3 Points of Interest

The first point of interest that was new to me was the part about the use of radio as a communication tool for early models of distance education. I had never considered “educational radio” in the formalized sense, and I was interested to read the definition of “educational program” as provided by W.W Charters of Ohio State University: “one which raises the standards of taste, increases the range of valuable information, or stimulates the audience to undertake worthwhile activities.” I think this is a very elegant and useful definition , one worth revisiting by current designers of educational programming, regardless of the medium used.

I was also interested to learn that elitist attitudes that cast a stigma over distance ed. were present since its earliest stages. It seems to me that these attitudes are intricately woven with the allegiance to what the authors of this article term the covert curriculum of the established education system, which stresses the three pillars that were central to the needs of an industrial economic model: obedience, punctuality, and rote memorization.

Finally, I was not aware that the number of state-sponsored k-12 online schools. About a year ago, I first learned about the Florida Virtual School. I saw it as an interesting model for future innovations, and have often wondered why there are not more schools doing this. I was impressed to learn that there are over 80 state-sponsored schools on K-12 schools online. I found three in California. As much as I was surprised to know that there were more online schools in the U.S. than I was previously aware of, the number still seems incredibly small, given the demand and the capacity of modern technologies. Many of the school sites were announcing that enrollment was closed, and that they were no longer accepting applications (for students or faculty), which is certainly a testament to the demand (by students, parents, and teachers) for distance learning models in public education.