Should there be online classes in high school?

In my town, there is currently a vicious debate about the hundreds of millions of dollars in maintenance the school buildings will need over the next few years. Because of a statewide program, every high schooler has a laptop. Could online high school classes work?
They don’t even all have to be online, but even a few online classes could mean smaller and cheaper school buildings.
I am currently going to college online, and I think it works well.

My Son’s high school has a selection of online classes. Mostly electives, including soem programming and web design courses. Seems to work ok.

Could it work?
Perhaps, for higher grades, but id say only for kids with very good self discipline.
It would be much like online college courses.
And not all people learn well in the detached online fashion.

And there is a lot lost when you have no ground school
ask anyone who has taken classes online with no real live breathing standing right there instructor.
You take college courses online, i am sure you already notice that there are some things that would be much better in a real classroom where you can be hands on.

Also, though a program may have given each kid a laptop, does his family have internet?
What if a kid does not? then what?
I am not sure if you are in the USA, but if not you might be interested to learn that our
countries broadband coverage is embarrassing compared to many other countries.

We have large areas that there simply is not any source of good broadband.
Best you can get is bandwidth limited options like satellite, stream a lecture and POOF, you have exceeded your monthly data cap no more internet.
And the cost of having it installed is high as well.

What state is this that has laptops for every student? There are plenty of districts that do that (especially in the suburbs), but I’ve never heard of a statewide program for it.

EDIT: Though if you can get a device in the hands of every student, you can do what’s called a “flipped classroom”. Basically, the students watch the lectures on their own time on their laptops, and then do what would be the homework in the classroom, where they can ask the teacher for help if they need it. It’s an idea that’s gaining a lot of steam, and early results look promising.

The ship has sailed, over 90% of high schools nationwide offer some online classes already. In the state where I currently live you can do an entire high school curriculum online and the state will even lend the student a computer to use, although it doesn’t pay for the internet connection required.

My daughter is currently using an online course offered by BYU to fulfill her high school foreign language requirement, taking a language not offered at her brick and mortar school. She has to watch lessons, submit homework, take tests, and then schedule regular appointments with TAs for one on one tests and evaluations, all online.

I ran out of math classes and took two online. I would have preferred a class. But it was OK and I would expect some improvements over the past 20 years or so.

As others mentioned, adequate internet access could be an issue. Although I had a class period set aside when I was supposed to be working in the computer lab. So I used the school’s internet.

The trouble with online classes is accountability.

The school I taught in had some online classes available. The ones I was most familiar with were the mathematics courses available for students who had troubles passing the in class versions (usually Algebra or Geometry). In discussions with several students who ended up taking the online versions, it became clear to me that, even when the online version was taught in a dedicated online “classroom” (really just a room full of computers with a “teacher” monitoring the efforts; in our case, the teacher was the boy’s basketball coach), the students quickly figured out how to “game” the class. Thus, no real learning took place. As long as the Algebra students managed to pass the state-mandated EoC test, no one cared, least of all the administration.

Of course, when those self-same students then enrolled in the subsequent courses in the sequence, they performed quite poorly, having not really learned the material “taught” in the online course.

I am, in general, skeptical of online learning for anyone who is not taking the course because of a motivation to actually learn the material. For high school students, that’s a relatively limited group; most are just trying to jump the appropriate hoops so they can get out of the school and on to the next challenge.

He is in Maine, iirc.

High School?
Maybe a few Electives for Juniors and Seniors.

For anyone younger being in a real classroom in a clean, warm, well lit school has too many social functions - this is where puberty happens - a time of great rising expectations - not only the ability to reproduce, but the realization that there are lots of other places and people to be.
This is the worst possible time to be alone.

Younger children are expanding their world view and need lots of assurance that they are not the only ones going through what they are experiencing.

This is a greatly expanded version of a book vs a teacher - you can’t ask a book a question.
You can’t grow into adulthood apart from your peers.

Find the damned money and educate your children properly.

I don’t care if you buy a mobile home facility and convert the homes to classrooms. Get clean, dry, warm, well lit space for real classes.

I don’t know. I for one would have preferred to have undergone puberty in peace and privacy. Perhaps that was just me.

That’s the wrong question to ask.

The right question is: should there be high schools?

Education reforms are all thinking small. They’re not thinking about ways to radically alter our education system. They take most of the system for granted, and only look for ways to tinker around the edges. Currently nearly all students spend ages 5 to 18 being herded through big buildings called “elementary school”, “middle school”, and “high school”. They spend 6 to 8 hours being bossed around by government employees, being told to go to this room at this time and move to another room at that time. The majority of classes are organized around preparing for endless tests and quizzes. Everyone simply assumes that it must be that way. How could it be otherwise? The best we get is minor proposals for sending a few kids to private school or charter school–welcome ideas, to be sure, but it still leaves kids spending thirteen years trooping through big, ugly buildings and getting drilled over and over on how to take multiple choice tests.

Moving education online has many advantages. For example, suppose that I’m really good at math and bad at Spanish, while my friend Bob is good at Spanish and bad at math. In a brick-and-mortar high school, we both spend one hour per day in calculus class and one hour in Spanish in class. If we instead took our classes online, I could zip through my calculus lesson in 10 minutes and use the extra time to focus on the Spanish material, while Bob does vice versa.

The advantages of online education don’t stop there. If I’m really awesome at math, my online calculus course could identify that fact and craft a curriculum specifically designed for me, that challenges me far beyond what’s in a normal calculus textbook. If I’m one of 30 students trapped in a high school calculus classroom, it’s not possible for the teacher to do that.

That sounds a lot like the “video classrooms” back when I was a freshman at The Big U. For a 3 credit hour class, we had two sessions of an hour each where the entire room watched a video on a (tube) TV (not color, so you know how long ago that was). The video was created in the university’s TV lab by the top profs. Sometimes the same video was sent to multiple rooms, since each TV screen wasn’t that big.

Then, one day a week, we had a class headed by a Teaching Assistant, typically a grad student, with only 10-15 class members, where we could ask any questions and have that personal dialogue with a human. And take tests.

I always thought it worked well. Got me through Psych 1 & 2, History 1 & 2, English Lit, and a few more classes that I forget.

This is certainly not true for all students.

One problem is that education reformers, administrators, and politicians get information from published research, seminars, and so forth. They should read stuff like Calvin and Hobbes and watch The Simpsons if they want know what a modern American school is like from a child’s perspective. Those sources display school as an agonizing experience, which for many children is exactly what it is.

When I was in seventh grade, the public school I attended did absolutely nothing to help me understand puberty or to establish an intellectual self. For me and everyone else, it’s a relentless process of being mocked and made fun of by other kids for our appearance, for our clothes (if we couldn’t afford the most expensive brands), for not being cool, and for absolutely anything related to sex. If any kid showed too much interest in academics, that immediately made them a nerd and an outcast.

Interesting question. My daughter’s high school provides all the kids with laptops. I should say her former high school. She just completed a two day orientation for the cyber school she’s now enrolled in, (long story why we decided to move her.) Anyway, she said at the former high school, they would sit in class and a lot of the time just work on the laptops, not have any discussions. With the cyber school, she has a learning coach that checks in with her on a daily basis, she does take some live classes,will need to participate in chat rooms and there are teachers available from 8-8 that the kids can go to with questions or help.

I know my daughter and if she puts her mind to something, it will get done. I also know her best friend and cyber school probably wouldn’t be a good fit for her. I think at the high school level, it really depends on the kid. I did a ton of online courses but it was graduate work. I loved it btw.

There has to be accountability and I don’t know if all kids are up to the task or if they would be comfortable with it, so brick and mortar isn’t going anywhere in the near future.

I would love this option even for my middle schooler. I homeschooled her in fifth grade and she loved taking online courses with my guidance. She has a laptop at her school now but I think it’s mostly just used for educational games. I think they start using them for class work in seventh.

Since the point of the standard model of high school at this point is pretty much to pass standardized tests, this can easily be done online. This may or may not be particularly beneficial to those who would be in danger of suspension, expulsion, arrest for behavioral reasons at school. It may also be a good alternative to those who want an alternative to the more structured setting of the school itself.

Given some of the advances that have been made in online classes through lots of trial and error, I’m sure it’s possible to have some good online classes set up. Of course you have the usual risks of not having face-to-face collaboration, not as direct access to the teacher, etc. that are usually associated with online courses, these may or may not outweigh the benefits for some students.

Now do I think it’s ideal for high school aged children from a developmental perspective? Perhaps in moderation, but mostly no. But that’s a completely different thread.

I (sort of) had an online class my senior year (20 years ago). Actually, they called it “distance learning,” I think. The class was an elective (Music Theory). The way it worked was that the half-dozen of us in the class sat in the classroom with the teacher at another school (with her “other” students). It worked pretty well, but there was definitely some jackassery that went on (we knew which camera angles she had, so we dicked around a bit). It helped that most of us were reasonably mature (and already somewhat socialized… kind of…I was a nerd/jock, surrounded by pure nerds and goths).

I think the socialization element is an important aspect of high school. Having kids just do a class from the dark recesses of their bedroom at home isn’t likely to contribute much to people with social skills.

I don’t know, and you can quote me on that.

The reason I don’t know, is that I am all too aware that anything can be done right, and anything can be done wrong.

Done well, home schooling can be excellent. Done wrong, it’s a guarantee of an ignorant, possibly propagandized child.

I remember when the idea was first proposed, to use the internet to allow business employees to work from home. All the major corporations first assumption was, “if the manager can’t see them working, those damn employees will just hang around and watch TV all day.”

I worked at IBM back then. I saw first hand, the fears, and I saw up close, what actually happened. At first, the company seemed to add more big meetings, sort of to provide spot-checks, that everyone still owned white shirts and ties.

But then the various reports started to come in. And to their surprise, they found that people who worked from home, tended to work longer hours, and work harder and more productively than the ones who came into the office, precisely because they didn’t have to do forty-seven things in order to be ABLE to get to the office.

The idea that productivity would suffer from working at home, rapidly switched to management looking for every opportunity they could, to eliminate the need for office visits.

The key was, setting up a work-from-home STRUCTURE that made it impossible to fake that the work was occurring.

Now, I don’t know whether there is a way to prevent people from only pretending to learn. They managed it even in the days of rigidly monitored classrooms, so I have no idea what exactly to do.
I do know one thing for sure, though, learned from the business world.

If your only goal is to “save money,” as it seems to be with the opening post, where the school system is only turning to online schooling to avoid paying for school buildings and equipment, then you plan will fail.

Schooling has to have successful learning as the goal. Not holding expenses down.

I’m all for computer classes in school. I am against cutting even more funding to public schools.