education week sr global e-learning 2-1-2012

A Supplement to the February 1, 2012, Issue Vol. 31 • No. 19Education WEEk

A Special Report on K-12 Educational Technology > www.edweek.org/go/elearning-global

Virtual WORLD of

Learning> E-Learning Is Evolving

Around the Globe, Prompting U.S. Schools To Forge International Partnerships

2 U.S. Schools Forge Foreign Connections

6 Linking Open Content

9 Teaching Goes Global

12 U.S. Firms Court Global Clients

6 AFRICA: Mobile Devices Address Equity Issues

10 CANADA: A Different Approach to Virtual Education

Canadian Ed. Dips Into For-Profit Realm 10

13 CHINA: Partnerships With U.S. Schools Break Down Walls

Quality Concerns Slow E-Learning Growth in China 14

15 EUROPE: Leading the Way In Hand-Held Computing

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On-DemanD WeBInaR: e-LeaRnIng gOes gLOBaLRegister for this webinar to learn more from international experts about how e-learning is bringing new resources, master teachers, and an awareness of life in other countries to students around the globe. Online learning through mobile phones, tablets, and e-readers, among other forms of technology, is making e-learning international. FeatuReD guests: AllisOn POwell, vice president, state and district services, international Association for K-12 Online learning (inACOl), and RObeRt sPielvOgel, chief technology officer, education Development Center, a nonprofit development agency.

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AMichigan school district has set up virtual and physical exchange programs with students and teachers in China, providing unprecedented opportunities to share content and teachers and bridge cultural

differences. On the continent of Africa, the use of mobile technologies and online content is gaining steam as a way to overcome some countries’ most significant education hurdles, including isolated rural settings and lack of technological infrastructure, challenges familiar to many communities in the United States, too. In Canada, education officials have taken a different approach to virtual education from that of the United States, setting up more centralized and standardized e-learning systems within their provinces while shying away, for the most

part, from using private companies to provide content and teachers for online courses.

The United States has many lessons it can learn from how other countries are deploying virtual education and how it might partner up with those countries in different ways to offer a wider range of educational and cultural experiences to its students. This report, part of Education Week’s ongoing series on virtual education, draws out many of those lessons to be learned from other countries and highlights some of the more distinctive virtual education partnerships emerging between schools in the United States and those outside its borders, while noting the difficulties that arise for educators and schools when taking on such initiatives.

to view previous special reports in this series, go to www.edweek.org/go/elearning-series.

2 U.S. Schools Forge Foreign Connections

6 Linking Open Content

9 Teaching Goes Global

12 U.S. Firms Court Global Clients

6 AFRICA: Mobile Devices Address Equity Issues

10 CANADA: A Different Approach to Virtual Education

Canadian Ed. Dips Into For-Profit Realm 10

13 CHINA: Partnerships With U.S. Schools Break Down Walls

Quality Concerns Slow E-Learning Growth in China 14

15 EUROPE: Leading the Way In Hand-Held Computing

President & editor- in-ChiefVirginia B. edwards

exeCutiVe editorGregory Chronister

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COvEr

Students at Ningbo Secondary School in China’s Zhejiang province (shown on

the computer screen) ask questions of teenagers in teacher Fan Li’s

Chinese-language class at Oxford High School in Oxford, Mich. The January teleconference, which was the class’s

first with its Chinese counterparts, saw both groups performing and

conversing in Chinese and English.

Photo by Brian Widdisfor Education Week

ABOUT THIS rEPOrT

Global Lessons

From left, Rachel Quansah, 9, shari Jules, 10, and ahmad mahmood, 9, work on reader-response assignments at Discovery Public school in maple, Ontario.

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n By rOBIN L. FLANIgAN

Ninth graders at the 2,300-student South Plantation High School in Plantation, Fla., were in a video-conference with Egyptian students and journalists last year when President Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Both the Americans and the Egyptians were in awe, clapping and

laughing and sharing in a moment of global impor-tance.

“All of a sudden, our students understood what freedom is, what a democracy means, how fortunate they are to be where they are, and how people have to struggle to get to that level,” said Donna Rose, the director of the school’s valor Freshman Academy, the academic program for the school’s 500 9th graders. “In a heartbeat, they changed their view of humanity. How could I have done that on my own?”

Across the United States, students are teaming up with classrooms around the world, using videoconfer-encing equipment, social media, and other technolo-gies to learn about current events, historic milestones, economic trends, and cultural norms. Educators say the collaborations, which lend themselves to co-cur-ricular projects, foster deep and meaningful conversa-tions, whet a thirst for knowledge that textbooks can-not offer, and show that people in different countries have a lot more in common than many assume.

Educators note that no matter what countries American students are paired with, the same teenage topics seem to come up as they get to know each other during formal class discussions: dating, sex, family, music, and clothes.

And they point out that the poor technological con-nections between countries, the dropped calls, and the broken translations teach patience and perseverance even as they pose logistical problems for the partner-ships themselves. At the same time, educators say the authentic relationships that form between students from different cultures tend to turn them into more independent thinkers with higher levels of tolerance and compassion.

“It’s really easy to hate what you don’t know,” said Lisa Nielsen, an international speaker on innovative education and the co-author of Teaching Generation Text, published in 2011 by Jossey-Bass Teacher. “In the future, I think there are going to be big changes in the way countries are defined, because people around the world are going to be connecting and bonding with each other in a way that doesn’t involve places, but their ideas and passions.”

Ms. Rose has noticed a rise in the academic per-formance of each freshman class at South Planta-tion High School, particularly with critical-think-

ing skills, since she started partnering with other countries five years ago. Students have spoken with earthquake survivors in Haiti, widows in Afghanistan, and indentured servants in Pakistan.

This school year, they’re connecting regularly with a school in Nagoya, Japan, and with students in a Yemeni refugee camp. (Sensitive to requests from Yemen, South Plantation students make sure there are no high-tech gadgets on their desks and nothing too ornate in the classroom within view of the refu-gees, because they don’t want to make them feel de-prived.)

“We are an urban school with a high minority popu-lation,” said Ms. Rose, “and this is how we expose our students to the world.”

CONNECTINg CULTUrES

For the same reasons but in a far different en-vironment, social studies teacher Suzie Nestico oversees a project that involves 14 schools and nearly 400 students in Australia, Canada, Eng-land, Germany, South Korea, and the United States. She teaches students in grades 10 through12 at the 900-student Mount Carmel Area High School in Mount Carmel, Pa.

“We’re a small, rural town of 6,000 with ultra-con-servative family values and viewpoints, and most of our students have never gone anywhere else,” said Ms. Nestico, the project manager for the Flat Class-room Project, an international collaborative effort that links classrooms around the globe. She also built a course called 21st Century Global Studies that started this academic year. The course is for stu-dents in grades 10 through 12 who, through project- and inquiry-based assignments such as editing wiki pages, learn that working collaboratively with other cultures—an increasingly marketable skill—can be challenging.

“It’s a big shift for them to go from ‘me’ to ‘we,’ ” she said. “I can’t help but think that the more kids we in-volve in projects like this, the more we start to break down some of this sense of entitlement” that exists among students in the United States.

“Just imagine if you wrote 200 words on your wiki page, and when you went back the next day, you saw that students in Korea had changed a couple of your sentences because they thought it sounded better another way,” Ms. Nestico said. “There are a lot of sighs at first, and it’s a messy process, but it’s very much worth doing. This is where we truly push learning to the highest level.”

Some lessons have less to do with a final grade than with understanding that a simple phrase in one culture can easily be misperceived in another.

U.S. Schools Forge Foreign Connections

American students are teaming up online with classrooms

around the world to learn valuable

lessons

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When a student in California posted an online request last sum-mer for information about a “flash mob,” for example, a teacher from Germany immediately jumped in to write that European students couldn’t even talk about such a thing because of the London riots. And two years ago, during an education-related trip to Mumbai, India, Ms. Nestico had to nix any exclamatory T-shirts that might offend the local residents, such as “Holy cow!,” because cows are con-sidered sacred animals in India.

‘Just liKe us’

Troy Tenhet, a 6th grade teacher for the 650-student Bill L. Wil-liams Elementary School in Ba-kersfield, Calif., turned to ePals to link his classroom with those in Iceland, Norway, and Singapore. The ePals social-learning net-work joins more than half a mil-lion classrooms in more than 200 countries and territories.

When Iceland’s most active vol-cano began erupting in May 2011, Mr. Tenhet’s students heard about the devastation firsthand from children their own age through email exchanges. And a haiku-poetry swap with peers in Norway evolved organically into a lesson on patriotic symbols.

“They realized that, hey, there are kids all over the world that are just like us,” Mr. Tenhet said. “All of a sudden, everything mat-ters more.”

The day after Haiti’s massive earthquake in January 2010, Me-lissa McMullan, who teaches Eng-lish and social studies to grades 6 through 8 at the 900-student John F. Kennedy Middle School in Port Jefferson, N.Y., found herself un-able to get her students to focus on an upcoming state exam. They kept interrupting with questions about the catastrophe, and no amount of redirection got them back on track for long.

Ms. McMullan went home that night and, struck by the anguish she saw on the evening news, de-cided to adjust her strategy.

“I believe strongly that what-ever you need to teach kids can be taught in the context of what they’re interested in,” she said.

With backing from her principal and help from other faculty mem-bers, she constructed an interdis-ciplinary unit of study centered around Haiti and the earthquake. She set up partnerships with

people who traveled frequently to Haiti; ran a shoe-collection drive for orphans; and flew to the rav-aged country to deliver the dona-tions. She stayed only 18 hours, but used Skype, a Web-based vid-eoconferencing service, to intro-duce her students to the orphans they were helping.

“That was the moment,” Ms. McMullan said of her inspiration to launch what would become the nonprofit organization Wings Over Haiti. So far, the group has shipped at least 1.5 tons of do-nated shoes, clothing, and toilet-ries to Haiti. Students do all of the packing, weighing, and invoicing.

‘MAKe A DiffeRenCe’

Ms. McMullan’s students even helped open a school in Haiti, with 43 students in kindergarten and 1st grade, in October 2010. They wrote job-interview questions, watched the interviews via video, helped hire the school’s three teachers, and started a meal pro-gram to feed every student at the school two meals a day.

Eighth grader Gianna Bottona organized a car wash to help the fledgling school buy a satellite dish. Her family also has started sponsoring a 4-year-old Haitian girl, whose pictures are all over the family’s house.

“It gives you an outlook that no matter what your size is, or who you are, you can make a differ-ence,” she said. “It’s an indescrib-able feeling knowing that every time you see those kids smile, it’s because of you. It’s almost selfish, really. When you help them, you’re helping yourself.”

She and her classmates use Skype to keep in touch with the Haitian students, and password-protected cloud-computing rooms to post files and pictures and set up conference calls.

As a result, new connections are being made within JFK Middle School’s walls as well. Ms. McMul-lan has her students collaborating regularly with eight special educa-tion students she’d never met be-fore the earthquake. “There was something about reaching way beyond us that allowed us to work much better in the building,” she said.

Ms. McMullan travels to Haiti once a month these days. The relationships between students continue to strengthen—and that means that some tragedies far away now hit closer to home than before. One student at the Haitian school recently died of starvation.

“When you see those things happen, it makes it much harder to judge somebody because they don’t have the right shoes or they aren’t good at lacrosse,” Ms. Mc-Mullan said. “It puts things in perspective.” n

“ [The students] realized that, hey, there are kids all over the world that are just like us. All of a sudden, everything matters more.”

Troy TenheTTeacher, Bill L. Williams Elementary School, Bakersfield, Calif.

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s6 |

Linking Open

Content Initiatives in countries from South Africa to Vietnam are fueling the growth of open

educational resources

n By kATIE ASH

Open educational resources are claiming a place in schools in a diverse array of countries.

South Africa’s Education Department is printing math and science textbooks pro-duced from such resources for use in grades 10 through 12. In the Netherlands, the Min-istry of Education has developed a platform called Wikiwijs for employing open resources.

Vietnamese educators are translating such resources and creating their own to build a repository available for their country’s students.

“It’s interesting to watch this whole field of open education resources grow from embryonic to industry-challenging,” said Lisa Petrides, the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, a nonprofit research organization in Half Moon Bay, Calif., that created the oEr Commons, a repository of open education resources.

“In one sense, the field has gotten more competitive, but it’s also more exciting,” she said.

The Siyavula project, started with aid from the Durbanville, South Africa-based Shuttleworth Foundation, which supports open education efforts in that country, aims to build open cur-riculum for every grade in every subject in South African pri-mary and secondary schools.

Since 2007, Siyavula has compiled the contributions of hun-dreds of subject experts around the world to create open edu-cation textbooks for all grades. This year, the South African Department of Basic Education will be printing the Siyavula-created open textbooks in math and science for all 10th to 12th graders in the country.

The printed books look and feel the same as publisher-built textbooks, said Mark Horner, the manager of the Siyavula project, so it should be a smooth transition for South African teachers. There will also be online versions of the textbooks, with embedded links and videos, for teachers and students who have access to the Internet, he said.

“Many teachers don’t know how to start integrating technol-ogy into the classroom,” said Mr. Horner, “so this should give them some ideas.”

In fact, the real power of open education resources comes not

from the fact that they are free, he said, but from the ability to customize the resources.

“The real benefit is that educators can customize materials for the classroom, and we can then build a mega-repository of educational materials for all learning styles that educators can draw on in an instant,” Mr. Horner said.

All the textbooks made from the volunteers coordinated by Siyavula will always remain free, he said, and they can be ac-cessed through the Houston-based open education repository Connexions.

nAtiOnwiDe PlAtfORM

In 2008, the Dutch minister of education, Ronald Plasterk, announced a nationwide project that would create an open, Internet-based platform for teachers at all levels of educa-tion—from primary school to university—to be able to share, develop, and remix open education resources. The platform name, Wikiwijs, means “wikiwise” in English.

The platform was launched in 2009 with resources in math and languages at the primary, secondary, and community col-lege levels and has since expanded to include all other subjects and levels of education.

Jan-Bart de Vreede, the senior product manager for Wiki-wijs, said it has had an impact on the way teachers use cur-riculum in their classrooms.

“Teachers feel more empowered and become the ‘owner’ of their lessons again,” said Mr. de Vreede. “Rather than follow the book every week, it becomes much easier to take detours or create a completely different course altogether.”

Wikiwijs also allows teachers to find materials to differenti-ate instruction for students, he said.

However, challenges go hand in hand with using open edu-cation resources, said Mr. de Vreede. For instance, quality con-trol can be an issue.

“We try to get large education institutions to ‘recommend’ materials so that teachers have more indications of the kind of content they are dealing with,” Mr. de Vreede said. And mak-ing sure that the resources are tagged correctly so that they can be found easily is another challenge, he pointed out.

n By MICHELLE r. DAvIS

In Ghana, elementary-school-age chil-dren who have rarely seen more than a handful of books are now using e-readers to access whole libraries. In South Africa, students are text-chat-ting with math tutors by cellphone for help with their homework. And in Liberia, educators will soon use

electronic tablets to collect vital and accu-rate information about schools, students, and resources throughout the country.

On the continent of Africa, the use of mobile technology and online content in various forms is gaining steam as a way to bypass some countries’ most significant education hurdles, including rural settings, limited electricity, and a lack of educational resources. Experts say mobile technology—whether cellphones, laptops, MP3 play-ers, tablet computers, or e-readers—is likely to aid many African countries in making a leap in education that was im-

practicable not long ago.“The introduction of mobile technology

throughout Africa has helped countries to skip several steps in the development process, which could have been much more prolonged,” said Sandy Oleksy-Ojikutu, an education adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or usaid, which is funding many education projects using mobile technology in Africa.

“As people got used to using cellphones,” she said, “they got used to using mobile technology.”

Mobile-phone use in Africa is now outpac-ing that of Latin America, making Africa the second-largest mobile-phone market in the world behind Asia, according to a No-vember 2011 report released by the Lon-don-based Groupe Speciale Mobile Associa-tion, a consortium of global mobile-phone operators. Over the past 10 years, the num-ber of mobile connections in Africa grew an average of 30 percent a year, and the report predicted it would reach 735 million people

by the end of this year on a continent with about a billion people. Some experts say mobile phone growth has been spurred by the fact that cellphones are the cheapest digital tool available on a continent that lacks the infrastructure for higher band-width technologies.

The growth has drawn the attention of key players.

For example, usaid recently started an education mobile-phone initiative and last year hosted, in Bethesda, Md., the first International Symposium on Mobiles for Education for Development. The initiative aims to improve access to low-cost mobile technologies for education globally.

In addition, the Paris-based United Na-tions Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or unEsco, has launched a drive to see how mobile technology can support its Education for All initiative to provide every child worldwide with a free, high-quality education by 2015. Last year, unEsco established a three-year partner-

ship with the cellphone giant Nokia, to which the company will contribute up to $10 million to identify educational applica-tions for mobile technology.

“In Africa, it’s a situation where even at the best of schools and universities, com-puters are still fairly rare,” said Tim Kelly, the lead information and communication technologies specialist for InfoDev, a unit of the Washington-based World Bank. “Mo-bile phones are much more common and are increasingly starting to resemble com-puters.”

ACCess tO bOOKs, COnCePts

Mobile technology is opening up a world of books and academic concepts to stu-dents in Africa, providing teachers in rural schools with more professional develop-ment and support, and helping govern-ments gather vital statistics about their education systems.

AFRICA: Mobile Devices Address Equity Issues

| s7


Lastly, using open education re-sources takes more time and effort than using prepackaged materials, he said.

“Using oEr does not save time at first because the alternative is a closed book or digital course, which requires almost no work from the teacher to find, but requires money,” he said.

Implementing a project like this in the Netherlands has been suc-cessful so far, but developing coun-tries may run into other difficulties, such as a lack of technological infra-structure, said Mr. de Vreede.

glObAl COllAbORAtiOn

Anna Batchelder is the chief ex-ecutive officer and co-founder of Bon Education, an educational technol-ogy professional-development and consulting company based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her com-pany trains Middle Eastern teach-ers in how to access and use open education resources, thus opening the door to materials they otherwise could not afford, she said.

“OErs are bringing the interna-tional education community to-gether,” Ms. Batchelder said. “For example, a math teacher in Dubai can now easily see how teachers in other countries teach fractions, and vice versa.”

In addition, many of the oEr repositories, such as Curriki, an online community that focuses on

materials for K-12, and Peer 2 Peer University, or p2pu, which provides open-course materials for higher ed-ucation, offer platforms for teachers to discuss, debate, and collaborate, she said.

For example, Ms. Batchelder co-facilitated a course through p2pu about using Web 2.0 and social-me-dia tools to promote learning, a class that attracted educators from Abu Dhabi, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United States.

“It was wonderful to see the rich discussions that unfolded on p2pu and Skype as a result of bringing together people with such distinct pedagogical backgrounds,” she said.

But Ms. Batchelder echoed the concerns about open education re-sources outlined by Mr. de Vreede. Quality control and tagging the resources can be difficult, she said. Beyond that challenge, the vast ma-jority of open education resources are only available in English, she noted.

“We need to start encouraging teachers that speak other lan-guages to share their lessons, or translations of lessons, as well,” she said.

Many oEr projects, such as Con-nexions, which is an oEr repository created by Rice University, and the Khan Academy—a repository of thousands of educational vid-eos on math, science, history, and other subjects created by the hedge fund manager-turned-educator

Sal Khan—are actively seeking to translate materials into other lan-guages.

Translating resources is one of the main undertakings of the Vietnam Open Educational Resource proj-ect, or voEr, which aims to build a repository of educational resources to be used by the whole country. Minh Do, the program director for voEr, which is led by the Vietnam Foundation, based in Hanoi, said that project’s focus right now is on higher education.

Through the project, faculty mem-bers publish their courses online through the platform. Students taking the courses then update the open courseware and materials, based on their notes and experi-ences in the classroom.

“Developing countries like Viet-nam will get benefits from [the open education movement] as high-quality and up-to-date materials from well-known universities and research institutions in the devel-oped countries are free to use,” Mr. Do said.

“VoEr is very easy to use and very convenient. Everyone can use it, as there is almost no high-tech require-ment” besides basic computer skills, he said.

u.s. inteRest Rising

VoEr is a sister repository to the Houston-based Connexions, said Richard G. Baraniuk, the founder

and director of Connexions and a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineer-ing at Rice University.

Founded in 1999, Connexions hosts almost 20,000 resources used by about 2 million users each month.

One of the most powerful as-pects of the repository, said Mr. Baraniuk, is not necessarily the outreach of the project, but the types of contributions it receives.

“I’m interested in the ability for diverse contributions from people around the world and all walks of life to contribute material and have them get used in all kinds of educational contexts,” he said. “It adds a real diversity and extra di-mension to the resources.”

And although many open educa-tion resources are available to stu-dents and teachers in the United States, teaching from open edu-cation resources is not the norm, said Karen Fasimpaur, the presi-dent of K12 Handhelds Inc., a Por-tal, Ariz.-based education technol-ogy company, and an advocate for open education resources.

“OEr definitely started in higher education, but the last two years, especially, it has started getting a lot more interest in K-12,” she said. “Probably the biggest driver of that is the economic situation. Also, there’s more of a critical mass of high-quality content now, and that makes a big difference.”

Teachers are also becoming

more familiar with incorporating digital resources into the class-room, said Ms. Fasimpaur.

Part of the reason open educa-tion resources may be integrated more quickly in countries outside the United States is the way that education systems are governed, Ms. Fasimpaur said.

“The biggest difference is [in other countries] there’s a min-istry of education that makes a decision, and if there’s any sort of review process, it’s done at a na-tional level, whereas in the U.S. it’s not only at the state level, but in many cases, it’s really building by building,” she said.

Many other countries have also embraced mobile technologies at a faster pace than the United States, said Ms. Fasimpaur, which could help lead to quicker adop-tion of open resources.

Kim Jones, the executive di-rector of the Cupertino, Calif.-based Curriki, agreed that open education resources in U.S. K-12 education have grown in the past several years. Like other experts, she agreed that the challenge now is not getting educators to contribute resources, but weeding through the vast amount of infor-mation to find the high-quality resources that teachers want and need.

“We’re trying to build collections and align the collections to stan-dards and really curate the con-tent,” Ms. Jones said. n

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a class in senegal utilizes a solar-powered interactive whiteboard as part of a lesson.

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Often, the technologies are not used to supplant traditional schooling, but to en-courage learning outside class time or pro-vide an added boost to skills development.

That’s the case with a mobile-phone proj-ect launched by Steve Vosloo in 2009, when he was a fellow with the Durbanville, South Africa-based Shuttleworth Foundation, a nonprofit organization working for social change. Mr. Vosloo wanted to increase stu-dents’ access to books and improve literacy among low-income students living in Cape-town’s shanty towns.

Inspired by the cellphone novels, or m-novels, that had gained popularity in Japan, Mr. Vosloo worked with students to write a serialized novel called Kontax fol-lowing the adventures of four Capetown teens. The story, aimed at 15- to 18-year-olds, was published online and with MXit, a mobile phone instant-messaging platform. In the first month, 60,000 people signed up to read the story.

The MXit platform also allows people to submit comments through texting. Since then, additional novels about the Kontax group of characters have had readers fol-lowing their adventures. Mr. Vosloo has


s8 |

now launched the Yoza project, which pro-vides mobile-phone access to 28 different m-novels, as well as five Shakespeare plays and some poetry. More than 300,000 users had accessed the library as of August 2011, Mr. Vosloo said.

While improved literacy was the primary goal of the project, Mr. Vosloo, who is now based in Paris as a programme specialist for mobile learning for unEsco, said the stories also indirectly address other issues. In one of the Kontax stories, for example, a teenage girl’s mother contracts hiv, and the girl con-templates quitting school to care for her. Mr. Vosloo asked readers, by text, whether she should, drawing hundreds of comments.

Mr. Vosloo emphasized that “the second kind of real benefit of this medium is to en-gage readers on social issues.”

Because mobile phones are popular in South Africa, they’re being tapped more often for educational purposes.

Since 2007, the Pretoria-based Meraka In-stitute, a research organization focused on information and communication technology, has run a program on the MXit platform that allows high school students to text-chat by cellphone with University of Pretoria en-gineering students for help after school with homework, said Laurie Butgereit, a princi-pal technologist with the Meraka Institute. The technology is even cheaper than sms texting, an inexpensive form of texting used in much of the world, and costs less than one cent per message, she said.

Cellphones aren’t the only mobile way to reach students in Africa. Worldreader, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, started a project in Ghana in 2010 with 500 students in two primary schools and four junior high schools that has students using Kindle e-readers in classrooms every day. Their local textbooks are loaded onto the Kindles, said David Risher, Worldreader’s co-founder and executive director, and large publishers like Penguin and Random House donated books for free use. Students are en-couraged to take the Kindles home for read-ing, Mr. Risher said.

“Kids are reading more, and they’re read-ing better,” he said. “They had access to so little before, and now we’re seeing kids who have read 50 books or 70 books—crazy num-bers.”

In addition, teachers have Kindles that are usually loaded with the instructor’s guide to the textbook—something many teachers had never seen, Mr. Risher said.

He said he chose schools in semirural areas outside the Ghanaian capital, Accra, be-cause they had access to some electricity and could set up charging stations for the Kindles. Once the e-readers are charged, they can go about a month without recharging, making them an ideal technology for a part of the world where electrical service is often spotty.

Though Mr. Risher said he was initially concerned about the possible theft of Kindles, that hasn’t been an issue. Out of 500 ma-chines in Ghana, only three have been lost. Breakage, however, has been a problem. So far, Wordreader has shipped broken Kindles back to the United States, where manufac-turer Amazon repairs them for free under a warranty that covers the first year of use.

The program has also expanded to Kenya and is set to begin shortly in Uganda, Mr. Risher said.

“Our goal, which may be overambitious or just crazy … is that we really want to trans-form reading in the developing world,” he said. “We want to get e-readers to a million kids in five years, and we think there’s a real shot at that.”

teACheRs’ DigitAl sKills

It’s not just students who are benefiting from mobile technology in Africa. Teachers, who often lack training and support in the classroom, are also seeing the upside of mo-bile technology.

Jim Teicher, the founder and director of Cybersmart Education, with operations based in Bernardsville, N.J., and Dakar, Senegal, said teachers are using cellphones for professional development surrounding his company’s product, a solar-powered in-teractive whiteboard. About 50 teachers are taking part in a training program with the technology and using mobile phones and sms texting—cheaper than making a phone call—to stay in contact with each other, collaborate on professional-development projects, and provide feedback on the best ways to use the whiteboard in the classroom.

“A big part of using the whiteboard is not about the equipment,” Mr. Teicher said. “It’s about integrating technology into instruction, and that requires deep, ongoing professional development.”

Teachers are using their own technology to make it happen.

“The fact is, everybody has a phone; … peo-ple may have no electricity, or very little, but they get five bars on their cellphones,” he said. “It has totally leapfrogged so much other de-velopment, and it’s exciting to see the impact of mobile learning.”

Mobile technology is also helping in the collection of data on schools. In parts of Africa, that task is complicated by remote locations, areas of violence, and frequent fraud. Such problems can make it hard to determine where schools are, whether they have teachers and textbooks, and how many students are attending, said Sonia Arias, the deputy director for performance and learn-ing technologies for fhi 360, a nonprofit global-development organization based in Durham, N.C.

Ms. Arias is helping to adapt a long-time, education data-collection effort to tablet computing devices in a number of African countries, including Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, South Sudan, Uganda, and Zambia. The data-collection tool, called EdAssist, uses a paper survey to gather information that can be used by ministries of education to set budgets and allocate sparse resources effectively.

Data collectors in some countries are using cellphones to report the information and to map remote school locations. In the recently formed country of South Sudan, for example, data collectors have used gps tech-nology through mobile phones to plot schools, Ms. Arias said.

“We’re not about to do away with the print in many places, but in countries with a little more data coverage, it’s becoming increas-ingly possible” to use mobile technology, Ms. Arias said.

In addition, fhi360 is in the planning stages of developing an application for tablets to do teacher observations. A data collector would visit a classroom, fill out an evaluation form

on a tablet, and upload it to a central site. Instant feedback could be provided, giving suggestions for new approaches on lessons or teaching techniques. A pilot project to use that app is set to launch in Liberia soon.

“That could be huge,” said Ms. Arias. “The issue is that teachers do face-to-face tra-ditional training, and then they go back to schools and they’re left to fend for them-selves.”

OveRselling MObile benefits?

But Ms. Arias said it’s important not to oversell the use of mobile technology in Af-rica. While many people in Africa have mobile phones, many aren’t smartphones that can access the Internet, she said. Mobile learning, she said, is not going to take the place of tra-ditional teaching methods.

“It has great potential to transform, but let’s not get carried away here,” Ms. Arias said. “What’s cutting-edge here in the U.S. is still a long way from what’s going on in Africa.”

In addition, education with mobile phones in Africa typically involves a student or teacher using his or her own technology and bearing the burden of associated costs, even if those costs are low.

“That cost is passed on to the student, and we’ve got to think about ways to avoid these costs,” said Mr. Kelly, of InfoDev. “I don’t think it will change the basic structure of teach-ing in Africa, but it will enhance it and bring greater resources and incentives, and improve the way schools are administered.”

Vicki Cerda, who is based in Miami and is the director of communication and outreach for E-Learning for Kids, a nonprofit bringing online learning to developing countries, said the advent of the tablet changes the land-scape. E-Learning for Kids offers more than 200 free lessons to students in countries like Ghana and Tanzania, accessible on desktop computers or Android-based tablets. Ms. Cerda said she expects a very low cost tablet to be introduced in the marketplace soon and to explode in Africa. “I know mobile phones are all over Africa, but I’m not sure that’s the right form for education,” she said. “The tab-lets are great.” n

aFriCa, Continued From Page 7

a primary school student in Kenya uses an e-reader supplied by the Worldreader organization.

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Teaching Goes Global

n By rOBIN L. FLANIgAN

Petersburg High School sits on an island in Alaska’s Southeast Panhandle, where most of the land is a national forest, and the 140-stu-dent school in recent years has struggled

with dwindling enrollment, staff, and electives. So when the Virtual High School Global Consortium, a nonprofit organization specializing in collabora-tive online education and professional development, offered 25 student spots at a reduced price in exchange for one Advanced Placement teacher, Peters-burg took the deal.

“This way, we could offer engineer-ing, architecture, art history, veteri-nary science, and a bunch of things we couldn’t offer our students otherwise,” said Petersburg English and Spanish teacher Sue Hardin, who under the deal has facilitated weekly ap classes for students in schools in some North-eastern states as well as Oklahoma and Washington state, and even in China, Switzerland, and Venezuela. “And I appreciate the diversity I get in return.”

Working with nearly 700 schools in 43 countries, Virtual High School, or vhs, is one of a number of educational matchmakers that allow brick-and-mortar schools to garner qualified in-structors from anywhere in the world. It requires teachers like Ms. Hardin, who has been with the consortium for five years, to pass a proprietary 16-week, graduate-level training program before being added to the roster.

Districts are connecting with educa-tors around the globe for a variety of reasons. Some want to offer a richer course selection than their personnel budgets allow; others find it helpful for new graduation requirements in online learning. For schools in remote areas that can afford the technology, such an arrangement eases the bur-den for teachers juggling multiple sub-jects without the proper certification.

While there are drawbacks—teach-ers who lead online classes say the amount of time required can be drain-ing, and technological glitches can in-terrupt conversations—educators say the opportunities to build alliances with colleagues worldwide allow them to strengthen their own skills and

form partnerships that change the way they do their jobs.

“I’ve become a better teacher be-cause of this kind of work,” said Alicia Carroll, a new-teacher developer in the office of teacher development and ad-vancement for the 57,000-student Bos-ton Public Schools. Her post includes teaching stints at several schools.

“There’s a huge network out there,” Ms. Carroll said, “and it’s just about knowing where to tap into.”

entRePReneuRiAl effORt

In one southern Maine region, the motivation for educators to link with classrooms in different countries has been entrepreneurial, stemming from a plan to help relieve property taxes.

The 3,625-student Auburn school department in early 2011 hired a lob-byist to help push through state legis-lation allowing public schools through-out Maine to sell online high school courses for a profit to out-of-state and foreign students. The courses would cover a variety of subjects, from the sciences to the humanities, and the target market would be China, where students are increasingly interested in obtaining an American education.

With the former superintendent’s retirement last year, Auburn’s plans were put on hold, however.

“We’re only now returning to the conversation at the district level about whether we should commit to this, and one thing we’ve talked about is that the program would have to be authen-tic,” said Mike Muir, the school depart-ment’s multiple-pathways leader, who is essentially in charge of creating var-ious strategies for learning. The idea grew out of his work developing online courses for Auburn students who are at risk of dropping out or have medical conditions that keep them at home.

“We have no interest in even com-ing close to making it appear as if we’re selling diplomas,” Mr. Muir said. “Money was definitely something that got us talking, but some of the other things we started thinking about as possibilities are what has kept us going.”

Those authentic measures include virtual collaborations and student exchanges between Auburn students and their peers around the world. State lawmakers are giving the dis-

trict a couple more years to develop the plan before the legislation’s sun-set provision kicks in and the measure expires.

netwORK in 130 COuntRies

Educators can look to several re-sources on their own to collaborate across national boundaries.

For example, Sklobal.com offers a social and professional online network specifically for those who want to con-nect on an international level. The for-profit company, launched in 2011, is particularly useful for schools look-ing to find virtual teachers to fill gaps during tough budget times, according to President Jennifer Nelson. At the same time, for teachers losing their jobs because of budget cutbacks, “this provides a way for them to take their craft and knowledge base and use them in other places,” she said.

Another avenue for global educa-tors who want to join forces is the In-ternational Education and Resource Network, or iEarn. With U.S. head-quarters in New York City, iEarn sup-ports some 300 projects at any given time through a network of more than 45,000 teachers in 130 countries.

“They’re all designed and facilitated by teachers, who determine the time frames, the languages, the age lev-els, and the outcomes, and answer the question of how each project will make a difference in the world,” said Lisa Jobson, the nonprofit organiza-tion’s assistant director.

Using connections made through iEarn and a grant funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, instructors from Brazil, Russia, Uganda, Yemen, and other countries have shared their best teaching prac-tices with faculty members at Mar-tha’s Vineyard Regional High School in Massachusetts. For now, the in-formal online chats after school help teachers at the 700-student school think differently about ways to en-gage students.

“The problems are the same every-where, but their solutions differ,” said Chris Baer, an art, design, and tech-nology teacher who co-facilitates the grant. “This has opened our minds to some possibilities we’ve never even thought about before.”

Though the Internet connection occasionally drops for a couple min-utes at a stretch, Mr. Baer hopes the monthly, hour-long sessions, which have spawned a Facebook group, will ultimately lead to a more formalized classroom setting.

In early January, several students from the school’s class in Brazilian history attended a session with a teacher from Sao Paulo; the Martha’s Vineyard island community has a large mix of first- and second-gener-ation Brazilian immigrants eager to connect with their ancestral culture.

For Ms. Carroll, the educator from Boston, the mentoring and collabo-ration that has come from work she developed as a Fulbright scholar “pro-

motes mutual understanding between countries and a whole new level of support.” Her interdisciplinary Forbid-den City Project, to start soon at the K-8, 170-student Mission Hill School in Boston, involves cooperation with the University of Massachusetts Bos-ton and schools in China and Kenya.

“We’ll have interpreters, and we’ll all be learning together,” she said. “This speaks to the need for culturally rel-evant teaching and curriculum, and this is the real standard we should meet as educators.”

MAJOR tiMe COMMitMent

David Dixon, a Virtual High School teacher from Tulsa, Okla., also sees a new standard from his work leading an online Advanced Placement phys-ics course for juniors and seniors in Malaysia, Peru, Vietnam, and Western Australia and throughout the United States.

When he taught an ap physics course about a decade ago, neither he nor his students, he said, were prepared for the rigorous pace of the material. But after inheriting the vhs course in 2010, Mr. Dixon, a sci-ence teacher at Tulsa’s 500-student Webster High School, was able to see how a more experienced ap educator paced the class. As a result, some of the documents he incorporates into the online lessons, such as a step-by-step explanation of problem-solving procedures, make their way into his physical classroom.

But the position is a huge commit-ment. “I’ve never worked so hard in any course in my life,” said Mr. Dixon, who in his first year with vhs spent an average of 20 hours a week on this one online class alone.

“That just nearly wore me out,” he said. “This year, it’s a little bet-ter, but it’s still an awful lot of time.” Webster High administrators are now considering whether to start offering an ap physics course on campus. If that happens, Mr. Dixon, whose virtual-teaching experience has helped him learn how to better “explain things concisely and ver-bally as opposed to doing everything on paper,” is ready.

“I’m a lot more confident about mak-ing that successful now,” he said. n

“The problems are the same everywhere, but their solutions differ. This has opened our minds to some possibilities we’ve never even thought about before.”

ChrIS BAerTeacher, Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, Oak Bluffs, Mass.

U.S. schools connect with educators in other countries to expand offerings


s10 |


Canada’s approach to online learning comes rooted in a his-tory of distance education for students living in remote areas and is often unique to the prov-ince where the brick-and-mortar schools are located.

But unlike the way online learning has evolved in some parts of the United States, there’s very little private com-pany involvement in creating or providing virtual courses in Canada. Few schools buy online courses from private vendors, and or-ganizations that provide those courses within the country are either mostly nonprofits or operated directly by school districts.

In the past few years, the paths of the two countries have diverged when it comes to on-line learning, said Michael K. Barbour, an as-sistant professor of instructional technology at Detroit-based Wayne State University. He has written several reports about the status of online learning in Canada for the Interna-tional Association for K-12 Online Learning, or inacol.

Americans “have seen online learning as an avenue to privatize education, and that hasn’t happened in Canada,” Mr. Barbour said. “Ca-nadians have been much more reluctant to see corporations as the saviors of public insti-tutions.”

While online learning may be used in differ-ent ways in each of the United States’ more than 14,000 school districts, and policies on virtual schooling may extend either district or statewide, in Canada each of the 10 provinces and three territories stakes out its own guide-lines for cyber education. In the country as a

whole the number of students participating in what’s called distance education grew from 3.4 percent in 2009-10 to 4.2 percent in 2010-11, according to Mr. Barbour’s inacol report “State of the Nation: K-12 Online Learning in Canada.”

For example, in British Columbia, a major-ity of the 60 school districts formed their own cyber schools for e-learning that are designed around a similar framework. In Quebec, meanwhile, e-learning is provided by a pri-vate, nonprofit organization paid by schools and the provincial education ministry.

Other policies and procedures in the vari-ous provinces differ as well. Some school districts or e-learning providers offer mostly on-demand online courses; others customar-ily provide courses with specific virtual-class-room times. In addition, some provinces make online courses available to primary-school-age students, while others limit those opportuni-ties to high school students.

stAnDARDizing PROgRAMs

All that makes e-learning, and education in general, more decentralized in the United States, where education is mostly a local endeavor, said Maurice A. Barry, a program-development specialist for the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation at the department of education in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

“By being provincially governed, we cut down on an awful lot of unnecessary duplica-tion,” Mr. Barry said. “But we also run the risk of squashing things that are innovative and different.”

In Canada, he said, it’s a priority that online

learning “gets done and gets done very well, but it gets done in one particular way.”

In Ontario, online learning has evolved over recent years to limit that duplication, said Alison Slack, the coordinator of the Ontario eLearning Consortium, a coalition of 20 prov-ince school districts that share resources and students. In the late 1990s, several districts began experimenting with online learning, and by the 2000s a few boards were heav-ily invested in providing online learning to students. But each of the province’s 72 school boards had its own version of the Ontario-curriculum-based online courses, and each provided it in its own way with its own learn-ing-management system, Ms. Slack said.

In 2006, Ontario’s education ministry moved to standardize online education. It instituted a single learning-management system for all school districts and developed one version of each course being offered. The courses, and the learning-management sys-tem, are provided free to districts.

Districts assign their own teachers as online instructors and are free to adapt the ministry-written courses, Ms. Slack said, but they start with the same standard course. Districts can-not charge a fee for their own students to take those courses, but must charge other districts whose students want to take their courses.

The Ontario eLearning Consortium, whose members offer most online Ontario courses, allows students to take advantage of other districts’ courses.

“We share our kids. For example, boards will say, ‘You take 10 of our students into your courses, and we’ll take 10 of your students into our courses, and we’ll call it even,’ ” Ms. Slack said. “There is no transfer of money.”

Although some students take online courses

full time, most students taking virtual classes in Ontario are supplementing their face-to-face classes because they have a conflict or want to take a course not offered at their schools, Ms. Slack said.

In other provinces, online learning is viewed differently. In Newfoundland, “online learning is not designed as an alternative,” Mr. Barry said. “We have schools that would be nonsus-tainable any other way.”

For instance, he cited the small Newfound-land community of Francois, located in a fjord on the south coast. No roads go into Francois, Mr. Barry said, and the area is accessible only by an eight-hour ride on a ferry, which oper-ates several times a week, or by helicopter in an emergency. The K-12 school there serves about 30 students.

The school has used some form of distance learning for decades. There’s no other way for students to access appropriate education, Mr. Barry said.

“We offer this because it’s necessary,” he said of online learning. “The alternative is to take those students away from their families and move them somewhere else. We’re just not prepared to do this.”

The Centre for Distance Learning and In-novation serves 1,000 students in 103 schools including the students in Francois, Mr. Barry said, and employs 34 full-time, online teachers teaching 34 different courses. The center pro-vides the Internet connectivity and equipment needed for students to access the courses.

PiCKing MOtivAteD stuDents

Elsewhere, however, online learning is not provided directly by the provincial govern-

CANADA: A Different Approach to Virtual Education


While there may not be much involvement by private companies in the online education sector in Canada, that doesn’t mean the idea of earning profits in this arena

is being ignored. Take, for example, the Leading English Ed-

ucation and Resource Network, or lEarn, a nonprofit organization based in Quebec that provides online resources, including virtual courses to students and schools in the prov-

ince. LEarn also has a for-profit arm, called i-Edit, which provides e-textbooks, consulting services, and other products related to online learning, said Michael Canuel, the chief ex-ecutive officer of lEarn and the chairman of i-Edit.

For its work through lEarn in the Ca-nadian public schools, the organization is paid by the provincial government. But through i-Edit, it has provided its services in Madagascar and is talking with Panama about consulting there to help integrate on-line learning into schools. Several American school districts are using the organization’s web-conferencing platform and its content-management system, Mr. Canuel said.

The difference, however, from a purely mon-eymaking venture is that the profits that are made through i-Edit are funneled back into the nonprofit lEarn, Mr. Canuel said.

“Our ultimate mandate is to serve our community [in Quebec] as best we can,” Mr. Canuel said.

Other Canadian companies, like Desire-2Learn Inc., based in Kitchener, Ontario, are also reaching across the border, but not typically with online courses, said Terri-Lynn

Brown, the director of learning solutions for Desire2Learn.

Her company provides software and learn-ing-management systems to help power online learning courses in some U.S. school districts and states, such as Alabama and Maryland.

Ms. Brown said she doesn’t see many Ca-nadian schools purchasing online course con-tent. “They certainly need the infrastructure, and our company provides the online learn-ing environment,” she said, “but the [virtual] schools themselves are generally run by the districts” whose teachers develop the courses or use resources provided by the provinces.

u.s. COuRse COnneCtiOns

Several American online-course providers say the distinctiveness of Canadian curricu-lum standards, plus the differences in online learning requirements from province to prov-ince, make it hard to export online courses north.

Other barriers include language dif-ferences—in Quebec, for example, where

French versions of online courses would be required—and the fact that Canada gener-ally follows the British spelling of English and uses the metric system. Such consid-erations, “for some online course providers, may mean developing new or significantly modified content,” said Jeff Kwitowski, a spokesman for K12 Inc., an online edu-cation company based in Herndon, Va. He said K12 does not do a significant amount of business in Canada.

But the Florida Virtual School, the largest state-sponsored U.S. online school, does serve several Canadian schools.

Andy Ross, the general manager for the global services division of the Florida Virtual School, or flvs, acknowledges there’s more of a tradition of Canadian educators developing their own courses. Even so, some districts in Canada are buying flvs courses and adapt-ing them to the Canadian curriculum.

The Manitoba province, for example, has purchased nine flvs courses. Canadian edu-cators have also been interested in consult-ing Florida Virtual on such issues as online teacher training and the management of on-line courses, Mr. Ross said. n

Canadian Ed. Dips Into

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“Canadians have been much more reluctant to see corporations as the saviors of public institutions.”MIChAeL K. BArBourAssistant Professor of Instructional Technology Wayne State University, Detroit

Fourth grader Rachel Quansah works on a reader-response assignment at Discovery Public school in Vaughan, Ontario, just outside toronto.

ment. In Quebec, a nonprofit organization called Leading English Education and Resource Network, or lEarn, serves more than 150,000 students through blended online courses, and about 500 through sychronous classes for high school students, which require the teacher and students to be online at the same time.

The organization has been offering online courses since 1999.

While lEarn has plenty of online material for teachers and students to access whenever they want, Michael Canuel, its chief executive officer, said his organization has found that a synchronous approach generally produces the best achievement results for online students.

“Our dropout rate is almost negligible [in the synchronous courses],” he said.

Most of the students who take online courses through lEarn are highly motivated, and the brick-and-mortar schools decide whether a student is eligible to take an online course. In fact, some online schools in Canada will take only students who fit that motivated pro-file, unlike cyber charter schools in the United States, which tend to offer courses to all comers.

Darren Cannell, the administrator of the Saskatoon Catholic Cyber School in the prov-ince of Saskatchewan, a publicly funded online high school that offers 44 different classes, said his school is selective about what type of student it allows to take online courses and deliberately does not offer online courses to younger students. All the courses have been

developed by master teachers. “We don’t believe that a student younger

[than high school] should be sitting at home working on this,” he said.

To that end, Mr. Cannell said, his school dis-courages students from taking a full-time on-line courseload, unless there are extenuating circumstances.

“I don’t agree with the idea of full-time cyber students,” he said. “We think a mixture of face-to-face as well as online classes during the year is best.”

funDing DiffeRenCes

One of the biggest differences in the way e-learning has evolved in Canada versus the United States is funding. Online learning is free to all local Canadian students and districts, and course providers are typically reimbursed by the province for their costs to develop and run online courses. School districts do not typically purchase courses from private providers and because of that, the e-learning marketplace in Canada has remained relatively noncommercial.

“There’s not a lot of profit in it here because the ministry oversees and pays for everything,” said Ms. Slack, of the Ontario eLearning Con-sortium. “If a [company like] Pearson came to the board and the district to try and sell content, the board would say: ‘You’ve got to be crazy. We get this for free. Why would we pay you?’ ”

In addition, there is no equivalent of an online

charter school in Canada, said Mr. Barbour. “There’s never this notion of inviting a for-

profit company to run an online school,” he said. The result is that private companies are not looking to attract students and their government funding from province school dis-tricts as they do in the U.S., although not all e-learning providers in the U.S. are for-profit either.

In British Columbia, schools are prohibited from charging any type of fees for online learn-ing (or any public education, for that matter.) Education funds in the province are distributed on the basis of a per-student funding model. Brick-and-mortar schools receive about $1,000 more per pupil than cyber schools do, said Tim Winkelmans, the manager for e-learning for the provincial ministry of education.

British Columbia has about 600,000 stu-dents in 60 school districts. Forty-eight of those districts have their own cyber schools or “distributed learning schools,” and last school year about 90,000 students took courses at those schools, Mr. Winkelmans said.

Some schoo l d i s t r i c ts in Br i t i sh Columbia can, though, charge other districts fees to use their courses, either inside or outside the province. But the culture in Canada has been for schools to develop their own courses, using their own teachers, or to form consortia of school districts that pool resources to develop online courses, Mr. Winkelmans said.

“We have very little private-sector participa-tion or involvement,” he said. n

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U.S. Firms Court Global

Clients But despite the flexibility in delivering e-learning,

barriers posed by geography and

regionalism are slowing plans for growth

n By IAN QUILLEN

Within U.S. borders, online learn-ing providers often approach districts, schools, and individual students and families by pitch-ing the idea that virtual courses can help a student reach beyond a school system that falls short of addressing all student needs.

International e-learning consumers, by contrast, are approaching American virtual providers because they represent not an alternative to traditional American education, but an extension of it.

“A lot of the interest in U.S. [virtual] education is driven by the desire for U.S. higher education,” said Bruce Davis, the vice president of worldwide business development for Herndon, Va.-based K12 Inc., the na-tion’s largest for-profit online learning provider. “The U.S. remains a very desirable destination for higher educa-tion. … That affects the openness toward [American] middle school and high school education.”

It also creates a delicate line American providers must walk when moving into the global market, and perhaps explains why their presence beyond U.S. borders is lim-ited despite the “anytime, anywhere” mantra champi-oned by virtual schooling advocates.

For example, of the more than 200,000 students K12 Inc. purports to extend its services to, only 2,600 are en-rolled in the tuition-based K12 International School, a virtual establishment that mirrors the format of “inter-national schools” around the world that adopt curricula created and focused beyond their national borders.

Only about half of those 2,600 students actually live abroad, Mr. Davis said, with the rest choosing the in-ternational option over other domestic private virtual school options.

It’s a similar story for the 122,000-student Florida Virtual School, based in Orlando, which has been al-lowed to serve international students on a tuition basis, thanks to state legislation that stipulates all resulting revenues gained from international work are put to uses that benefit the school’s free service to Florida’s public school students.

Since the Florida Virtual School opened its global-services division three years ago, revenues from the di-vision have not exceeded 11 percent of the company’s total earnings. Those revenues come both from the sale of flvs content to international brick-and-mortar schools and from a global school with an internationally-geared curriculum that targets individual students domestically and abroad.

And of the more than 15,000 high-school-age students worldwide who enroll in courses offered by the Virtual High School Global Consortium, based in Maynard, Mass., only about 15 percent reside in foreign countries—despite a global focus at the school that includes courses designed to work around time and cultural differences.

“I would like to see us increase those numbers, but it is not our highest priority to do so,” said Liz Pape, the president and chief executive officer of the global consor-tium. “We’re really focused more on curriculum, course, and category enhancements that would benefit all of us, but not necessarily be focused just on increasing our course enrollment.”

bARRieRs tO exPAnsiOn

One reason providers may be reluctant to court global clients specifically is that, despite online delivery, not all barriers of geography and regionalism can be eliminated.

alex grodzicki, left, 15, and James Beaupied, with guitar, 16, both 10th graders at Oxford High school in Oxford, mich., perform a song that is broadcast via teleconference to students in ningbo secondary school in China’s Zhejiang province.

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For example, Mr. Davis of K12 Inc. says, courses offered to inter-national students must be struc-tured in a way that includes a guarantee they can be delivered in an environment where Internet connectivity or bandwidth may be limited.

There’s also a need to provide technical and instructional help in real time via telephone, for which K12 has set up regional call centers in China, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

And the willingness and abil-ity to provide an American online curriculum will also vary greatly across continents and nations. For example, Mr. Davis said, students and schools in Scandinavia are unlikely to see value in leaving their own curricula for American versions, while the opposite is true in nations with developing econo-mies, such as China, Mexico, and Turkey.

In other countries that may be receptive to the American educa-tional model, sometimes an online offering is either not viable finan-cially or simply not seen as a de-sirable alternative.

“I’ve been frankly surprised at how limited the demand from India has been,” Mr. Davis said of the K12 International Academy, a private school that costs about

$6,000 per full-time student en-rollment. “It either isn’t there, or they can’t afford the price point, or the Indian national school system is better than I perceive it to be.”

Virtual providers that are popu-lar with global schools and stu-dents are also adept at offering the courses that are compatible with international needs. That often means Advanced Placement courses for which students can sit for exams afterward and receive American college credit.

It can also mean courses de-signed with more international cultural references.

“We do make sure to be careful to think of global examples in our content,” Ms. Pape of the Virtual High School Global Consortium said. “We make sure the images we use in our courses are globally diverse. You don’t want to just see little white hands and little white faces all the time.”

For the Florida Virtual School, being receptive to international demands also means reaching students and schools in other countries through multiple path-ways. That includes offering con-tent to brick-and-mortar schools worldwide in two different models, as well as a tuition-based Global School similar to that of K12 Inc. for individual students.

Foreign schools that buy Florida

Virtual School content can do so outright, load the content onto their own learning-management systems, and alter it as they see fit to adapt to their curricula. Or they can buy it hosted on the flvs learning-management system, and retain the ability to block or add content, but not change it.

“You do have to have some more knowledge and sophistication in order to edit content,” said Clau-dine Townley, the Florida Virtual School’s director of global ser-vices. “We just try to be upfront and honest. If we are a good fit, we are a good fit. And if we’re not, we’re not.”

inteRnAtiOnAl bACCAlAuReAte Online

Both the Virtual High School Global Consortium and the Florida Virtual School have also worked with the International Baccalaure-ate program—which offers educa-tional programs to students ages 3 to 19 worldwide—to develop online versions of their courses.

The Global Consortium developed pilot courses offered at a school in Brazil to give the ib program “proof of concept” that the consortium’s format, in which students take a course over two years and then sit for an internationally recognized

exam, could translate to online of-ferings intended to extend the ib’s reach throughout the world.

The flvs became a content cre-ator in the model of a subcon-tractor for Pamoja Education, an Oxford, England-based nonprofit company created by the Geneva-based McCall MacBain Founda-tion with the sole purpose of of-fering online content for the ib’s diploma program.

Brenda O’Connor, a school-re-lationship manager for Pamoja, suggested that the structure of the relationship between the ib pro-gram, her company, and the Florida Virtual School was more desirable than a direct relationship between the virtual school and the ib.

“If you already have your own way of doing things, you might not want to buy into the [ib] philosophy of doing things,” she said.

Denise Perrault, the head of on-line learning development for the ib program, said the past and present involvement of U.S.-based online learning providers helped the ib make sure it was the right track.

“I would say the U.S. has at least a reputation at this point of being really strong in K-12 online learn-ing,” Ms. Perrault said. “This pro-gram is not very old, so I think the decision to work with two U.S. pro-viders was a way to kind of bridge a [gap]. n”

n By kATIE ASH

Several schools aiming to better prepare students for a global economy and fos-ter cultural understanding between the United States and China have turned to vir-tual exchange programs between American and Chinese schools.

“The global market is changing 24-7,” said William Skilling, the superintendent of the

4,600-student Oxford community school system in Michigan. “We feel it is mission-critical for every student to become fluent in a world language and fluent in multiple world cul-tures.”

To that end, the district hires only native speakers to teach foreign languages, hosts both virtual and physical exchange programs with Chinese students and educators, and launched an international school in China that will allow students from the district to study there.

“In today’s global market, you need to have the skill set by which you can have virtual meetings in which multiple languages and cultures are present at the same time,” said Mr. Skilling.

The international school, called the Northeast Yucai Oxford International High School, in Shenyeng, China, will allow American students to spend up to three years studying at the school in China. Students in Oxford Com-munity Schools will receive the first opportunity in this program, followed by students in Oakland County, where the district is located, before the program is opened up for

students throughout Michigan.Students will receive scholarships for the program but

will be responsible for purchasing their own airfare, said Mr. Skilling. The school district will be offering 50 scholarships initially. Although the school was founded in April 2011, classes there will not start until next fall, Mr. Skilling said.

The school district has received financial assistance from the Beijing-based Hanban, a Chinese institution af-filiated with the Chinese Ministry of Education, as well as the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University in East Lansing, to launch the school and support its Chi-nese education initiatives.

Establishing stable Internet connections in China has been one of the biggest challenges in setting up the school, he said. “It’s not that [Chinese educators] don’t have ac-cess to technology,” he said. “It’s more to do with the sta-bility of the network.”

For the past three years, starting in kindergarten, stu-dents in the Oxford district have opportunities to learn synchronously and asynchronously online with their Chi-nese peers.

“They make videos, send them over, pose questions, and talk about different things they like in America,” Mr. Skill-ing said, referring to the Oxford students.

For the 2012-13 school year, the district will launch a foreign-exchange program in which high school students in Michigan will attend the district’s international school in China full time, at set classroom times, via the Internet. The students will take virtual classes, at the high school building, from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m.

“A lot of American students choose not to do exchange programs because they don’t want to leave their peer group,” Mr. Skilling said. This alternative will allow those students to have an international experience without leaving their families and friends.

The program will be officially announced this spring, said Mr. Skilling, and students will be allowed to sign up until the end of the school year in June. So far, no con-cerns have been voiced about a ‘graveyard shift’ education schedule, he said.

beyOnD steReOtyPes

The Oxford district has also sent more than 60 teach-ers to China to help them get a better understanding of the Chinese education system using grant money from Michigan State University’s Confucius Institute’s class-room grants, Mr. Skilling said.

“Our teachers have become much more aware of the cul-ture, and they’re starting to get a little better understand-ing of the language,” he said.

However, virtual education in China has grown much more slowly than in the United States, he said.

“Virtual learning in China is just starting to take seed,” Mr. Skilling said. “Because it’s still something very new, there’s a hesitancy to jump on board with it.” (See related story, Page S14.)

At the 2,300-student State College Area High School in

CHINA: Partnerships With U.S. Schools Break Down Walls

“

I’ve been frankly surprised

at how limited the demand from

India has been. It either isn’t

there, or they can’t afford the

price point, or the Indian national school system is better than

I perceive it to be.”

BruCe DAvIS Vice President of Worldwide

Business Development, K12 Inc.

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State College, Pa., students in Susan Anderson’s learning-enrichment class are taking part in a virtual exchange program called Greenleaf set up through Schoolwires, an educational technology company based in the town.

Ms. Anderson collaborated with a teacher in the Beijing Yu Yuan Tan Middle and High School to launch a pilot of the program during the fall 2010 semester. The pilot began with 30 American 10th through 12th graders and 30 Chinese students; the classes used Schoolwires’ software to facilitate a cultural exchange between the two classrooms.

“The [American] students were shocked to find out that [the Chinese students] liked some of the same music, movies—that they actually watch some of the same TV shows,” said Ms. Anderson. “It certainly broke down a lot of the stereotypes.”

The first semester focused on allowing the stu-dents to get to know one another better, said Ms. Anderson. The American students created a faq page with answers to questions their Chinese counterparts were interested in, such as the col-lege-admissions process in the United States.

The American and Chinese students also created a shared blog to cover the topics of food, sports, and holidays and celebrations, said Ms. Anderson.

Still, even though the pilot was mostly success-ful, it ran into some technological challenges, she said.

Jane Sullivan, an instructional technology spe-cialist for the school who helped with the project, said that “we struggled with sharing files and com-municating back and forth.” For instance, the stu-dents and teachers originally hoped to exchange video files, but quickly found that those files were too big to send back and forth easily.

Ms. Sullivan said she was surprised by how much more tech-savvy American students ended up being than the Chinese students.

“I just assumed the [technology] skills of the [Chinese students] would be the same, but they’re not really used to working in groups and collabo-rating [with technology],” she said.

leARning tO COllAbORAte

Improving those skills in Chinese students was one of the major motivations for undertaking the project, said Zhijian Fang, the principal of the Bei-jing Yu Yuan Tan Middle and High School, through translator Lin Zhou.

“Our students need to have a digital mind,” he said. “They need to know how to use the Internet, digital media, and media environments to collabo-rate with each other.”

The Greenleaf exchange program is a needed departure from the longtime teaching methods in Chinese schools, Mr. Zhijian said.

“Traditionally, in China, the instruc-tional method is really teacher-centered. The teacher gives instruction, and the main activity for the student is listening to the teacher’s instruc-tion,” he said. “Also, traditionally, Chinese students tend to learn independently, [not in group collabo-ration]. This project really breaks that.”

In addition to challenging established teaching methods, the project gave students a chance to see the world from a new perspective, he said.

“Before, [Chinese] students could only look at things from their own perspective. But now they can look at things from different perspectives,” he said.

Beyond those benefits, Mr. Zhijian said, the Chi-nese students also had a chance to practice their English in a real-world situation. n

China, Continued From Page 13

n By kATIE ASH

The Chinese govern-ment has set a goal of creating digital learning environ-ments for all the country’s students by 2020, but the growth of online

learning in China has lagged be-hind that of the United States, experts say, in part because of concerns about the quality and reputation of such education.

“Online learning is considered second-best [in China],” said Yong Zhao, the director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Educa-tion and a professor in the college of education at the University of Oregon. “They have not accepted the fact that you can learn as much [through online learning].”

The online learning that does exist in the Chinese education system is mostly supplementary, said Mr. Zhao, who was born in China. “They’re experimenting, but the stigma is still there, and they haven’t moved much in that arena.”

A recent study from the Vienna, Va.-based International Associa-tion for K-12 Online Learning, or inacol, found that nearly 26 per-cent of Chinese students, or 12.7 million students, engage in some type of online learning. The 2011 report defines online learning as “all aspects of technology-assisted learning,” such as using the Inter-net for a research project, visiting websites for class, or keeping a school-related blog.

The report notes that while the Chinese government has set standards for online teaching, there are no national standards for online content or courses at this time.

That lack of policy guidance in China, a lack of professional development for teachers, and inadequate Internet access and technology tools for students have contributed to slow growth in this sector in China, the report says.

teACheRs As A gAtewAy

Chengfeng Zhou is the chair-man and chief executive officer of the Vancouver, Canada-based China Education Resources, one of the largest online learning pro-viders to China. The company is

working directly with China’s Ministry of Education to develop and implement an online teacher-training program to help teachers complete their continuing educa-tion credits, said Mr. Zhou.

“Through the training program, it forces teachers to get more familiar with the Internet and learn the skills,” he said. The on-line training program is also more cost-effective than face-to-face professional development, said Mr. Zhou, and provides teachers greater flexibility in when and where they can take the classes.

“You can do large-scale train-ing,” he said.

The online teacher-training program is highly interactive, with fixed and flexible classroom scheduling and interactivity, said Mr. Zhou. Teachers gather in chat rooms to speak with each other, as well as expert educators, about how best to improve their instruc-tion. They are also required to give feedback on their peers’ con-tributions, so that everyone both gives and receives advice, Mr. Zhou said.

In addition to helping the teach-ers complete their continuing edu-cation credits, Mr. Zhou sees the program as a gateway to provid-ing online learning to students.

“The more teachers take the online training program, I believe there will be more students who will rely on the Internet to do learning and studying,” he said.

But there are many challenges to integrating online learning into the Chinese education sys-tem, Mr. Zhou said, starting with teacher attitudes and teaching techniques. “China uses more traditional learning methods to teach,” he said.

Through the government’s push to digitize classrooms in China with the goal of achieving a 6-to-1 computer-to-student ratio by 2020, Chinese officials hope to emphasize more creativity and student-centered learning—a shift in how that country’s teach-ers traditionally teach, he said. And as of now, students are over-loaded with homework, said Mr. Zhou, which does not allow them time to explore Internet resources after school hours.

The current digital culture in China is one in which most Chi-nese students view the Internet as a form of entertainment, he said. Unlike American students, who

have time to socialize with their friends after school, Chinese stu-dents typically spend their after-school hours studying and may have only 15 minutes to relax, said Mr. Zhou. During that time, students will often turn to the In-ternet and online games.

“The homework is so much that they can only take a break at home,” Mr. Zhou said. “They can-not just call their friends and go out for several hours. And because of the one-child policy in China, most of the kids are at home by themselves.”

Therefore, students view the Internet primarily as a way to de-compress and socialize rather than as a tool for learning, he said.

PRessuRe tO suCCeeD

A huge part of the skepticism toward online learning in China stems from the pressure Chinese parents put on their children to succeed on national exams, said William Skilling, the superin-tendent of the 4,600-student Ox-ford community school system in Michigan, which recently opened an international school in China. That school, called the Northeast Yucai Oxford International High School, located in Shenyeng, China, will provide opportunities for American students to spend up to three years studying at the school in China. (See related story, Page S13.)

“What really inhibits [digital learning] from taking off is [that] the students who are planning to take the national exam for admis-sions into the Chinese university are fearful that virtual education will not be adequate enough to prepare them for national exams,” he said.

Mr. Skilling believes, however, that if virtual education begins to build a stronger reputation in China, it will become a popular option for students there.

“Whoever gets into China and demonstrates virtual education and its possibilities—they’re going to inherit that virtual market very quickly,” he said. “People just need to see it and see the results.”

Gaoxiang Huang, a 27-year-old student at the Mason School of Business at the College of Wil-liam and Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., attended primary and second-ary school in Ningbo, China—an

Quality Concerns Slow E-Learning Growth in China

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n By IAN QUILLEN

While hand-held mobile learning is viewed in the United States as a recent trend, its roots go further back in the United King-dom and Western Europe.

As early as 2001, David Whyley began directing national government funding to-ward hand-held computing devices for stu-dents as the head teacher of a school in the Midlands of England.

And by 2006, John Traxler, a professor of mobile learning not far from Mr. Whyley, at the University of Wolverhampton, was speaking to an audience at Microsoft Corp.’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., about the educational possibilities of hand-held devices such as cellphones and personal digital assis-tants, only to be shrugged off by an audience that instead saw laptops and the ubiquitous wireless Internet—and not 3G and 4G net-works—as the future of education.

“At that point, we were getting a fairly blank reception,” Mr. Traxler recalled.

The attitude, he suggested, was: “We’ve got WiFi coming out of the carpet, why should we listen?”

Yet, as the United States has shaken off those doubts and has begun integrating hand-held devices such as smartphones, media players, and tablet computers into mobile learning approaches, the American path appears to differ from Europe’s. In fact, there is so little awareness of Europe’s mobile learning history that, for example, when Mr. Traxler was among a handful of European educators invited to the 2010 Wireless Education Technology Conference in Washington, an organizer billed it as “the world’s first mobile learning conference.”

ReAChing beyOnD ClAssROOMs

European educators say their focus has been on using hand-held devices to allow students to interact with their environment outside the classroom through activities such as photography and videography, data collection, and orienteering. That outlook,

EUROPE: Leading the Way In Hand-Held Computing

urban area located 150 miles south of Shanghai.

Although he did not have any direct experience with online ed-ucation as a student, he can see how it may become a viable op-tion for Chinese students.

“First, more people are able to have Internet access,” Mr. Huang said. “And second, the traffic is be-coming horrible, and the life pace is becoming faster as the economy develops.” Not having to com-mute could make online learning a good option for some students, she said.

In addition, Chinese parents are eager to provide high-quality learning opportunities for their children, and online courses and tutoring could make those oppor-tunities available to more fami-lies, he said.

e-leARning sKePtiCs

However, proving the quality of online learning and online courses is still a challenge in China, Mr. Huang said.

“How you can improve your quality of education is the major concern if you are not a major in-ternational brand,” he said of vir-tual learning providers seeking to tap into that market. “How to do the marketing is another prob-lem, since people are still skepti-cal about online learning.”

In fact, in an effort to branch out into China, several U.S. online learning companies, such as the Seattle-based Apex Learning and the Herndon, Va.-based K12 Inc., have paired up with pre-existing Chinese education organizations to provide virtual education op-portunities to students.

“We found that virtual edu-cation is not really received or viewed favorably [in China],” said Apex Learning’s chief execu-tive officer, Cheryl Vedoe. Conse-quently, the company paired up with Beijing Normal University, which opened up a high school where Chinese students could earn both a Chinese and Ameri-can diploma using Apex Learning curriculum taught in classrooms by Chinese teachers.

Similarly, K12 Inc., invested in an already existing Chinese digital education company called Web International English, which works with 100 Chinese schools in 50 Chinese cities, as a way to tap into that market despite the negative perceptions of online learning in China.

“The Chinese market is not re-ally ready for online learning,” said Bruce Davis, the company’s executive vice president of world-wide business development. “It suffers from the stigma that on-line learning had in the U.S. 10 or 15 years ago.”

Andrew S. Torris is the deputy superintendent of the Pudong Campus Shanghai American School, in Shanghai, which serves more than 3,000 pre-K-12 stu-dents from 40 countries. Although his school does not educate Chi-nese students, it regularly uses online courses from the Virtual High School Global Consortium, based in Maynard, Mass., to sup-plement its own courses.

Online learning may catch on in China, he said, in part because of the goals of parents and students in China.

“There’s a real push in China right now for the Chinese to get kids from the rising middle class and upper class into U.S. univer-sities,” he said. That push could prompt some Chinese families to enroll their children in online courses provided by schools or com-panies based in the United States.

But for now, that is not the norm, said Mr. Torris.

“These Chinese are strong be-lievers in tradition and history. It’s all about reputation with a particular school,” he said. “So because online learning is still new, and it’s still rough around the edges, they immediately de-fault to not having the trust in the system.” n

six-year-old maria shows how to learn spanish on a mobile phone to german Chancellor angela merkel, right, and then-spanish Prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, left, at a technology fair in Hanover, germany, in 2010.

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they say, stems from a past will-ingness of national governments to underwrite such research, and a shift across the continent toward a more constructivist approach to teaching that includes the same kind of project-based learn-ing many American educators are beginning to favor.

Meanwhile, the Europeans’ U.S. counterparts have focused on

using those same devices to give students 1-to-1 computing con-nectivity inside the classroom in a manner more affordable than lap-tops, allowing students to respond digitally to an interactive white-board, access a search engine, and do work on a calculator.

It’s a model that has roots in a lack of funding from national, state, and local governments, rather than in specific govern-ment funded directives to ex-plore new kinds of technologies for learning. And although there has been a push at some Ameri-can mobile learning gatherings to bring in more elements of what could be considered a European approach, many in Europe sense the American vision may be more sustainable in “the new normal” after the recession that began in late 2007.

“I think there is certainly a more tangible business model that goes along with it,” Mr. Trax-ler said of the American model of hand-held mobile learning. “It’s selling content, selling airtime, and all of that is quite easy to understand when a call comes for commercial reasons or human reasons to reach as many people as possible.”

And even Michael Gove, Brit-ain’s secretary of state for edu-cation under a Conservative-led coalition government that took power in May 2010, pushed the country’s education system to keep moving forward with its mo-bile learning initiatives and oth-ers related to education technol-ogy, while looking to America for inspiration.

“It was a complete surprise,” Mike Sharples, a professor of educational technology at The Open University in Nottingham, England, said of the new govern-ment’s outlook. “Everybody had been expecting that the govern-ment just hadn’t got it when it came to learning with technol-ogy, and suddenly they gave this speech where they said Britain has to catch up with the United States. It was rather ironic.”

Outlining fOuR levels

But to paint Britain—or any European country—as following a uniform model of hand-held mo-bile learning is inaccurate, accord-ing to research on national mobile learning practices and individual observations from practitioners throughout Europe.

In a report for the United Na-tions Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or unEsco, a Stockholm-based independent e-learning consultant, Jan Hylen, de-scribes the hand-held mobile learn-ing practices of European countries as falling into four levels.

The United Kingdom is alone in the top level, according to the report, in terms of taking compre-hensive nationwide steps in mobile learning above and beyond those funded by the European Commis-sion, the executive governing body of the European Union.

That’s largely in part because of programs funded by Britain’s Mobile Learning Network, or MoLeNet, collaboration between the national government and participating schools that paid for 40,000 students’ and 7,000 educators’ instructional use of mobile devices in 2007 through 2010, mostly at the secondary school level. (The program has since concluded.)

Then, the report says, 16 mostly Western European countries fall into a second level, where most activity around hand-held mobile learning has centered on Euro-pean Commission-financed proj-ects.

Estonia, France, Greece, Lithu-ania, Malta, and Poland fall into a third level of countries that are just making preliminary steps in the practice. Then Belgium, Lux-embourg, and Romania are in a bottom level—those that have shown little or no progress.

Mr. Hylen also emphasizes that, while many European gov-ernments take a more central-ized role in education than the U.S. government, more educa-tors are now taking a bottom-up approach to implementing hand-held mobile learning into their schools and classrooms, and in that way perhaps following the U.S. model.

“From a grassroots level, things are starting to happen,” Mr. Hylen said. “At the moment, it’s driven by the technology itself, and the fact that teachers and students, by themselves, use these devices on an everyday basis.”

Further, the governmental structures of individual countries can also promote or impede the progress of mobile learning ini-tiatives, though not everyone is in agreement on how exactly they relate.

For example, Gavin Dykes, an independent educational technol-ogy consultant based in London, believes a shift in national policy over the past 10 years that has given regional and local educa-tion authorities more autonomy has resulted in more productive hand-held learning projects than in countries, such as France, with more centralized education sys-tems.

In contrast, Marcus Specht, a professor of advanced learning technologies and director at The Open University of the Nether-lands, sees the centralized Dutch educational push—including the work of the country’s public Ken-

nisnet organization that oversees information technology initia-tives in primary and secondary schools—as more advantageous than his native Germany’s sys-tem. In Germany, Bundesregions, the equivalent of states, carry substantial power.

“I’ve seen a lot of initiatives on the national level just be buried [on the regional level],” Mr. Specht said of German hand-held mobile learning.

nAtiOnAl vs. RegiOnAl AuthORity

While most educators agree that the breadth and uniformity of Europe’s mobile communica-tion network in the early 2000s helped jump-start hand-held mo-bile learning there, they also sug-gest that the shape the newest trend in mobile learning may take—the push to let students use their own devices as learning tools in class—may be affected more by national culture than re-gional collaboration.

For example, Mr. Hylen says that in Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia, the cost of de-vice ownership is not an issue for families in the same way as in other countries in Europe. Coun-tries also define teacher-student relationships differently, says Mr. Dykes, pointing to Denmark’s con-sideration of allowing secondary school students to use the Inter-net during final exams as a sign of more inherent trust in students than in his native England.

But David Whyley, the hand-held mobile learning pioneer who is now a head-teacher consultant for the learning technologies team of the 45,000-student Wolver-hampton Learning Authority, says where mobile educators in Eu-rope are united is being less will-ing than Americans to accept the lack of constraints of some bring-your-own-device models that en-courage students to use their own data plans for Internet access and teachers to surf the open Web for resources.

Mr. Whyley and others worked with a Slough, England-based mobile-service provider, O2, the commercial subsidiary of Tele-fonica U.K. Ltd., to produce a data-filtering plan that would enable schools to offer a filtered network to students’ smartphones and, more importantly, block other unfiltered networks while students are on campus. But he insists there’s still work to be done.

“Being able to access informa-tion behind a [personal] logon is absolutely crucial,” Mr. Whyley said. “We’re much tighter on our moral restrictions with the kids and where we set stuff.” n

“ Everybody had been expecting that the government just hadn’t got it when

it came to learning with technology, and suddenly they gave this speech where

they said Britain has to catch up with the United States. It was rather ironic.”

MIKe ShArpLeS

Professor of Educational Technology The Open University

Nottingham, England

euroPe, Continued From Page 15

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