The Web: Online education

A weekly series of UPI articles examining the current state and future prospects of the global network known as the World Wide Web.

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CHICAGO, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- The Internet is transforming K-12 education, providing access to new teaching and testing methods for educators and students alike.

Major colleges are providing schooling for gifted students around the world, online, asynchronously and in real-time. Testing firms, like the Princeton Review, are providing teachers with online assessments of students that furnish computer-generated test results and lets them focus on tutoring students with special needs.

"You can even find lessons in the public domain, online," Lisa Graham Keegan, chief executive officer of the Education Leaders Council in Washington, D.C., told United Press International.

One of the most well-known K-12 offerings online is from Stanford University in California. The project offers a virtual classroom for 3,000 gifted students, Ray Ravaglia, deputy director of Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth, told UPI.

The program, which was funded by the National Science Foundation starting 10 years ago, initially offered e-learning courses via software installed on personal computers. By the mid-1990s, the program had gone online, and today, it program offers kids in schools "more than their local school can provide if they are gifted," said Ravaglia.

Students can work several grade levels above their age in math, English, or even physics for older, high school students, he said, and parents can apply online to enroll their kids.

"It takes a serious commitment on the part of the student," said Ravaglia. "So it needs to be integrated into their academic program. The math courses are fairly aggressively self-paced."

Real-time, online software tools enable the students to compete in math competitions with their peers overseas, he said.

"With a whiteboard, you can talk to each other, online," Ravaglia explained. "That's all you really need. You can do competition there at a high level."

The program contains a newer component aimed at kids from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. It uses Internet learning, whiteboards and virtual classrooms to help bring slower students up to grade level.

Because the program can be attended online, it can lessen the social embarrassment of an 8th grader who reads at a 4th grade level as no one sees who they are when they are online, Ravaglia said.

The Princeton Review, the test preparation service, recently began offering assessments for students in math and reading in New York City, the company's headquarters.

"This was launched in September, and we did the first round in math and reading, and another round starts next week," Rob Cohen, executive vice president of the review's K-12 services, told UPI.

The project, homeroom.com, provides real-time, online assessments for K-12 students, giving schools the power to create localized, benchmark assessments and give students feedback, immediately, on test scores, Cohen said.

"There are 4,000 schools now that are using the service in 40 states," he said. "In each state, the product aligned to the state standard. Everyone is not doing the same thing."

The project usually is implemented district-wide, instead of for just one school, Cohen said.

Despite more than a decade of activity, educators actually are just beginning to tap the potential of the Internet as an education tool.

The George Lucas Educational Foundation in San Rafael, Calif., founded by the filmmaker, is aggregating stories about successful online and interactive learning projects on its Internet site, Milton Chen, executive director of the non-profit, told UPI.

"Students can access Web-based content from NASA or even the Library of Congress," Chen said, adding one of the strengths of the Web as a learning tool was it fostered "project-based" learning.

"People learn more effectively when the learning is connected to projects or communities," he said. "Textbooks are a less effective approach."

The Internet can even increase the number of field trips that students take during a given year, he said. They can go see video of a pond, and then look up information online about the species of creatures in that pond.

The Web is a fantastic tool for publishing, too, Chen said. "Students can use it as a publishing forum. The beginnings of the digital revolution are clear."

Online teaching technologies also are a great way to boost overall educational standards, Graham Keegan said.

The U.S. Department of Education has been working with the Education Leaders Council to move educational standards forward by embracing new technologies, she said.

"We felt strongly at the school level about implementation, and technology is so, so critical here," said Graham Keegan. "For the first time it is possible for teachers to have laid out for them the non-negotiable of instruction. Technology and the Web allow you to align standards to curriculum materials."

There are also lots of unintended consequences of the use of the new learning technologies.

"Custodians at schools see the kids using the Internet," Graham Keegan said, "and they go online and get their GED diploma. It's a wonderful thing."

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Gene J. Koprowski covers technology for UPI Science News. E-mail sciencemail@upi.com