Even! but No Longer Odd: Once Regarded as an Unconventional Alternative for Atypical Students, Virtual Schools Have Achieved Mainstream Acceptance, and Are Now Seen as Providing an Education Equal To-If Not Better Than-What Their Traditional Counterpart Offers

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CAN A CYBER DIPLOMA BE FOR REAL? One need only consider Jacob Swink for an answer to that. 17-year-old 12th-grader has been attending Connections Academy, a K-12 virtual school, for the past three years. He's a solid B+ student. The only reason I'm not an A, he says, because of a tough AP computer science class. This fall, he'll go on to Bloomsburg University, a four-year public college in Bloomsburg, PA. He is proof positive that online learning offers a competitive alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar I heard about Bloomsburg at a college fair and talked to them, he says. His application sailed through. I never even got a phone call--I just got accepted a couple of weeks later. Swink's experience is becoming commonplace. With hundreds of K-12 schools routinely offering online courses, the idea of a full-time virtual school is no longer as outlandish as it once may have seemed. Thanks to giant improvements in technology and the quality of their academic instruction, most virtual schools now hold a trump card they had not possessed: credibility. There were many questions five years ago and not enough experience with online learning in the K-12 arena, says Dawn Nordine, director of instructional technology services for Cooperative Educational Service Agency (CESA) 9 in Tomahawk, WI, who also serves as the director of Wisconsin Virtual School. I think there was doubt as to the academic progress a student could achieve online and the quality of the experience. There used to be a lot of the same concerns with traditional schools as well, says Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL), a nonprofit group, and former director of the Office of Educational Technology at the US Department of Education. Until there was online learning, when was the traditional school the gold standard? Whatever skepticism lingers is being put to rest by early research that affirms the value of online instruction--and the value of the students receiving it. All of the preliminary data, Patrick says, shows that virtual school students are equal to or better than students in traditional schools. A Dubious Beginning prevailing view of online schools had been as a niche-filler--a fringe alternative for students whose circumstances or geography prevented them from pursuing the conventional classroom-oriented education, according to Gary Lopez, executive director of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), the parent organization of the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), a nonprofit network of educators, administrators, and technologists that provides online course content for high schools, colleges, and advanced placement programs. Students who needed to take advantage of this kind of instruction were some kind of special needs students, Lopez says. were students who didn't have access to regular brick-and-mortar resources. They were students who were out of the loop. They were pregnant teens or incarcerated youth--there was something about them that didn't fall into the middle of the bell-shaped curve. This was a solution to get them some of what they needed because they couldn't do it the regular way. That's changed. Now this instruction is being looked upon as something that is appropriate for those who are in the middle of the bell-shaped curve. What we've seen happen in the last couple of years is a shift from online content being a solution to a problem, to actually becoming a real learning tool that people turn to because it works better, and because it may present topics in a way that you can't do with chalkboard and textbook. Getting to this point has taken time. Ever since distance learning mushroomed in the 1990s, the perception of online instruction has been influenced by the scandals associated with diploma mills. …