Ah, the 21st century. A time of some pretty darned good innovations – although I don’t know if what I’m about to tell you is one of them.
The Mississinawa Valley School District in Darke County, Ohio has announced that when snow-days occur, the kids still have to go to school – on the web.
Oh, yes, this is a very real thing – even if only in the experimental stages at the moment.
It is true that online classes do work very well for collegiate studies and have for several years now, so having this on the books on a district level might actually be a good thing.
The particular Ohio school system mentioned can only declare three "calamity" days per school year. If they go over, they must make them up by tacking on extra days before summer vacation. The goal here is that if there is an online option a student can use from home in the event of a calamity day, the school doesn’t have to tack on those extra days and can graduate students based on the original projected day for when the school year ends.
Getting the sneaking suspicion that this is a way to trim school budget costs? You’re absolutely right. If a school knows the scheduled school year will end on a very specific day without having to worry about tacking on extra time to cover calamity days due to bad weather, that’s a very easy way to cut costs.
I personally believe this doesn’t put any student at a disadvantage, nor does it cheat them out of anything. When a snow-day happens, any learning that would have happened that day is lost and in some instances royally screws up lesson plans for teachers. Students that have the option of getting their lessons via online means when calamity days happen means the lesson plan can stay on track. Granted, this obviously isn’t as good as in-person teaching, but it’s better than just losing the day outright.
What do you think? Is having online education for snow-days a good idea? Do you think it will work?
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And what about the kids that don’t have access to a computer and broadband internet connection at home? Is the school district going to provide these things or are the parents going to be forced into purchasing them? Believe it or not, not everyone has internet access at home and, yes even in this day and age, some families just cant afford it.
Can the local infrastructure handle it? If every school age household is connected for possibly video and audio classes, can the local infrastructure support it? What about those homes with more than one child and only a single computer not to mention those without. Community capacity and local resources always are forgotten when looking at things like this. We all take the internet for granted that it is limitless resource. That is accomplished through capacity planning, making sure you stay ahead of the maximum bandwidth utilization curve. If everyone has to use high capacity services at once you are setting things up for a huge fail!
While I think this is a great idea, especially considering that I homeschool my son already via online classes, I have to echo the concerns already mentioned like the logistics and the fact that not every household is wired for this. It could very well become more commonplace in the future though.
Another problem…
Even if every home and child has a computer with adequate internet access, it is possible that some or all households may have an internet outage due to the weather.