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Summary

Courses offered primarily over the Internet-netcourses-will have a tremendous impact on precollege education. Educators searching for meaningful applications of the Internet have used networking primarily for reference and for short educational activities. Netcourses are the next logical step for those seeking to integrate technology and learning. Netcourses will expand schools' course offerings; allow teachers to offer specialized and non-core classes; serve as alternatives for home-schoolers and non-traditional students; and bring learners, teachers, and resources from all parts of the world together. The Concord Consortium has made a major commitment to developing and offering netcourses with its INTEC and Virtual High School (VHS) projects. INTEC (the International Netcourse Teacher Enhancement Coalition) is an extensive teacher professional development effort that addresses ways of incorporating student learning through inquiry in math and science high school instruction. The VHS project is a $7.4 million Technology Challenge Grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education. It is a cooperative of over 30 high schools that are creating and sharing innovative, asynchronous netcourses across the country and around the world. Over 500 students are enrolled in VHS netcourses for the 1997/98 school year.

Other educators have also begun to create "virtual" or "cyber" schools that offer online courses to students. The design, delivery, and intent of these courses vary greatly. This article, the second in a series, is a critical review of the various kinds of secondary online courses. This is an exciting area to research as most of these schools are quite new and in the pilot stages of development. There is wide diversity in the use of the term "virtual school." It is sometimes used to encompass courses that use only live and interactive video, while other times it is used to describe a traditional course that simply uses the Web for posting homework assignments. This article will concentrate specifically on reviewing courses, seminars, or modules that are delivered primarily online using the Internet.

Most of the preliminary research for this article was done over the Internet. We searched for keywords in the major search engines, and followed links from education al Web sites and other virtual school sites. We have tried to be comprehensive; the virtual schools and netcourses profiled are all that we turned up after a fairly thorough survey. After looking through project Web sites we attempted to contact and interview staff from each of the schools to verify the information that was found there. While every effort was made to be as thorough as possible, there are undoubtedly schools and courses that we have missed in our research, and projects that we could not get in touch with.

We found that while there is, of course, some overlap, most netcourses fall into one of three broad categories. We have defined these categories by the types of communication and interaction used in a netcourse's structure, because the kind of communication used strongly influences the educational strategies used. Virtual courses are based on either asynchronous or synchronous communication, and are either unscheduled with little or no peer interaction (such as a self-paced independent study courses) or scheduled with more focus on group interactions (such as online group seminars). Therefore, we have placed netcourses into one of three categories: unscheduled asynchronous, scheduled asynchronous, or fully synchronous. These three categories are described fully in the sections that follow. Whether scheduled or unscheduled, the current majority of online courses are asynchronous, although many of these also mix some synchronous technologies into their course designs. Both scheduling conflicts (especially across districts and time zones) and bandwidth limitations currently make it difficult for a virtual school to operate primarily in a synchronous mode. Rapidly improving technology may soon enable more schools to use synchronous technologies, but these technologies will not solve scheduling problems. Some of the most exciting possibilities of the virtual classroom are found in asynchronous features such as the time- and place-free ability to connect students and teachers from around the world. For this reason, we have focused our research on asynchronous netcourses, although several synchronous programs are profiled below.

Most netcourses at this time are designed as independent study courses adapted to an online environment. These courses are described in the Unscheduled Asynchronous Netcourses section. Fewer courses are designed to be taken together by a group of collaborative learners as occurs in a traditional classroom. These courses are reviewed in the Scheduled Asynchronous Netcourses section. Because of bandwidth limitations, a still smaller number use real time audio, video, and other synchronous technologies, as discussed in the Fully Synchronous Netcourses section.

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