application that is widely used in colleges and universities, and the APEX Web conferencing application for synchronous interaction. The consortium also provides a content system that enables students and teachers to create portfolios on a "virtual hard drive" on the Internet. This way, they can access their work from any computer with Internet: from school or home, or when traveling.

For now, membership in the consortium is free, and members have free use of the online tools. The only exception is when a student takes a course taught by a teacher outside of his or her own district, the resident district pays $100 tuition to the district providing the course.

Opp is trying to develop a regular funding stream for the consortium.

"We need to build enough of a political base to be able to get an appropriation built into the foundation formula," he says. He proposes a $1 million to $1.5 million cap on the annual funding. That amount would enable the consortium to serve 800 to 1,000 students at about $1,500 per student, far less than the state's basic aid of $5,075 per student. At present, there are about 300 students from 30 to 50 schools taking courses through the consortium.

Alaska Online jointly licensed the APEX Web conferencing application with the Center for Distance Education at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. While the consortium uses the Web conferencing application primarily during the day, the university uses it primarily in the evenings. The partnership not only has cost-savings advantages, it also has fostered deeper ties.

Opp says that the consortium and the university are considering another partnership in which the university would provide teacher professional development delivered through Alaska Online. This would be a big help to rural teachers who need professional development to meet the NCLB requirement to be highly qualified in the subjects they teach.

But it all comes down to finding continued funding. Senator Ted Steven's initial three-year grant for launching Alaska Online is nearing an end. "Just like anybody else, once the grant money runs out, it runs out. But we're trying to build a financially sustainable model," says Opp.

— Denise Jarrett Weeks

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