Clicking through classes.

• Author: Andrade, Jane Carroll
• Position: Cover Story

Moving can be stressful for any teenager. But when 15-year-old Kaitlyn Parrott began high school near her new home in Lee County, Fla., she was traumatized to the point of losing the will to live.

"It was a nightmare from day one," said her mother, Lynn Parrott.

The new school didn't measure up academically, it couldn't accommodate Kaitlyn's learning disorder along with her high IQ, and she was harassed by classmates.

Although Lynn Parrott had always been opposed to the "isolating" experience of home schooling, out of desperation she pulled Kaitie out of her new school and enrolled her in the Florida Virtual School. To her surprise, she found that although Kaitlyn takes all of her classes over the Internet from a home computer, she is getting "an entire educational experience."

Kaitlyn is one of thousands of students nationwide opting to take some or all of their courses online. A study released in March by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics estimates that there were 328,000 enrollments in distance education courses among students regularly enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools in 2002-03. (The study measured course enrollments as opposed to students, so students enrolled in multiple courses were counted for each course.)

According to Susan Patrick, director of the Office of Educational Technology for the U.S. Department of Education, 15 states provide virtual schools, "and that number is rising." Furthermore, sire says, there is some sort of e-learning taking place in 25 percent of schools nationwide.

ONLINE DEFINED

Online education--also referred to as e-learning and virtual learning--falls under the larger category of distance learning, meaning students and teachers are in different locations. Virtual or cyber schools refer to the entities that deliver instruction, often over the Internet, but also through two-way video conferencing. E-learning can be synchronous, where students work with a teacher and possibly other students in "real time," or asynchronous, where students work at their own pace on their own time.

"The virtual school world is a fast-growing new phenomenon," says Mickey Revenaugh, vice president of state relations for Connections Academy, a private company that contracts with public schools, charter schools and school districts in eight states to provide a full virtual curriculum for students in kindergarten through ninth grade.

Revenaugh attributes the increase in virtual learning to three trends: the increasing sophistication of technologgy, which helps personalize learning; the trend toward school choice and the popularity of charter schools; and the increase in the number of families choosing home schooling because they want a more individualized approach for their child.

Advocates of online education tout that individualized approach as a key reason many parents, students and schools are going the virtual route. A July 2004 Department of Education report on virtual schools cites enhanced communication between teachers and students and the ability to accommodate different learning styles as potential benefits to online learning.

"A virtual classroom meets the needs of individual students much more than in a traditional classroom," says Revenaugh.

Julie Young, executive director of Florida Virtual School--the largest statewide, publicly funded virtual school in the nation with 21,000 students agrees. She says that students, in essence, have a teacher to themselves. They can ask questions or discuss issues one on one with their teachers--via email, telephone and other means--without fear of embarrassment.

"We find that the student who sat in the hack of the classroom and never said a word in class will come alive in the online environment," she says.

Another advantage, she adds, is that students can work when they're at their peak...