Undoubtedly, I consider myself a believer in e-learning not only as an alternative to traditional classroom teaching but as something that can add new value to classic teaching and that is going to find its role in modern-day education. With technology playing an increasing role in our everyday lives why should it be any different when we look at the education system?
I personally got to know lots of people who believe in the opportunity to shift towards online education and who clearly don’t do it for the money.
However, I’m not blind and as online education gets more traction it also gets more interesting for people with less classy objectives in mind.
Although I am aware of fraudulent or pirated learning software it was almost mind-blowing for me to learn to what level this gets when state or federal money is involved.
In the After Hours last Friday I talked about about scam in distance education. So called fraud rings have been established, the estimated number in the article goes up to 600 with over 10,000 students participating. Up to now the investigators were able to recover $7 million from 42 of those fraud rings. The New York Times also published an article on that matter.
My other find presents numbers from the state of Colorado only. Even if Colorado was one of the states that are most progressive when it comes to distance education I think it is not unrealistic to imagine that we’re talking about the same amount of money when it come to online education programs in many of the other states as well.
As the article states “this year, online schools in Colorado will receive $100 in tax dollars to educate some 18.000 students from kindergarten to high school”. We’re talking about big money here but more concerning for me was to read that already five years ago the Colorado Department for education was criticized for their inadequate monitoring of the online programs in the state.
It is suggested that within the last five years little to nothing has happened to establish better control mechanisms besides a failed attempt by the law maker and that online schools invest considerable amounts of money in their lobbying which apparently seems to pay off in that sense.
Also, the educational value and often lacking expertise in online education of the people on top of those online schools is being debated.
Only taking the parents’ opinion into consideration whose evaluation whether an online school works or not is predominantly motivated by the performance of the individual child, was not enough.
When reading what rigorous assessments private schools or charter schools have to pass before their schools are able to start operations and teaching, it has more than surprised me to learn how lax the oversight for online schools from lawmakers, state education officials and local school boards is up to now.
Picture: morguefile user snowbear
