Global Online Academy's First Year

by CAREY QUAN GELERNTER| photographed by TOM REESE

GLOBAL Online

AcAdemyReaching across continents and cultures,

23 independent schools pioneer a virtual learning community

28 LAKESIDE Spring/Summer 2012 Global Online Academy 29

At 11:15 a.m. in Seattle, Global Health teacher Bob Lapsley has a prearranged video chat with junior Yazan Fakhoury, who at 8:15 p.m. Jordan time is in his dorm room at King’s Academy. They talk over an upcoming reading assignment and Fakhoury’s project with a New York student in which both are doing surveys for a cross-sectional study. The class is learning about the different kinds of studies that can measure illness.


Ishani U. ’13 checks the time zone map on the class Haiku page: at 10:30 a.m. Seattle time, it’s 8:30 p.m. in Jordan. She’s

collaborating with a student at Jordan’s King’s Academy on a project about HIV for their online Global Health class; they have to nar-rate each other’s slides using VoiceThread, a digital tool that allows video, voice, and text commenting. She’s got a free period now, and this might be a good time to catch him.

The time zone map comes in handy every time she’s paired with a new partner from a different city: so far, Philadelphia, Oakland, Honolulu, Albuquerque. She’s already had a text from her partner for another assign-ment, from Oakland’s Head-Royce School, saying he’s delayed; she texts back that she’ll be ready to Skype that evening after her bas-ketball practice.

“Skype, Google chat, it’s fantastic to be able to communicate that way,” says Ummat. “It’s how I communicate with my friends here. For our generation, it’s a very intuitive thing, it almost replaces face-to-face.”

Mary Zamojski ’12 wouldn’t have been able to squeeze in a seventh brick-and-mortar class, especially with college apps, so she was glad she could take Media Studies online: “I’m interested in the way the media impacts our everyday lives.” She hadn’t thought that much about the online aspect, but “I’m interested in having teachers from all over the country and working with students from all over. I like that collaborative nature of it.”

She quickly appreciated what that could really mean when the first assignment was to choose a photo of 9/11 and write an essay on it: “A girl from Jordan, one of her first lines was, ‘I’m a Muslim and I’m not a terrorist.’ What struck me was that she felt the need to start off and say that, assuming we might hold these ideas of her. Chilling. It’s so cool

you get to see that perspective from all over the world.”

For these two Lakeside students, it’s all in a day’s work at Global Online Academy —although just what a “day” means, when students and teachers are coming from all over the globe and work together asynchro-nously, is a little more complicated.

The academy is ending its first year—a year that has seen it grow from 10 found-ing schools to 23 on three continents, with 116 high-school aged students completing one of the first five courses offered this year: Global Health (Lakeside), Media Studies (Germantown Friends), Perspectives from the Spanish-Speaking World (Punahou), Math for Computer Scientists (The Dalton School), and Urban Studies (Catlin Gabel).

Plans for next year show still more growth: 19 courses will be offered fall and spring, with 150 students already signed up (registration is not yet complete); and more schools are expected to join. The academy has just hired an academic dean: Lakeside science teacher Jake Clapp, who taught the fall online Global Health class. He joins Michael Nachbar, Lakeside’s former Middle School assistant director who was selected last summer as the academy’s director. Bernie Noe, Lakeside’s head of school, chairs its board of directors.

Much has happened in a short span, since the spring 2011 conference that launched the academy as a consortium of 10 leading independent schools. A year before, the inspiration for the academy came when Lakeside leaders heard author Michael Horn speak at the 2010 conference of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) about the “disruptive inno-vation” of online education.

Horn, a coauthor with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, told the NAIS gathering, “This thing’s coming. Get on board early and you’ll be able to take the reins. If you don’t do it, it’ll be done to you.”

Disruptive innovations create such dramatic change they transform exist-ing industries or create new ones, and Horn said the classic signs of such disruption are occurring in the world of education. Since then, the proliferation of virtual schooling has only accelerated in K-12, college, and for lifelong learning (see timeline below). The word from NAIS: the next generation of great teaching will be a hybrid of online and face-to-face learning.

Here, we take a look back at how the pioneering year has unfolded.

Internet AcAdemy, the first online school in Washington state, is founded; accredited and supported by the Federal Way School District; free to K-12 state students, open to others. 2

001 On April 4, MIT announces free

OpencOurseWAre, posts syllabi, course notes and videotaped lectures. Harvard, Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford soon begin posting videos of popular courses. By 2007, MIT opens a site aimed at high school students and teachers.1

996mi lestones i n

Online Education


GloBAl Online

AcAdemy

Punahou School teacher Emily McCarren teaches an advanced Spanish course for Global Online Academy.

While its virtual doors will open in September with the first classes, the academy’s year really begins in June. Some of the best and most passionate teachers from top schools across the U.S. and Jor-dan gather for a four-day boot camp at IslandWood, an eco-retreat on Bainbridge Island (think lush forests, LEED-Gold campus, organic food, compost toilets). They include five who will teach the acade-my’s first five courses in fall and spring, and others aiming to teach in fall 2012. They are a mix of genders, ages, and academic disciplines—the “early adopters” at their schools, and deep thinkers about the art of teaching.

There isn’t any real prototype for what they are trying to create, Nachbar says. Online education is exploding, but much is remedial, often offered by for-profit com-panies, and prompted by public schools’ budget crunches—since it allows for more students per class and thus fewer teach-

ers. “They’re about content delivery, not communities of learners,” which the inde-pendent schools pride themselves on being, Nachbar says.

That’s why, at the founding conference of the academy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation encouraged the consortium to pioneer the niche of “high-quality teachers for high-achieving students”: specialized courses to supplement what the students get at their home schools, with classes capped at 18 students; flexibility for busy students’ schedules; the chance to hone “21st century” skills of online collaboration with students across the globe; and to bring some of what they learn into their brick-and-mortar settings, as well.

The founding schools commit, too, to exploring how they might eventually offer access to these high-quality offerings to a community beyond the member schools, including public school students.

For now, Nachbar asks the teachers

at the summer institute to think about: “What will be ‘best practices’ in online edu-cation?”

During this week, they take mini-work-shops on some of the latest (ever-changing) technologies—Camtasia (screen video capture software), Prezi (cloud-based pre-sentation software), and especially their learning management system, Haiku. (Each class has its own Haiku page; Hai-ku’s interactive features support online class discussion, assignments, assessments, and wikiprojects; it hosts digital media content of all kinds; students can keep e-portfolios on it for entire school careers.)

The teachers design home pages and initial lessons and then come together for “show and tell” to give and get feedback.

They consider content organization questions: What should the visual ‘entry’ be to a course? How should they structure the flow of material so students navigate logically and easily?

➢2006

in april, Michigan becomes the first state to require online learning for high school graduation. (Alabama, Florida, and Idaho have since added requirements.)

in september, Khan acadeMy debuts a free online collection of video tutorials aimed at K-12, covering subjects from math to economics. Later incorporates progress tracking and practice exercises, and acquires significant backing from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. 2

009 online school for girls

becomes the first single-gender online school and first online independent school, with four member schools. Expands later to 12, including Marlborough, Hockaday, Holton-Arms, and Miss Porter’s Schools, and charter affiliates .


ROBYNN POLANSKY

Teachers from member schools spent four days on Bainbridge Island sharing plans and sharpening skills for the inaugural online academy classes and future classes. From left, Tristan Chirico, King’s Academy; Emily McCarren, Punahou School; Gary Kulak, Cranbrook Schools; Aran Glancy, The Dalton School; and Michael Nachbar, academy director.

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☛

As Clapp puts it, they must “decide not only the materials, resources, formats, but what you want the student experi-ence to be like on a daily basis. You’re building an infrastruc-ture.” A virtual world.

They consider intellectual property questions. A teacher’s Web page, or even blocks of text of a lesson eventually can be tagged for a searchable content library, useful in future courses taught by different teachers. The academy and the teacher jointly own the courses. What’s the best way to give credit for the teaching material created?

Quickly they get down to the biggest and most basic of questions about the nature of teaching and learning. What is teaching? What is a course? If a community of learners never meets in person, what brings it together as a community? How does the online teacher help that to happen?

“I’m thinking a lot about what happens in our brains when we look at a face, talk on the phone, and when we communicate with VoiceThread and stu-dents see a picture of me but I’m not ‘live,’” says Karen Bradley of Head-Royce School in Oakland, Calif. What will be the differ-ent emotional impact?

Coming from schools where teachers are the heart of the value of their schools, they ponder how their personalities will translate online. Long-established teacher personas and identities come into question.

As “a well-loved classroom teacher who has a great connection to students” she worries how her wry sense of humor, such an asset in classroom, will translate online, confides Germantown Friends teacher,

Meg Goldner Rabinowitz. And, “How do you establish an envi-ronment for respect and trust? Those things are super impor-tant to me, especially as issues around differences arise: racial, cultural differences, differences of opinion,” she says. “They are difficult to talk about in per-son; when you add distance and technology, how does that facili-tate, or present obstacles?”

With more than two decades in the classroom, she also teaches the methods class in the graduate school of education at Univer-sity of Pennsylvania, and trains the Teach For America recruits who are teaching English in the Philadelphia School District. But for teaching an online class, “we’re using a different set of muscles.”

They turn over questions about their different students and student cultures.

Germantown Friends is a Philadelphia Quaker school where weekly, mostly silent “meetings” are a cornerstone of

the culture. King’s Academy is a board-ing school whose students are international but mostly from the Middle East, some from small villages, many the children of oil company executives. The Dalton School is so high profile in New York City that The New York Post runs a story when not as many graduates as usual get into the Ivy League, and its students tend to be highly sophisticated.

The teachers wonder what the challenges may be, but are eager to take advantage of the pluses in the mix.

All agree that this new environment gives students a chance to broaden what they can do. Traditional assignments will be there: reading, writing, quizzes, discus-

some new Classes for 2012-13

iPhone and iPad Development (Punahou);

Japanese Language through Culture

(Noble and Greenough); Environmental

Economics (Jakarta International);

Playwriting 2.0 (Lakeside); Comparative

Government Campaigns and Elections

(Lakeside); French hip-hop, France’s

multicultural identity in the 21st century

(Lakeside); Declaring Our Humanity:

Applying Philosophy to Modern Global

Issues with emphasis on “different per-

spectives on changes taking place in the

Middle East, including the recent Arab

Spring” (King’s Academy, Jordan).--www.globalonlineacademy.org

read previous storieson Global Online Academy

at lakesideschool.org/magazine

20

11 NAtIONAL ASSOCIAtION

OF INDEPENDENt SCHOOLS (NAIS) reports that close to 70 percent of independent schools offer Web-facilitated classes (meaning up to 29 percent of the course takes place online). Four in 10 are considering online courses.

From Oct. 10 -Dec.18, Stanford computer science prof SEbAStIAN tHruN offers a free online class on artificial intelligence with Google’s PEtEr NOrvIG, which includes giving feedback on progress and a statement of accomplishment; 160,000 in 190 countries, from high schoolers to retirees, enroll.


➢ GLObAL ONLINE ACADEMY: reaching across continents

Sebastian Thrun Peter Norvig

Michael Nachbar

Meg Goldner Rabinowitz

Jake Clapp

member sChools

Albuquerque Academy (Albuquerque,

N.M.), the blake School (Minneapolis,

Minn.), Catlin Gabel School (Portland,

Ore.), Cranbrook Schools (Bloomfield Hills,

Mich.), the Dalton School (New York City),

Germantown Friends School (Philadelphia,

Pa.), the Greenhill School (Dallas, Texas),

Head-royce School (Oakland, Calif.),

the International School of beijing (Bei-

jing, China), Isidore Newman School ( New

Orleans, La.), Jakarta International School

(Jakarta, Indonesia), Lakeside School,

Latin School of Chicago (Chicago, Ill.),

King’s Academy (Madaba-Manja, Jordan),

Noble and Greenough School (Dedham,

Mass.), Punahou School (Honolulu,

Hawaii), Sidwell Friends School (Wash-

ington, D.C), the Westminster Schools

(Atlanta, Ga.).*Schools added in spring in yellow; Schools added for fall in turquoise. Five additional schools have joined and their names will be made public soon; more will join by fall. For the latest list, see globalonlineacademy.org

sion (albeit asynchronous). But there’s the possibility for doing those things dif-ferently, and for taking advantage of what online can do best, such as multimedia. If they just mimic the brick-and-mortar classroom, they say, they’re short-circuit-ing the potential.

By the end of the conference, they feel much more ready to face their classes September 6. Well, not face them in person, but interface with them.

As the yeAr goes on, many of the early worries resolve themselves eas-ily; others require more work.

There are little technology glitches that are mostly quickly corrected. They ditch some technologies that seemed surefire but end up being cumbersome. It turns out the Internet in Jordan is weak. Boston students on spring break in Italy find they can’t upload on Haiku (schools’ differing schedules mean different holi-day and finals’ times). But teachers and students say they expected some hiccups. And new technologies emerge continu-ally, making things like group scheduling, collaborations, and screencasting even easier.

One lesson teachers learn: Students come with vastly different technological ability. Even those adept “natives” know technology more on a “hobby” basis than with a real mastery.

Teachers (who have faculty meetings via Skype) decide that, to address that, they will need to build into the first part of their courses various activities around online learning technology that will also build a classroom class culture. They will make sure that before classes start, students are ready to go with needed tools, whether Web apps to download or profiles that must be updated for Voi-

ceThread or YouTube or Google Docs.Early on, some students drop classes

when they realize online classes aren’t “easier” and so they don’t have room in their schedules. Others conclude they don’t have the self-discipline or the comfort level for a class without a physi-cally present teacher. Part-way through the first semester, Nachbar polls the students, asking what they’d like to see more, or less, of. They say they wish for more interactivity with teachers, and the teachers respond. As Rabinowitz notes on her blog at the time, it’s “useful feed-back. … They want to ‘see’ us, they want to ‘hear’ more from us, and they want to get to know each other better. I am beginning an ‘if you want to say it to your students, film it’ plan …”

She is not alone. The teachers step up making videos of themselves, a time-consuming business, and arranging and moderating more real-time group Skype discussions, in addition to the online written discussions and the regular “office hours” they hold, via Skype, phone, and email.

Sometimes that means teachers must schedule three different real-time video conferences with students on computers using an embedded chat room to accommodate students in different time zones, as Clapp does, having students discuss the book Sizwe’s Test, about HIV testing and stigma in South Africa. Time consum-ing but, he says, the results are worth it, for the class connections and cama-raderie formed.

With these changes in approach, the student attrition rate goes from 20 percent the first semester, to 1.6 percent (one student) the second semester.

And then, soon enough, the acad-emy’s first year is over, and they are looking back at successes and challenges,

on nov. 19, Stanford University rebrands an initially experimental online project aimed at gifted youth as stAnford online high school ; The New York Times reports that some experts consider this a milestone in online education, noting that several other universities already operate online high schools but none with the pedigree of Stanford.

in december, MIT announces Mitx, an experimental online interactive learning platform that will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for MIT students and for a virtual community of learners around the world who, for a modest fee, will be able gain a credential for completed work (issued through a separate nonprofit); the goal is to later make the software available for free to other schools. ☛


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Take a “Tour”of a global online class

• stUdents checK in to their virtual classroom every day. They enter the class via their teacher’s Haiku home page. Haiku is a learning management system that hosts digital media content and has interactive features that support online class discussion, assignments, and assessments. Each teacher’s home page has contact information: email, Skype address, “office” hours. The teachers have learned that it’s easier for students to navigate if Haiku page are simple and linear.

• teAchers MAKe Videos of themselves to give that personal touch. They demonstrate required technologies (such as Diigo, a social bookmarking tool) and skills (such as how to find accurate health statistics on the Web). Global Health teacher Bob Lapsley makes a video reviewing assignments and goals at the beginning of each unit, such as this one about the social

determinants of health.

and planning for what will make it even bet-ter next year.

Some leSSonS: The “righT” sTudenTs

Online learning does require students to be more independent at planning their schedules, since there are no set class times. Students who aren’t going to see their teach-ers in, say, the cafeteria line, may not feel quite as accountable, teachers find.

Ishani U., the Lakeside junior who enjoyed her Global Health class and did well, says she decided that, even though she didn’t have to be “in class” for a set time, “I wanted to dedicate the same amount of time I would put into my other classes.

That seemed fair.” And that was a winning formula.

For Zamojski, the Lakeside senior who took Media Studies, the online format made her want to work harder for her teacher, Rabinowitz. “You kind of want to show off your skills, you want to impress her, because she’s seeing such a limited view of you. So in an assignment, I’d want to make this the best thing ever.” That was also a winning formula.

Students concluded they did not feel academy classes could replace their brick-and-mortar classes—“too lonely,” as Zamojski says. But they say they enjoyed them and got a lot out of them. Especially valued: the chance to take classes they wouldn’t have had room for in schedules, or that weren’t offered at

home schools; and gaining ease in technology, including the ability to collaborate with other students from far and wide, publishing work online that went far beyond the walls of an individual classroom.

As a senior at Jordan’s King’s Academy, Fakher Elfayez, who took Media Studies, said: “Apart from the fact that I’m learning new things, I like the idea that I can also bring something to the world. I can contribute.”

Her fellow King’s student, junior Yazan Fakhoury, appreciated that “you no longer take classes with just peers who share your same culture, same beliefs. Through GOA you learn alongside peers with diverse and very different back-grounds and experiences.”

34 LAKESIDE Fall/Winter 2011 Global Service Learning 35

2012

on Feb. 13, MIT opens registration for its first MOOC, or maSSive open online CourSe (Circuits and Electronics), as a prototype for MITx.

Winter: NAIS reports that nearly 30 perCent of college students have taken at least one online course.

Spring: Thrun creates udaCity, a new, free online institution of higher learning independent of Stanford, announcing two classes, a goal to eventually offer a full slate of classes

in computer science, and plans to monetize its students’ skills and help them get jobs by getting their permission to sell leads to recruiters.


TOM REESE

Zoe W. ’13 “enters” her Global Health class from her North Seattle bedroom, and checks to see the latest comments posted by other students about her supergraphic on a South African novel about HIV. “I like how interactive and collaborative the class has been,” she says. “We all have different perspec-tives and backgrounds and I think that aspect has been wonderful, especially in a course whose subject is global health.”

➢ GloBal online aCademy: reaching across continents

Global Service Learning 35

TechnologyThe boost students got in their tech-

nology skills ended up being a major plus, in students’ eyes. Students got great satis-faction from becoming more proficient in using different Web tools, software, social media, and finding quality information on the Web.

Lakeside’s Alana A. ’14 says she signed up for a spring course exactly because “I’m not a technology person.” She wanted to push herself to become more adept. Now she says she’s applying useful new skills to research for her brick-and-mortar classes as well.

RelaTionshipsWhile it took more deliberate work

than some of them had banked on, teachers and students say they did build relationships, in many ways much closer than they thought possible.

“I was surprised at how I was able to form relationships with students that are not at Lakeside, only via email and mostly videoconferencing; I was actually able to get to know them, not as well as in the brick-and-mortar setting, but pretty darned well,” says Clapp. Emily McCar-ren, the online Spanish teacher from Punahou, described “different relation-ships, but still valuable and rich.”

Zamojski says she does wish she could have met her online teacher Rabinowitz in person—because she liked her so much. She’s used to being in close communication with her Lakeside teachers, and she made sure the same was true with Rabinowitz, which Rabinowitz appreciated. They often emailed and spoke on the phone.

“It’s really cool to have a teacher who’s not from Lakeside get to know you,” she says. When “I wanted the perspective of some-one who didn’t know me as well, I asked her if she would read my college essay, and she said she would totally love to.” Unbidden,

Rabinowitz, who’s also a college counselor, wrote her a recommendation, too.

As for Rabinowitz’s early fretting that her humor might not shine through, she needn’t have worried. “She has this energy, she’s funny,” Zamojski says. “She’s very on top of things. A little East Coast, go-go-go. She’s a fun personality.”

No surprise that the relationships did feel somewhat different. A one-to-one Skype with a student tends to feel more “high-stakes” than a conversation in a classroom when the interaction involves everyone else in the class, or a casual encounter in the hallway. It also feels differ-ent when the student appears on the other end in her home, holding up the screen to show it’s snowing in Chicago, says Lake-side’s Bob Lapsley, who taught the spring Global Health class. An online quiz tends to make students more nervous than a “get-out-your-papers for a quick quiz” in the first 10 minutes of class, Lapsley notes.

Discussions among students, led by other students or by the teacher, felt differ-ent, too, in some ways that both teachers and students found thought-provoking.

Because the students don’t know each other in the context of the social settings of their school, discussions are truly just about the subject at hand. And this also allows stu-dents who wouldn’t necessarily jump into a fast-paced, in-person discussion, to par-ticipate equally. It promotes deeper thinking rather than the quick thinking promoted by oral discussion, Nachbar says.

Zamojski says she missed the natural flow of an in-class discussion. It takes a while for all the discussion posts to accrue.

Ishani U., while agreeing, liked the fact that “Once comments do get there, people were very insightful, very thoughtful. In GOA, you can come back and read com-ments through again to understand if you didn’t the first time. You can take your time to respond, which has its benefit,

IMAGE OF POLL

• POLLS are a tOOL built into Haiku that serve as a quick check-in with students. Here, students weigh in about which social factors most affect health

September 2011 ongoing: New York Times series on “grading the digitaL SchOOL” explores “the push to digitize the American classroom and whether the promises are being ful-filled,” finding a mixed bag that includes success stories and for-profit companies that tap public funds with insufficient ac-countability and questionable results.

K-12 OnLine – SOme numberS • 30 states have statewide full-time online schools, 40 states have state virtual schools or state-led initiatives.• An estimated 1.82 million students were enrolled in distance-education courses in K-12 school districts in 2009-2010, almost all of which were online courses. This doesn’t count those in most fulltime online schools (250,000 students in 2010–2011).Source: International Association for K012 Online Learning (iNACOL). More at inacol.org.


• cLaSS aSSignmentS may be posted three weeks ahead, but the goal is for the class to stay on a shared timeline. Assigning students to collaborate with one another, comment on each others’ work, post comments by a certain time, or have a group Skype discussion, is a way to ensure that—and to encourage students to get to know each other. Teachers assemble work pairs or groups from different schools, states, and countries. Here students had to use a statistical graphing website, Gapminder, to show graphically how achieving World Health Organization’s Millennium Development Goals would correlate with public health outcomes. They collaborated on presentations they narrated using VoiceThread.

POLLS are a tOOL built into Haiku that serve as a quick check-in with students. Here, students weigh in about which social factors

most affect health.

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in april, Stanford, Princeton, Univer-sity of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan announce a partnership with a new for-profit, cOurSera, to offer free courses, with $16 million in venture capital. in may, Harvard joins MIT to create edX, a not-for-profit partnership offering an array of MOOCs for free, investing $60 million.

36 LAKESIDE Spring / Summer 2012 Global Online Academy 37

• QUIZZES arE on thE honor SyStEm.

Once they begin, however, they have a limited amount of time to complete the quiz, and Haiku gives them a score immediately. Lapsley, who doesn’t count quiz results heavily in his grading, sees them as a good tool for students to gauge their depth of understanding, and for teachers to adjust their teaching accordingly.

• DISCUSSIonS may BE hEarD as well as seen. Here, Lapsley has assigned students to answer one question by VoiceThread and a second question in writing. The topic is breast-feeding policies for mothers with HIV.

• onLInE DISCUSSIonS require students to post comments by a designated time. Because of the different time zones, it takes a while for everyone’s comments to be collected, but unlike a brick-and-mortar classroom, in this virtual learning space, everyone weighs in eventually. Here, students are commenting on the poll on health factors they took earlier.

➢ GLoBaL onLInE aCaDEmy: reaching across continents

you have a more thorough response.“The flip side is, you have to spend

a little more time on it, because you’re reading and trying to digest, as opposed to listening in class, where maybe you’re not always hearing every word said.”

“In some ways I know my online classmates a little better than my Lake-side friends,” she says, because, “What they post is what they honestly think; they have no reason to post something different. There’s none of that judg-ment call, that ‘he or she may think X or Y.’ With friends there are certain people I won’t say things to, because I know how they’ll react. When you take that factor out of a discussion, it becomes something that is almost true. There’s nobody hiding anything. Some of our discussions were very heavy top-ics. You hear everyone’s thoughts, not just the dominant person in the class. That’s a huge part of how you learn about people; it’s easier to learn about people from the way they write and convey information, from this class.”

Still, what everyone intends to work more on next year is building in ways for the online classmates to know each other better socially.

Students did form friendships—Ishani U., for example, is still close Facebook friends with the Germantown Friends’ girl she partnered with on a project in which they did individual sur-veys and then combined their Excel data for a joint presentation.

But teachers found it takes a great amount of work, and intention, to make a really engaging interactive curriculum that also works to build a student social community in an online class.

Some ideaS conSidered for next year

Formal training in online teaching already is being beefed up; a four-week course for next year’s teachers began in April, taught by Nachbar and Clapp. They plan to add a blog or a Haiku page that’s a central meeting place for the teachers to learn technologies, share strategies, and tap best resources.

And they want to create some kind of virtual social hang-out spot for academy students.

Brick-and-mortar croSSoverUniversally, the academy teachers

found that their own adeptness with technology grew, and they brought new techniques, resources, and tools into their brick-and-mortar classrooms.

For most, the trend towards “blended” classes—that is to say, a blend of face-to-face and technology—is one that they had already embraced, along with other Lakeside and consortium school teach-ers. This just accelerated it.

In particular, the academy teaching experience has prompted many to make more videos that students can watch for homework, then spend class time working in groups or independently, synthesizing what they’ve learned, with the teachers there to guide them. They’re also more likely to assemble their own customizable digital texts to suit students’ learning styles, allowing for more individualized student work in class (something they’ve found natu-ral to do online). More and more the model is of the teacher as “curator” who guides. As Clapp says: “We are making strides, and making learning be more about students tapping into knowledge on their own. If you want to know how HIV infects a T-cell, you don’t need me to show you a PowerPoint. You can find an explanation pitched at the right level, if you know how to search well. As a teacher, my value-added is provid-ing students with guidance and coming up with activities and assignments that are meaningful, while getting them to cross-reference constantly: ‘OK, you read this, and now what is the connec-tion to that?’”

What’S next?So is online the key of the future?

How many classes will Lakeside stu-dents eventually take online?

Nachbar says he envisions possibly a few hundred member schools even-tually. While eight Lakeside students took academy courses this year, 14 are already signed up early for next year. The academy is increasing the num-ber of sections of each course, adding teachers for each, allowing more stu-dents to enroll.

Clearly as a consortium the academy

can offer a greater variety and range of courses than would be possible for any of the individual schools. The curricu-lum committee received 60 proposals for courses from teachers at 12 schools, choosing 19 for next fall and spring. Stu-dents will be able to learn about the Arab Spring from a teacher in Jordan, envi-ronmental economics from a teacher in Jakarta, and Japanese language and cul-ture from a teacher in Boston.

That will only get more powerful as they add more international schools to the three now participating in Jordan, Indonesia, and China.

But Lakeside and the other consor-tium schools believe the brick- and-mortar classes where teachers and students share physical space are essential. Says Nachbar: “We’ll never have online-only.”

Clearly brick-and-mortar classes are increasingly “blended,” though. What’s also clear is that change is hap-pening so fast that it’s hard to make clear-cut predictions.

Muses Clapp: “Maybe some time in the future, students come to school and

our curriculum is online and we’re inter-acting with people in different countries, we’re taking different classes. The social piece may be more disengaged from the curriculum piece. In the morning, maybe students will do a project for school together, or a sport, or work on a service project together—and there could be a two-hour block in the afternoon where we each sit and do homework or have a joint video-conference. Online all the time won’t work; it would be too lonely. There will have to be interpersonal inter-actions. But the social interactions could be disentangled from the cur-ricular.”

We’re still a long way from that, but, says Clapp: “The role of the teacher is fundamentally changing. I feel it is improving.”

And Global Online Academy will continue to play a pioneering role in that future. ■

Carey Quan Gelernter is editor of Lakeside magazine. You can reach her at carey.gelernter@

lakesideschool.org or 206-440-2706.

36 LAKESIDE Spring / Summer 2012 Global Online Academy 37

In Media Studies, students shared the images they created in the style of photographer Barbara Kruger. This one is by Mary Zamojski ’12, who says she welcomed the chance to take the class online because her senior schedule was too crowded for a seventh brick-and-mortar class. “I’m interested in the way media impacts our everyday lives.”

Meg Goldner Rabinowitz, bottom, a Germantown Friends teacher, had students in her fall course in Media Studies make short videos to introduce themselves to each other. Global acad-emy classes seek to build social as well as academic ties, to create “communities of learners.” Lakeside’s Mary Zamo-jski ’12 is at top.

The f irst Media Studies assignment was to choose a photo of 9/11 and write an essay. Students’ photos often reflected per-spectives influenced by where they live. This one is by Mary Zamojski ’12. She was especially struck by a fellow Jordanian student’s essay, which included the line, “I’m a Muslim and I’m not a terrorist.”

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Global Online Academy's First Year