Campus Technology

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Current News

A Cyber-Glimmer of Hope in the Rust Belt

11/19/2003

By Terry Calhoun

WPCCS mostly serves home-schooled learners who represent a range of students. Quite a few have medical, disciplinary, or other kinds of problems that make attending a physical school difficult, and many simply made the choice to learn online. Some high school students take as many as three courses at a time from a half-dozen community colleges through WPCCS, in addition to their regular high school curriculum. About half of the students are of high school age, but the range g'es right down to kindergarten. Enrolled students receive computer hardware and software and Internet connectivity through licensed vendors, and supplies like textbooks directly from the cyber school.

What makes the school a success for the students and families is its high-tech, high-touch focus on customer service and learning. The staff includes technicians and administrators, but also tutors, layers of instructional supervisors, and others who are on tap for students and parents via phone and e-mail (WebMail). A requirement of the school is that each student and a parent conduct a weekly progress status conversation with WPCCS staff. Students have a choice of curricula and the school has recently implemented Blackboard. I spoke with one instructional supervisor, Randy Calhoun, who is a thirty-year retiree from the East Liverpool School District. He says that for a veteran teacher like himself, "the constant flow of phone calls and e-mails with parents and students brings an entirely new and very satisfying perspective to the relationship between students and their school." He also notes that the school organizes some real world activities, such as visits to cultural centers, in order to satisfy specific curriculum requirements.

What makes the school a success for Midland is its revenue generation, as state funding for students - based on state dollars that their home school system would otherwise receive - flows into Midland. Exact numbers weren't available to me, but from just common knowledge, that's probably an average of several thousand dollars per student per year, for more than 2,000 students in a town that only has a few more than 3,000 residents. It's no wonder that the local millage for the Midland School District has gone down three years in a row. And it is a wonderful thing that without the expense of bricks and mortar, the WPCCS playing a growing role in the area's economy and has become the largest local employer.

What d'es all this mean for folks in higher education? Well, as I said at the beginning, these 2,000+ students are spending a lot of time in cyberspace, and they're doing it with involvement from both parents and teachers - a situation unlike the cyberspace experience of most K-12 students. I expect that by the time they graduate from high school, these students will be a little better-behaved online than their peers.

Further, students like these are going to reach us on campus with expectations about course delivery and level of customer service that have been shaped by a high-tech, high-touch online K-12 experience. If you factor in these students' expectations with related news stories like the one about Primrose School Franchising Company providing laptops to three-year-olds at its 120 locations - that's right, toddlers, basically - it is evidence once more that we have still only seen the tip of the information technology transformation iceberg in higher education.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

• Campus Technology |
• Education Plaza |
• EduHound |
• T.H.E. Journal

Copyright 1998-2008 1105 Media Inc.. See our Privacy Policy