Recently I have been working with VHS to gauge interest from International Schools in the Asian region to see if there is interest in them forming a partnership to expand the IBD offerings of VHS for IB schools. Here is a copy of a letter I have sent to a number of IB schools I have dealings with:

Dear XXXX,

I think we both agree that the idea of using a proven online learning model with all of the support for full classroom conferencing extends the offerings of a school and allows for students to gain a truly global experience by sharing with classmates from around the world whilst having the support of trusted mentors within the enrolled school. The issue is that this program is still in its infancy outside of the US.

Virtual High School has quite a history of successfully running online courses in the US and has a host of course offerings to suit all levels of American curriculum right up to many Advanced Placement offerings. It is only in recent years, however, that they have been successful in running courses endorsed by the International Baccalaureate Organisation. So far they have only been able to run two courses, these being Economics and ITGS.

Virtual High School is looking to expand its offerings in IBO courses but wants to know if there is interest from International Schools offering IB courses in supporting the VHS cooperative model. If you are not familiar with the cooperative model, there is some information on the Virtual High School website but in a nutshell, a teacher from a school gets training and support to develop and teach or just teach a course. Once trained, that teacher will instruct a course under the not for profit VHS system. VHS will, of course, provide all of the online conferencing and course management tools. In return for agreeing to release a teacher to teach online, the school will be awarded 25 places for students each semester in VHS online courses. Subject to the limit of a max of 5 in any one course to allow for cultural exchange in the courses. There is a payment made to the teacher for teaching the course and the students pay for the online courses.

As you can see from above, the model is not very successful when there are only 2 courses on offer to IB Schools.

For this reason, Virtual High School is looking to have some IB schools come on board with teachers that would be capable of developing and teaching other IB offerings throughout 2009 so that they would be ready to teach in the 2010 academic year. As a fast-growing IB school region, Asia would be well placed to benefit from the VHS teaching model but it is hard to know if the schools would support a model, especially if there is high staff turnover in the region, notwithstanding the fact that having VHS training makes a teacher a very desirable commodity in a school in the region.

In summary, Liz Pape, CEO of Virtual High School has asked me try to research if schools in the region might support one/some of their staff to do the training and write the course(s) in 2009 and deliver them in 2010. As you can imagine, there is great benefit to the teachers and the school in doing the training but it is generally done in a teachers own time. There is a cost of US$3500 for the training.

I would be grateful if you, as a school interested in the online IB offerings, could let me know if you think that there might be interest from you (and potentially others you might know in your region) in supporting Virtual High School to expand the IBO offerings and extend them to your students in the academic year commencing 2010.

Apologies for such a long winded email. I hope I have given you enough information and I look forward to answering any more questions that you might have and receiving your feedback.

Warm regards

Paul

It is going to be interesting to read the responses. If you are from an Asian School offering the IB Diploma, I would love to read your response. Is a cooperative model viable?

Perhaps it was inevitable, given the US reliance on test results via the NCLB legislation and this region’s reliance on similar high stakes testing such as the IB’s Diploma Programme, that entities would come along and do nothing but develop online courses that are highly professional, multimedia enhanced and capable of ensuring test results that are higher than for students in regular classrooms. One of these that I have been following for some time now is the Virtual High School. I have had some dealings with the VHS via Robyn Lynch of Shekou International School. I was not surprised to read of the VHS in Clayton Christensen’s latest book Disrupting Class. Interestingly, I came across a presentation by Jeffery Beard of the International Bacalaurette Organisation about widening access to the IB Diploma Programme via online delivery of content.  I have it on my “to do list” to contact Jeffrey and see if he would like to attend our conference in October and discuss this with the wider group. Given the strong shift to the IB DP course in this part of the world, it would seem a good fit for schools here.

This Tech Cruch article is very upbeat about an online test preparation startup, Knewton, that is turning a lot of heads for its model of trying to capture a big slice of the market via paying top money to expert teachers and using powerful adaptive software to tailor learning for the student.

Knewton is not the first to try to take on the traditional schools via an online model. Brightstorm, iKnow, Grockit, PrepMe and many others have tried in the same space. Knewton seems to have a bit more going for it than most, especially in the US market.

Based in New York City, Knewton raised $2.5 million last May from Accel Partners, First Round Capital, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway, and other angels. The company was very much under the radar until it showed up as a finalist for the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge last month (see video below). The company is built entirely on Amazon’s cloud computing services (EC2 for computation, S3 for storing video tutorials, and Mechanical Turk for fine-tuning its test questions). Actually, the Startup Challenge already has its winner: Yieldex. Knewton did win the popular vote, though.

The founder and CEO, Jose Ferreira, used to be an executive at Kaplan, the test prep giant. Knewton’s two chief test designers, Len Swanson and Robert McKinley, wrote the scoring algorithms for the adaptive learning tests used by, respectively, the Educational Testing Service (which administers the SAT, GRE, and AP tests) and ACT.

Adaptive learning tests are taken on computers. The questions get progressively harder or easier depending on each student’s answers. Thus, they adapt to each student’s knowledge and abilities. Knewton is taking the adaptive learning concept and applying it first to online test preparation services. It is not cheap. Right now it offers a year-long subscription to prepare for the GMAT test that costs $1,390. The company guarantees a minimum 50-point jump in a student’s test score or their money back.

Given the presence of Kaplan and many of the other test prep centres in this region, it may be able to make inroads in this lucrative area.

This is an interesting space to watch. I look forward to seeing if it starts to have an effect here.