Summary
In this paper we have described the theoretical and practical frameworks that led to the establishment of a virtual high school in Israel. After a year of activity, there are clear indications that the Virtual School based on the model of a cooperative of schools has a place in the Israeli educational system. The teachers who graduated from the course have succeeded in creating interesting courses for students, while marketing the framework to students and their parents in the schools has gone well and even aroused enthusiasm. Additional schools are asking to join the cooperative. Nonetheless, the work remains great: We have to form a system of quality control for products; continue development of the technological environment so that it will be rapid, faithful and enabling; and especially examine and follow up on the learning of students and their ability to concentrate in this framework.
Similarly, we have to examine questions of various types: organizational-economic, pedagogic, and social, such as scalability of the model, its economic stability, methods of operation in the actual schools, and the manner of absorbing virtual learning in them. We have to relate to and test the styles of the developed courses (from the core curricula or as enrichment courses), determine for which types of students this framework is appropriate, discover if we can create an additional system for learning via the Internet, and ascertain if the activities integrated in the various courses are appropriate to pedagogic and educational ideas and make intelligent use of the Inernet for teaching and learning needs. In addition, and especially for Israel, we have to relate to the question of social gaps and examine if it is possible to reduce them through the model of the Virtual School.
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Mittelman, T. The establishment of a virtual high school in Israel. ETR&D 49, 84–93 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02504512
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02504512