With the increase of distance education courses being offered at the collegiate level, in the corporate world, professional world, and in the military, it is imperative that K-12 schools, and especially high schools, keep up with the trend. In the spring of 2015, Alabama lawmakers passed a bill requiring all public school systems to establish a policy to offer some level of virtual schooling for high school students by the 2016-2017 school year. After passing through the House of Representatives, Governor Robert Bentley signed his mark of approval on April 28th. With the passage of this innovative law, and the 2016-2017 school year quickly approaching, school boards, administrators, stakeholders and educators in Alabama are forced to consider the platform they will use to offer online courses to their students. While there are many options to choose from, school systems must take their particular situation into consideration when selecting the right learning management system for their very own, and in many cases first, platform for virtual classes.
Virtual schools incorporate the basic idea of distance education which according to Moore and Kearsley is defined as, ¨teaching and planned learning in which teaching normally occurs in a different place from learning, requiring communication through technologies as well as special institutional organization (2012, p. 2). All levels of distance education require careful planning and considerations. One of the most important considerations is evaluating and determining which learning management system (LMS) will fit the needs of the school´s teachers and students. After the task of determining the best fit, the next most time consuming effort is designing the courses. Preparing distance education courses requires not only experts in each subject area but also instructional designers who can ¨organize the content according to what is known about the theory and practice of knowledge management and the theory of learning¨ (Moore & Kearsley, 2012, p. 15). Therefore it is essential that a team of specialists work together to create effective online courses (Moore & Kearsley, 2012, p. 15).
While the task of selecting and designing effective online courses is a huge and time consuming effort, it is nonetheless essential for today´s learners. According to Moore and Kearsley, 81% of degree-granting higher education institutions offered distance education courses as long ago as the 2006-2007 academic year (2012, p. 49). Additionally, the corporate world spent $45.48 billion between face-to-face training and distance education training in 2008 (2012, p. 57). The United States military was an early proponent of distance education, even before that correspondence was online (2012, p. 28). Today, all branches of the military incorporate distance education courses into their programs, with a total of more than 6,000 independent study courses available to military personnel and dependents through the Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support (DANTES) (2012, p. 61). Furthermore, countless professions require continuing professional education (CPE) credits, many of which are online courses and Webinars (2012, p. 62).
Locally, Shelby County Schools has offered teachers Moodle as a learning management system for years. While online classes have not previously been required, many teachers chose to use Moodle to create a blended learning environment for their classroom. Moore and Kearsley refer to this as the individual teacher level of distance education organization (2012, p. 5). During the 2012-2013 school year, I personally taught government and economics to seniors via Moodle. It was my first experience using a learning management system (with the exception of Edmodo) and I was tasked with creating an economics course from scratch. While it was time consuming (as is any course creation effort) I found it manageable and an effective platform for my needs as well as my students´ needs. After comparing Moodle to other learning management systems and reviewing updates and new features of Moodle from my classmate´s wiki page, I believe that Moodle still fits the needs of Shelby County Schools. It is my opinion that as Shelby County prepares their online courses, in accordance with the new legislation, Moodle is the best learning management system to adequately prepare students for life after high school, whether that path includes higher education, the workforce, or the military.
References:
Moore, M., & Kearsley, G. (2012). Distance Education. Wadsworth Cengage Learning: Belmont, CA.
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