What are secondary students’ expectations for teachers in virtual school environments?

Abstract

A recent evaluation of the new North Carolina Virtual Public School (NCVPS) in the USA revealed numerous expectations for virtual school teachers from secondary students. Specifically, students expected their teachers to actually teach rather than moderate a course shell, supplement course shells with content and projects that illustrate relevance, provide for both content and peer interaction, and respond to questions and provide feedback quickly. The data suggest a possible content‐related interaction where a limited course shell can be bolstered by a proactive teacher, but potentially flounder among teachers who do not expect or know how to supplement an online course. Data further suggest a potential communication‐related interaction where increased opportunities for student–student and student–teacher interaction could potentially decrease the actual or perceived need for individualized attention that is particularly challenging for virtual teachers to provide. These results can be used to establish teacher expectations and design professional development experiences that prepare teachers to undertake divergent roles unique to online instruction.

Keywords:

• virtual schooling
• distance education
• evaluation
• student expectations
• teacher quality
• communication

Acknowledgements

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction provided the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation with funding for the evaluation of NCVPS.

Notes

1. Further, given a 32% response rate (n = 1648), many additional respondents with substantially different views would be required to alter the basic tenor of the results. In fact, the results were generally positive (satisfaction‐related items on a Likert scale of 1–5 averaged around 4), indicating that if there is bias, we missed many hundreds of strongly dissatisfied students. Yet in survey research, we tend to assume those who are strongly dissatisfied are most likely to respond when given an opportunity. In all, this leads us to believe that this sample is not substantially biased.

2. In general, validation is not required when engaging in survey research of this nature because we were not measuring latent constructs, but rather soliciting attitudes and impressions, and because these questions were developed in concert with experts from NCVPS.

3. Other analyses, reported elsewhere, indicate that teachers were significantly more positive about their teaching performance than students, but not substantially so.

4. Of course, this issue is not unique to virtual classrooms.