Here is the answer to a comment you made on my blog about my PLE 11 months ago:

http://sarah-stewart.blogspot.com/2009/04/my-ple-2009.html

At TCS we have and amazing mix of young learners from an amazing mix of backgrounds. There are some learners who thrive in the distance environment and would definitely be worse off if they’d stayed where they were (where they were before they enrolled at TCS that is).

We have learners that really don’t want to learn – they are a problem! Aren’t they always?

We have learners who have no choice but to be enrolled with TCS, because of isolation, of health reasons or some other reason that excludes them from a F2F school.

Almost without exception our young learners do best where there is good parental support. I’m not saying that there aren’t some learners who would learn despite everything, for they exist too – they are young saints .

Though I’d not be popular to say this in the company of some educators, the most important factor for the learner is their home support – and that applies to F2F schools too. Next comes the learner, then follows the school and teacher. Some learners will learn despite home background and despite the school but they are very rare and tend to be extremely driven from within – I have only met a few in all my teaching career.

Thanks for the link and mention of my post about the e-learning myths .

Catchya

There are quite a few large k-12 DL programs in BC; Surrey Connect and Nechako’s EBus being two of the biggest. One of my school’s challenges is that we are fairly small, I think our FTE for gr 8 -12 is 60 students. On the positive side of things we are a geographically small district so most of our kids are able to come into the school on a regular basis. Being small does make it hard though to give all the specialized attention that we’d like; I’m working 0.5 and cover all of the math and science for grades 8 and up while my colleague works 0.6 and covers all of the humanities courses for 8 and up.

Regarding technology, I do utilize Elluminate Live to connect with the kids once a week and we have a weekly on site face-to-face session. I also use Elluminate Live on an ad hoc basis; if a student phones me with a math question we usually go to the Elluminate room and work out the question on the whiteboard. I try to keep good e-mail contact with the students and we post course “deadlines” in Google calendar so the students and their parents can see ideally where they should be in each of their courses. This is helping many students overcome the challenges that you outlined above.

Thanks for your comments and for pushing my thinking!

I was intrigued to discover a growing number of students in the DL program also experience challenges with their learning. Having taken Distance Education classes, I can attest to how challenging it is; one needs to be self-disciplined and well-organized in order to stay on top of assignments and projects. Perhaps technology can be part of the solution; for example using tools such as Skype combined with tools that allow you to demonstrate ideas in writing (particularly in subjects like math) can help.

I would be interested to see any research being done in k-12 DL programs with regards to this issue.