Bring on the Virtual Classrooms

One of the great advantages of attending conferences (such as the just-ended NELMS conference) is talking with teachers about the great web sites they have found that provide educationally useful functions.

• We hear about sites for blogging, creating wikis, and discussion boards to support interaction.
• We hear about sites where teachers create assignments and students upload files (complete with date and time stamps so there is no question about when it was submitted and there is no risk of the teacher loosing the paper). 
• We hear about sites where teachers create tests and quizzes that are completed online and that can be scored immediately (a great tool for formative assessment). 

 When one returns home from a conference and begins exploring these, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many many tools that provide essentially the same function. Different tech-savvy teachers are very likely to find and use different tools that provide the same function. As one becomes a tech-savvy teacher and collects accounts on these sites, one is faced with a large and increasingly unmanageable collection of usernames and passwords.

If students are to use the resources their tech-savvy teachers discover and integrate into classrooms, then they have a similarly large and unmanageable collection of usernames and passwords. Many school and technology leaders are reasonably concerned about using sites that require usernames and passwords in light of schools’ responsibilities for protecting students’ privacy.

 For all of these reasons, I am increasingly convinced that essential technology infrastructure in schools now includes access to a virtual classroom for every student and teacher. Just as every teacher should expect the school to provide a modern computer with broadband Internet access, updated productivity software, printing, and publishing access to a web server (all provided and maintained by the school); they should expect the school to provide and maintain access to a virtual classroom.

 Virtual classrooms provide several advantages over the chaotic collection of sites commonly encountered in classrooms:

• All of the functions (tools for interaction, assignment submission, online tests, rubrics, and almost every other tool) are provided in one place. 
• If the same tools are used by all of the teachers in a school, then the system will be easier for students to use as they are familiar with it. 
• The school can manage users and limit the access by and to outsiders through by managing the users in the system that they control. 

In the past, the one obstacle to providing virtual classrooms has been the expense. Proprietary systems (e.g. Blackboard) were expensive and open source systems (e.g. Moodle) were free to obtain, but expensive (in human resources) to install and manage. Recently, however, options for providing virtual classrooms at unimaginably inexpensive prices have become available. (I have obtained access to an essentially limitless Moodle installation for less than $50 per year including the domain!)

Educators have come to understand the usefulness of cloud computing and its value for teaching and managing classrooms. They are facilitating social learning through document sharing and collaboration. They are helping students perceive online space as an arena for meaningful dialogue and discourse, not just “posting silly stuff.” They are moving academic learning into the 21st century. It seems to me the next reasonable step in this process is the wide-scale adoption of virtual classrooms so that every in-person classroom is extended to an online space.