This is the abstract of our presentation to the EDEN DLE 2024 Annual Conference “Learning in the Age of AI: Towards Imaginative Futures“, to be held in Graz, Austria, 16-18 June 2024, now accepted by the conference committee.
The abstract will also be helpful to potential authors considering submitting a paper on virtual schools to the Special Issue of the MDPI open access Journal Education Sciences on “Virtual Schools for K-12 Education: Lessons Learned and Implications for Digital K-12 and Other Sectors of Education” where myself, Professor Sara de Freitas and Dr Bieke Schreurs are co-Guest Editors. See especially points 3 and 4 below.
Abstract
This presentation and associated paper describes interim results from a small ongoing study project involving experts on virtual schools and virtual universities.
The fundamental question the study asks is:
- Why is the education sector (schools in particular) not learning lessons (resilience, LMS use, etc.) from the growing community of virtual schools?
This question is best answered by splitting the answering process into several more detailed objectives:
- To understand the reasons why so many overview reports – e.g. OECD (2023) and European Commission (2024) – largely ignore virtual schools (VISCED 2011, Open Education Wiki 2024) and the positive implications of their practice for the wider education sector. Since one of the key reasons seems to be the custom for such overview reports to focus primarily on research literature rather than grey literature, this leads to the need for #2 below.
- To scope and understand better the research community that is generating research material on virtual schools (articles in peer-reviewed journals, and monographs), in order to understand the degree to which it interpenetrates the “conventional” education research community, especially at elite (and thus opinion-forming) levels. Investigations so far suggest that the research community looking at virtual schools is very small especially outside the US (Johnson et al 2023) – this in turn leads to #3 below.
- To develop ways by which more case studies of individual virtual schools and groups of them can be generated, suitable for publication in research journals. This relates to theme 2 on nestedness and integration. However, to avoid “false negatives”, a check has to be done to make sure that there are not virtual schools “hiding in plain sight”. This leads to #4.
- To investigate the full range of virtual schools: full-time (essentially replacing a f2f school), part-time (“supplemental virtual school”) teaching one or more subjects online to students at a f2f school, both visible (e.g. a separate organisation or visible department) and invisible (a group within a school teaching some subjects online to students in other schools).
The fundamental question can be split also by considering:
- Which subsectors of the education sector have the most to learn from virtual schools?
Initial considerations suggest that the university sector (f2f or online) will be reluctant to learn from virtual schools. Our contention is that the most promising area is upper secondary schools (grades 11-12 in many countries). The paper will look at a case study in a particular country (Sixth Form providers in United Kingdom/England) where upper secondary is a liminal zone with aspects of both school-level and tertiary-level education.
This case study leads on to a further but related issue
- What aspects of how universities run (especially online universities) could be usefully adopted by the schools sector? This also relates to the issue of whether a country should have unified IT support for all education providers – on the whole countries do not, but NRENs often take a more unified approach (GÉANT 2023).
This will encompass areas including group and regional procurement, LMS selection and use, AI use, and staff training/certification.
Authors
The authors of this paper are:
- Dr Paul Bacsich, Matic Media Ltd
- Charlotte Doody, Matic Media Ltd
- Jonathan Lloyd, The Pilgrims’ School
- Dr Margaret Korosec, University of Leeds
Opening up learning 