XplanaZine

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story today about how online education saved the day in Hong Kong when schools were forced to shut down because of the SARS outbreak.

According to the story, Macromedia Inc. and First Virtual Communications Inc. of Santa Clara have helped thousands of those students keep up with their studies via virtual classrooms conducted over the Internet.

From the comfort of their home computers, students can see their teachers live via a Web cam image on the screen. If the students have a Web cam themselves, they can also be seen by the teacher and other students. Students may also type in questions or comments, as they would during an online chat, and view materials hand-written or posted by the teacher in the classroom on a white board.

This is an interesting case of unfortunate circumstances speeding up a technology (r)evolution already taking place. Hong Kong Education City Limited, a government-funded entity, was already offering Web-based classes for free using First Virtual’s Web conferencing program, Click to Meet Express. In addition, Alex Fung, head of Hong Kong Baptist’s education studies department, accelerated work he and a team of educators had already started in creating an online learning platform called the Virtual Integrated Teaching and Learning Environment, or VITLE.

The result has been the linking of 60 elementary and secondary schools and 6,500 of their homebound students. Even more impressive, using server software from Microsoft and Macromedia’s Flash Communications Server MX 1.5 and ColdFusion MX, Fung and his team were able to get VITLE up and running in two days.

As the Chronicle article reports:

The Hong Kong example may be the first instance in which online learning has been used to replace real classrooms because of a major disruption in the education system. The region could prove to be an e-learning “showcase for other countries,” said Janna Gilbert, director of the Potter’s School, an online school based in Springfield, Va., that has about 1,000 students in 25 countries.
There are, I believe, a couple of important lessons to be learned from this “success” story.

• Successful online education solutions are interactive and utilize a variety of media options both for instructors and students. In the Hong Kong case, students can watch and listen to their teachers “live” via Web cams and respond via video if they have a Web cam of their own. Students and instructors also have built-in text messaging options and e-mail to complement the communications suite. The combination of media options provide everyone with synchronous and asynchronous capabilities that are important to reach all users equally in a distributed education environment;
• Successful online education solutions (technology) must be based on platforms that can be implemented and modified easily and quickly. I have worked with Macromedia’s product and can attest that one of the important factors in this case was the ease with which the Flash Communications Server can be setup, administered, and modified.
• Successful online education is only viable if students have access to it. In this instance, 70 percent of the students in Hong Kong have computer and Internet access at home. Interestingly, this number is not that different from the connectedness of students in the United States. Perhaps this is why it’s not surprising that about one-third of the K-12 grade schools surveyed in a recent Technology in Education report by Market Data Retrieval reported that they offer some distance education for their students.

while the SARS outbreak is tragic and continues to affect the lives of many adversely, it is comforting to know that technology is helping in a small way to help life go on. Students are able to continue learning outside of the traditional classroom. Some of them may even find the experience to be an exciting improvement.