Last month I was very fortunate to see another aspect of online teaching and learning that is just as revolutionary as what’s occurring today in higher education: our country’s virtual high school movement.

The University of California College Preparatory Initiative - a project of the University of California based at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which provides online Advanced Placement and Honors courses to under-served populations in California, hosted the Virtual High School Summer Institute 2002. This 2.5-day Institute was supported by the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET) and funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. More than 50 virtual high school leaders from across the country, representing 20 states, were in attendance.

I attended the Institute as part of a group from Knowledge Base, LLC. Together with the Clovis Unified School District, we had written a 120-page study that was distributed to Institute attendees, titled "The California Virtual School Report: A National Survey of Virtual Education Practice and Policy with Recommendations for the State of California." As part of my work on the study, I had interviewed about 20 virtual high school educators, directors and principals from a wide variety of states. Now I was meeting 50 more people involved with virtual high schools, as well as listening to and recording their presentations and discussions for a synopsis I wrote titled "Summary of Proceedings from the Virtual High School Summer Institute 2002."

The information gleaned from all this has major implications inside higher education, particularly within schools and colleges of education, as well as other higher education entities that provide professional development to K-12 teachers.

One major concern revolves around training high school teachers how to supplement their classrooms with technology as well as teach fully online courses. Part of the problem is that many high school students are more web savvy than their teachers.

Many Institute attendees felt that today’s schools and colleges of education were missing the boat on this very important issue. One attendee explained how the increasing number of enrollments in virtual high schools makes schools and colleges of education nervous. Why? Two reasons: Higher education is not prepared for the growing influx of educational technology savvy students about to enter their programs; and higher education is not prepared to teach pre-service teachers how to effectively use technology in education.

Other attendees explained how there is a need for schools and colleges of education to take the cost and time of training high school teachers in uses of technology off the backs of the virtual high schools as they experience state budget cuts and a serious lack of resources and infrastructure to do their own teacher training.

Another attendee voiced a differing opinion, saying that K-12 should not necessarily look toward higher education to help with the training of virtual high school teachers because higher education, in general, has not yet figured out how to effectively train its own faculty.

Other important issues discussed at the Institute were course development and course leasing. Virtual high schools, with their limited budgets and staffs, seem to be hard pressed to develop their own online courses, so they lease online courses from for-profit companies.

A number of higher education institutions such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Texas at Austin, and others are making significant strides in the area of virtual high school course development by helping to create sophisticated online courses for schools in their states, but it looks like for-profit companies such as Apex Learning and Class.com are making the most headway in leasing fully developed and tested online courses to virtual high schools.

Finally the Institute has set the stage for starting up a national virtual K-12 organization, and more people in online higher education should take notice of this and perhaps become involved. After all, be it virtual 9th grade or virtual grade 16, the numbers of educational technology savvy students are moving pretty fast, and educators at both levels need to maintain the pace.