high school Internet courses; from NY Times today

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August 2, 2005

Online Classes Offer Virtual Dissection, but Gym Still Takes Sweat

By SAM DILLON

MINNEAPOLIS - The nation's public schools are rushing to reconfigure scores of

traditional courses from basic composition to calculus so students can take

them via the Internet. One of the unlikely new offerings in this vast

experiment is online gym.

 

Sound like an oxymoron? Not in Minneapolis, where a physical education course

joined the school district's growing online catalog in the spring and already

has a waiting list.

 

"I've never seen a response like this to any course," said Frank Goodrich, a

veteran football coach who is one of two instructors teaching online physical

education this summer to about 60 high school students.

 

The course allows students to meet requirements by exercising how they want,

when they want. They are required to work out hard for 30 minutes four times a

week and report to their teachers by e-mail. Parents must certify that the

students did the workouts.

 

One recent day, after Dustin McEvoy lifted weights, Sasha Hulsey swam in a lake

and Marc Sylvestre played hockey, they sent in reports with details on their

warm-ups, cool-downs and how fast their hearts had beat. Mr. Goodrich,

reviewing their e-mail messages on his laptop the next morning, said that

although most students were sticking to their required routines, a few slackers

were headed toward F's.

 

Physical education is one of 27 online courses now offered by the Minneapolis

Public Schools, which had none four years ago. Thousands of other districts

nationwide are adding online courses, said Susan Patrick, director of

educational technology at the federal Department of Education.

 

"We're seeing just tremendous growth," Ms. Patrick said, "in enrollments and in

the kinds of courses offered."

 

In a survey, the department estimated that there were 328,000 student

enrollments in online courses offered by public schools during the 2002-3 year.

Ms. Patrick said enrollments had probably doubled since then.

 

Many districts, including Minneapolis, are writing their own Internet courses,

and more than a dozen states have established virtual schools to supply courses

to brick-and-mortar schools. Some schools are buying online courses from

commercial vendors, the survey showed.

 

Districts providing specialized courses - macroeconomics, say, or astrophysics

- are choosing to offer the courses online instead of hiring on-site

instructors to teach handfuls of students. Offering online versions of basic

courses required for graduation is also a way to make room for electives in

crowded classroom schedules.

 

The Illinois Virtual School offers 90 online courses, including about 16

Advanced Placement offerings. One of the most popular online courses is

consumer education, which teaches checkbook management. The course is required

by the state for graduation, but many students have had trouble fitting it into

their schedules, Matthew Wicks, the school's director, said.

 

Physical education is not the only course that seems an odd fit for Internet

study. Take Advanced Placement biology. The College Board's recommended

syllabus for the course includes 12 rigorous laboratory exercises, known among

educators as the dirty dozen.

 

Virtual High School, a cooperative based in Massachusetts that offers online

courses to more than 300 member schools in 28 states, offers an online Advanced

Placement biology course that covers laboratory lessons through computer

simulations, including a virtual dissection of a pig, said Liz Pape, who runs

the school.

 

"It's so neat that you can learn everything you need to know about dissection

without the formaldehyde smell," Ms. Pape said.

 

Still, some committed online educators remain unconvinced. Tim Snyder, the

executive director of Colorado Online Learning, which offers more than 50

online courses to Colorado schools, included physical education with studio

art, marching band and the laboratory sciences as subjects best left to

brick-and-mortar schools.

 

"These are still better experienced in a hands-on setting," Dr. Snyder said.

 

But online gym has prospered. That has been possible in part because physical

education itself has evolved. Once a highly regimented class centered on team

sports and competition, physical education now emphasizes healthy living and

personal fitness, topics some see as eminently suited for independent Internet

study.

 

One of the first schools to offer physical education online, in 1997, was

Florida Virtual School. It is now the nation's largest public online school,

with 21,000 students taking at least one course. Personal fitness, the online

version of the state's physical education requirement, was the school's most

popular course last year, attracting 4,500 students. (Second-most popular was

economics, with 2,400 students.)

 

Some students, including a blind teenager in Miami and a student in Melbourne,

Fla., who was recovering from a kidney transplant, signed up because their

health problems prevented their taking regular gym classes, said Jo Wagner, one

of Florida Virtual's lead instructors. But Ms. Wagner said most students took

the course to free their schedules for foreign languages and other electives at

their traditional schools.

 

The same pattern holds in Minneapolis, where Abbie Modaff, a sophomore, is

taking her second semester of online gym this summer. The daughter of

self-described "strugglingly middle-class" parents, she signed up last spring

to open time in a schedule snarled with English, Latin, biology, world studies

and advanced mathematics classes, not to mention horseback lessons, soccer

games and concert band.

 

This summer, Abbie has been training for a triathlon, so she has e-mailed

reports on swimming, biking and jogging workouts to her instructor, Tamara

Cowan, who is teaching online gym to 31 Minneapolis students this summer from a

friend's home in Sacramento.

 

"When I'm not feeling like I'm about to die, running can be incredibly good,"

Ms. Modaff wrote to Ms. Cowan in one workout journal in July.

 

Last spring, when Ms. Modaff sought to use her horseback rides to fulfill some

workout requirements, Mr. Goodrich balked. But using a heart monitor, Ms.

Modaff documented that her pulse frequently surged to a pounding 170 beats per

minute as she flexed her legs and torso to guide her horse through a dressage

course. Mr. Goodrich assented.

 

"She showed us that her heart rate was elevated, and her muscle strength was

improving," he said.

 

Because the class has faced much questioning, the district issues heart

monitors, requiring that students send pulse data to teachers and that parents

sign the workout reports.

 

Mr. Goodrich and Ms. Cowan are also on the lookout for cheats. Mr. Goodrich

recently sat on his couch in sweat pants and a T-shirt, and, peering into the

screen of his Macintosh, signed on to the school district's Web site. He found

31 student e-mail messages documenting recent workouts. There was also a

message from a student who pleaded the equivalent of "my dog ate my homework."

 

"I have just got back in town for three days and then I will be gone for three

days," the student wrote to Mr. Goodrich. "I am trying to get as much work done

as possible. Thanks."

 

Mr. Goodrich checked the student's preliminary grades and found she was

hopelessly behind with her assignments. He would send her a warning, he said,

and predicted she would fail the course.

 

About 20 percent of the students dropped out of online gym in the spring, said

Jan Braaten, the district's lead physical education instructor.

 

"Even though we told them it would be as hard as or harder than traditional

P.E., some thought it was going to be a cakewalk," Ms. Braaten said.

 

Even the course's author, Brenda Corbin, who writes curriculums for the

Minneapolis district, was dismissive at first.

 

"I refused to be a part of it," Ms. Corbin said of her initial reaction a year

ago, when Ms. Braaten and district administrators approached her about writing

the physical education course.

 

"How do you know they're really working out?" Ms. Corbin said she asked.

 

But she later changed her mind. "I was uninformed about what you can do over

the computer," she said.

 

Renee Jesness, the district's online learning coordinator, said she frequently

encountered skepticism about proposals to recast traditional courses for study

online. But critics often reconsider when they learn how creative the online

courses can be, Ms. Jesness said.

 

Even at a time of budget cuts, the Minneapolis district is adding online

courses about as fast as curriculum writers can create them, Ms. Jesness said.

 

"We're in think-tank mode, while the rest of public education is in triage,"

she said.