Q&A
Camille Cole
Oregon Department of Education
Online education
Q: How do online schools in Oregon operate?
Oregon's online schools that serve K-12 students cannot offer diplomas, they're not comprehensive schools that are supported by the state school fund. They're programs that offer online courses that students can take to fill in a course that they may have missed or may have failed and have to make up, or maybe there was a schedule conflict, or maybe that course wasn't offered at their school, for one reason or another. And this is the case often with Advanced Placement courses, foreign language courses, remedial courses, and technology courses. So when we say "online schools," in fact they're not schools in the sense that we define a school at the state level today. They do not receive state school funding. They are not a school, per se. And the district makes the call as to whether they accept the credit or not. These are all schools that are run by our public organizations—educational service districts, school districts, colleges, community colleges—so they are definitely quality and accredited programs, but they are programs rather than schools.
When a group puts together funding to develop an online program, how do they do that? They don't get any extra from the state, they just use what resources already come to them through regular state school funding apportionments?
Where they got their funding to develop these programs, I just really couldn't tell you. But the way they support the program once it's off the ground is by charging a tuition for the course and fee to the student that either the parent pays for or the district will pay for. Now, often it is the case that if it's a course that the student needs to meet NCLB requirements, graduation requirements, college requirements, it's likely that the district will pay for it. But I think that there's also a lot of cases where the parents pay for it too, and I think it's a case by case basis.
In Oregon how is public school funding apportioned? Is that by average daily attendance?
It is by average daily attendance. That is probably the biggest policy issue that we face right now as we are looking at the system as it exists, looking at how we'll be able to integrate this new modality accessing resources for learning. We got here by thinking outside of the box, and so now that we're here and using the technologies that are available to us, we're still in a system that's inside the box.
What do you mean?
State school funding is based on the seat-time of students. So the school is paid a certain amount annually for the attendance of a full-time student. It's not paid on the basis of completion of a class. It is based on certain criteria that define what a school is: qualifications of the teacher, rigor of the courses, and the sort of brick-and-mortar environment of, "Here's our school, here's the number of students sitting in the chairs, and here are the teachers and these are their qualifications." So when you look at an online program, it's outside of those parameters. State bureaucracies have policies that they go by and if a new initiative falls outside of the program then new policies and new rules have to be established. The question right now is: What kind of rules and policies can be established that will support these online programs and help us all get to the place where we function in a system that includes e-learning as a school option. We're not there yet, so what we're doing is looking at how we will get there. How we can get there and support these wonderful programs and give them a framework to work within.
So school choice, as far as e-learning being among the choices, that's something that philosophically is pretty much embraced in Oregon? It's just a matter of figuring out how to create the structures?
Yes, I would say yes, and I would add that it's probably more about availability of resources than choice. All students have a right to access their educational requirements and their educational desires and dreams, so if they want to take Japanese they darn well should be able to access it.
Is Oregon also hearing from private developers who want to start online programs?
Oh there's a lot of them out there.
Tell me about that.
I don't know too much about them because there's so many of them. I think that there is a market out there. Right now, e-learning is market-driven. There are so many students who are going to want to purchase, either through their district or their parents or themselves, certain courses that they want or need. So these programs that were developed by districts and ESDs were developed to meet a perceived market need. So there's a lot of groups within the private sector that we don't necessarily work with here at the department who responded to the same market demand. For a while there I got, especially when we were doing our e-learning summit, which we planned for at the end of 2003 and held in first month of 2004, I was getting a lot of calls from private sector companies that were producing online content for K-12 students, so I know that there's just a lot of them out there. I attended the National Educational Computing Conference in New Orleans last June. If you walk the vendor floor, they're everywhere!
Were these calls that you were getting after that summit, were they from people outside of Oregon or within Oregon?
Both. But since we're a government organization—I mean, if we were to open that flood gate—it isn't within our parameters to work with the public sector. We work with public organizations like the ESDs and the school districts. So we're working with them and support what they do. We're just not in a system right now, yet, where we can pay for what they do.
What were the issues that came up with Clackamas Web Academy. They started out wanting to be an online charter school?
They wanted to be a charter school. That is something that has to be approved by their district. And so within the district, they didn't fit the criteria for a charter school. So what they wound up doing was becoming an alternative school, and that worked for them. I think that that's probably one of the key issues.
We at the education department have been gathering public input on this for probably close to five years or maybe even more, and we got more public input from the summit in January. And we are now working with a consulting firm, Education Commission of the States, to put together a policy brief that we will present to the State Board of Education before the end of the calendar year. So we are hoping that some of the big issues, like funding, can be addressed in this legislative session. That's probably the most significant thing that I can tell you.
So some of the big issues are funding and—
Funding, teacher training, information output—I mean just informing our entire population of what's available, what does it all mean, all of the frequently asked questions, what is available, what isn't available—information outreach is big. Teacher training is a big one, both preservice and inservice teacher training. So that reaches across the sectors. It's not just about K-12. As we come on board with e-learning, we want to look at how we can make use of that technology to make a seamless P-16 education system for the students of Oregon.
Do you feel like you are in the forefront of grappling with these issues compared to other states?
I think that we might be just a little ahead of the middle of the pack. There are other states that are definitely ahead of us. A couple that jumped to mind are Missouri and Pennsylvania, Florida.
Have you had talks with those folks to use them as a model?
Well, I don't know about using them as a model, but we've definitely talked to them. They've had some brick walls to climb over and issues to resolve and so we've taken a look at their history.
What would be some of those brick walls?
It might be interesting for you to talk to people in Pennsylvania. Somehow online charter schools were legal there right out of the gate, so all of a sudden all of these homeschool students who previously did not qualify for state funding because they were homeschool students signed up for these public online charter schools and just about broke the bank in the state of Pennsylvania. All of a sudden the population of the schools through this online school increased 10 fold. There were court cases and they have worked it out. I can't specifically tell you how, but they have gone forward and they are being successful and they worked out the issues.
Is that a possible obstacle for every state or does it depend on how public education is funded in the state?
I think it depends a little bit on how it is funded. One of the things that I've noticed, states are really different from each other in the way that they do business. There are some states where the legislature just automatically, with hardly blinking an eye, fund their entire network system not only for K-12 but for higher ed, the libraries and all the government agencies. That's actually the case in the state of Washington. They have that K-20 Network. It's just part of their cost of doing business. In Oregon, it would take an act of Congress, literally, for anything like that to happen. And here we are two states in the same area of the country, right next to each other, but the way we do business is so different.
From where you sit, what role do you think online schools have in Oregon? Is it a fad or is it here to stay? Is it going to revolutionize how education is delivered in Oregon?
I think it's going to revolutionize how education is delivered around the world, not just in Oregon. I don't think it's a fad. I think that it will change the way we do business in the education field in Oregon, definitely for the better. For students throughout the state—I mean this is a huge state, I think we're 92,000 square miles—students in every corner of the state will be able to access educational resources from their computers at school, from their computers at home, and through videoconferencing as well. We have a very comprehensive videoconferencing system here in the Oregon, the Oregon Access Network.
Is it also going to revolutionize teaching?
I think it's one more tool that teachers now have an option to use. I started back in the early 70s and we had ditto master machines and film strip machines and those were the technologies we had in our toolbox. But we were teachers and we had tools. The tools are still there, they're more sophisticated, and it's up to the individual teachers and it's up to whether they're going to take advantage of them or not and whether they're going to do it effectively using best practices. I think that some will and some won't. I think that the good news is that the students who are coming of age and the students who are coming up now from kindergarten and first grade, maybe even those who haven't started school yet, they've grown up in a world of interactive technologies. So this, to them, is just part of their world. It isn't anything out of the ordinary. So to them it will be second nature. It's we adults who are having to adopt it and adapt to it and use it in the best way.
I think that people tend to make the technology the point rather than the program the point. I think if I were to make a recommendation at all around this I would say not to make it about the technology, but to make it about education.
That's a critical paradigm, isn't it?
I think so. Because we can really get caught up in "This technology is so cool and I'm going to use it because it's there." Rather than, "This technology is so cool and I'm glad I'm able to do this thing that I wasn't going to be able to do otherwise."
Do you see any downsides along the way in adopting online learning?
I worry that people might think that it's a way of replacing the educational community. I think community is really important and I think that face to face interaction between students and their teachers is something that will never be replaced. That feeling of community that they get in being in a classroom with their peers, and the things that they learn socially and culturally by being part of their community and with their peers can't be replaced by a computer screen in someone's living room.
Is that even possible to develop what feels like a real relationship with students over online?
I think that you can, but I think that it doesn't replace the face to face relationship. Not only do I think you can, I think it's important that you have those skills. It still doesn't replace the face to face relationship for an entire school experience. It certainly can for a class or two.
What kind of skills does it take to make that kind of connection online?
It's part of the communication process. Being able to use these communication tools to effectively make a connection with someone who you're not looking in the eye. For example, I think it's really important that there are regular and expected contacts to the student from the teacher. So say the student just doesn't come online for two or three weeks, they can expect that they will have a certain amount of e-mails from that teacher when they go back online asking where they are and why they're not there. Some of the schools make it a policy that students get a contact from the teacher every day and they're expected to reply to it. And I also believe that there are schools that do not contact the students regularly. All online classes are not the same. If you were to examine each one of those online programs you see listed on our Web site you'd probably find out that each one is radically different. There's a lot about them, too, that is the same.
The state does not have an online program. We don't have any online classes for students. We do have an e-learning professional development series on videoconferencing and videostreaming. But the online schools began popping up from the educational service districts and a couple of school districts, probably in 2001 or 2002.
From the state level, is there some thinking that online schools and programs can help schools meet NCLB requirements?
Definitely. All "virtual e-learning"—using electronic tools to teach and learn from a distance through online learning, videoconferencing, or videostreaming—we see as a way to fill in the blanks that are necessary requirements to meet NCLB standards, both for students and for teachers. There's a requirement for highly qualified teachers and that means that if you're working in the classroom you have to have an opportunity to access professional development opportunities and continuing education opportunities. Now, if you live in a remote area of the state you have an opportunity to take classes online.
So helping teachers to get the professional development to be highly qualified as well as for rural schools—
It gives students the opportunity to access content that they might not have otherwise. Because in a small rural community, even in a larger urban community, you're not necessarily going to have a Japanese teacher in every high school or an AP Physics teacher in every classroom, or Calculus, it would be probably unusual to have an array of highly qualified staff in every one of those areas in every high school. So in those places where the blanks need to be filled in, virtual e-learning can help.
We do have the infrastructure in the state to support that. Every school has access to high-speed Internet. The schools pay for their connectivity here in Oregon. It was given to them through Senate Bill 622 in 1999. So we have had support from our legislature to build the infrastructure, but the school districts pay to maintain the infrastructure. The videoconferencing portion of $50 million allocated by that bill was $6 million. The bill also called for high-speed Internet access to be installed in every school building in the state, to build local area networks, and to provide districts with moneys two years in a row to upgrade anything that they wanted or needed to within their school building to support telecommunications to provide training to some of their staff. It was a pretty comprehensive telecommunications program.
Was videoconferencing seen as the main thing and is it being eclipsed at all by online schools or are they complementary?
I just think they are two different tools. Videoconferencing was around first in Oregon. It was a couple of years later that the online programs started popping up. It's just another tool. It would be like saying, "Did the hammer eclipse the saw?"
Was videoconferencing seen mostly as a vehicle to deliver professional development or a way to delivery instruction to students?
Both. But it has been used more for staff meetings, collaboration with staff across the state. It has saved millions of dollars in travel and so on. Probably its second use has been for professional development and workshops. Its third use has been for delivery of course content to K-12 students.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
It's important to keep in mind that as we roll out this initiative, it truly is a partnership between the Department of Ed, the ESDs, and the individual districts. There is a lot of good information on the Oregon Department of Education's E-Learning Web site. If you click on the Summit link on that E-Learning Page it's to the left, you'll find a lot of historic documentation about online learning and about the programs, and about what people statewide are saying are the important issues that they're facing today. From the E-Learning Page under Additional Links.
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