Online courses for high school students?

The Governor of Minnesota recently announced that he would like all high school students to take at least one online course while in high school (see http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/10/23/pawlenty/). He discussed the fact that all colleges are now offering and the tech savvy generation of K-12 students should do the same. However, I think that the average high school student will not do well in this environment. Taking an online course requires one to be very responsible and diligent in keeping up, completing assignments, etc. I am not sure that the average high school student will be very good at this on their own.

I do think that maybe this can work for AP courses or in a highly supervised environment initially. For example, maybe a teacher can meet once a week but have students work independently the other four days. The other thing that I think is most important is for high school teachers to incorporate technology and independent, technology-related activities into their lessons so that students are prepared for online courses in college.

NETS

I had the opportunity to review the NETS technology standards in education. I think they were all good concepts but frankly think they were awfully general and unfortunately, the fact that they are not part of the NJCCCS makes it less likely that they will actually be fulfilled intentionally. However, I do think that most good teachers these days do incorporate technology into their lessons both because it might make their lessons easier to implement and also because the students might be able to related and find it more interesting. The Technology Literacy NJCCCS standards are those that must be implemented and are most likely to be carried out. Inherent in those are some of the concepts in NETS but again, I think NETS is more conceptual which is sometimes hard to ensure implementation.