Pedagogy without Borders: New Frontiers of Teaching and Technology

Virtual High School (VHS) is a year-round, asynchronous online, private school inspected by the Ontario Ministry of Education (BSID #665681) that offers Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD) credits to thousands of students around the world each year. It offers students the opportunity and flexibility to take a single credit, multiple credits, or their entire OSSD. The origins of VHS date back to the 1990s, when owner and principal, Stephen Baker wanted to supplement classroom learning with an online component. Initially these courses were mainly text based, however over the years, as technology and the internet developed, the school has grown and evolved to meet the needs of the student. Currently, VHS provides a full classroom environment with students learning through written text, videos, visual media, and interactive elements. However, the misconception of online education being a text-based classroom has not changed. 
One of the statements VHS often hears when people first discover the school is “Oh, so you are just a digital textbook.” The idea of asynchronous online education as a virtual textbook is a misconception that we try to break with every course we create, and we are continually trying to find new ways of improving the way we teach so that we are more than just a “textbook”. 

In-person education involves elements like instant feedback, demonstrations, assessment as learning, and lesson engagement, which are all things that are more challenging in an asynchronous online classroom. To try to achieve these same elements VHS uses interactive elements, media assets, and features of our preferred learning management system (LMS). We have explored how we can use interactive elements to allow students to conduct self-assessments of their understanding as well as provide instantaneous feedback that is linked directly to the course content. We have included more videos demonstrating skills but making sure to limit these to three-minute in length. These videos are also supported by written content. We have also considered how we can use our interactives and multimedia to present information in a more diverse way, engaging students, chunking information, and providing study resources. 

These features have been incorporated into our most recent courses. We continually monitor these courses and us feedback from students, parents, and teachers to determine the success of each strategy as students’ progress through these courses. Some of the main takeaways from this are that when students have smaller chunks of text, more videos, and more interactivity, they are more engaged and more successful as independent learners in an asynchronous online environment. This has changed our course development to create smaller, more concise courses that work towards very explicit assessments. The aim to move beyond the stigma of “just being a textbook” has created an understanding that to support the evolution of the student and their learning needs, we must also continually evolve, adapting how we teach, develop lessons, and how we apply our resources, to continue to meet students’ needs.