Reporting tools/progress monitoring: These tools help teachers learn how students are understanding lessons. They monitor student performance and help educators understand if additional intervention is necessary. These tools can offer immediate and specific feedback to help educators personalize instruction for students.
Availability of teachers to assist struggling students: Teacher assistance can help struggling students from becoming too frustrated or disengaged. This is important in fully-online and blended learning programs.
Instructors who are well-trained in delivering online courses: Classroom teaching does not translate to online teaching, and educators must be specifically trained to teach online. These unique requirements include working with online curriculum, online collaboration, and other tools to help differentiate learning.
Offering rigorous and engaging curriculum: An engaging curriculum helps students remain involved in their lessons, move forward, and focus on learning. Proper design ensures that different methods are available to deliver content to different learning styles.
Sixty-six percent of respondents with district-level roles, or those most often making spending decisions, said online learning is less expensive or costs the same as traditional learning, and 22 percent said they do not know what online education programs cost.
The vast majority of districts use curriculum from commercial vendors for online credit recovery (88 percent), online courses (85 percent), and full-time online programs (82 percent).
Seventy-six percent of responding districts offer or have experience with an online credit recovery program. Sixty-six percent offer or have experience with online courses, and 36 percent offer or have experience with a full-time online program. Eight-four percent of districts with 10,000 or more students offer online credit recovery, as compared to 67 percent of small districts and 77 percent of medium-sized student districts. This difference, the report notes, might be owing to the fact that larger districts, typically urban, have more transient populations with higher dropout rates that increase the need for online credit recovery programs.
The survey responses also revealed a number of needs that aren’t being met in respondents’ online learning programs:
- As ESSER spending increases, digital learning is a priority - June 1, 2023
- 5 fun STEM videos for hard-to-engage students - May 31, 2023
- Survey highlights troubling teacher morale issues - May 31, 2023