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Education is made up of several tiers, beginning with grade school. Grade school is broken down from preschool, elementary school (kindergarten through third grade), middle school (fourth through eighth grade), and high school (ninth through twelfth grade). Beyond grade school, education is optional, however more expensive. One can obtain a four-year degree through an undergraduate program, and go on to seek a master’s degree from a graduate school’s program. (ADD SOURCE)

Undergraduate and Graduate School:

Focusing on undergraduate and graduate programs, virtual school is far from a foreign experience. Many universities have online classes offered, and there have been many successes come from this. One of the biggest issues in virtual school for higher education is participation and sense of community considering most online students participate through a cell phone or laptop screen. Some universities and experts on virtual school have attempted to come up with ways to encourage students to participate, for example “distance learning tuition has depended on engaging the student in active learning by embedding activities in the course readings, with feedback on the assessment task providing the opportunity for interaction with a tutor.” (Robinson 2009). Another example of participation and student engagement would be “the study by Chen et al. (2010), based on data linked to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in the United States, argued that there is a positive relationship between the use of learning technology, student engagement and outcomes of learning.” (Kahn 2016). Student engagement is simply referring to how hard students try in school, in this instance when it is online versus in person. The experiment found that higher education students try harder when their classes are taught through the usage of technology. Virtual school has also been considered informal in some systems, considering face-to-face learning is the more traditional education option. There is a difference seen between in person and virtual schooling, however, and higher education has come to help both succeed. In the example of higher education utilizing both in person and virtual schooling or online education, “It has likewise become a platform for both campus based as well as open and distance universities to reach a global audience, breaking down traditional geographic and spatial–temporal barriers to professional development and learning by offering convenient and flexible programming.” (Peters 2019).

History:

In Australia during 2011, one college facility worked on integrating “Second Life” into their online education to promote student engagement in an online classroom, essentially into virtual school, as well as into face to face learning. “Second Life” is essentially a virtual reality style system that uses a 3D environment to engage the students and help feel more involved and intrigued. The journal study published on it explains Second Life, “Developed by Linden Labs, users can access SL through the Web for no cost, as the software is free to download. Users create an avatar, a computer-generated persona of themselves (Childs 2010), that represents both their presence in SL and their identity (Dickey 2003). It also acts as the ‘camera’ (Dickey 2003, 107) or eyes of the user to view the 3D virtual environment.” (Matthews 2012). In regards to how virtual school came to be, one graduate program known as U21Global took advantage of upgrades needing to be done to help integrate virtual schooling more seamlessly into their curriculum back in 2008. This graduate program approached it from a technological standpoint to allow the students to utilize the system without fear of a poor system crashing, as well as having it be more sustainable and having a smaller hardware footprint. The implantation of their system called Red Hat Enterprise Linux allowed the system engineer to publicly state, “we met our goals for a high-performance virtualization implementation that is stable, reliable, scalable and secure.” (Virtual graduate school exploits data center visualization 2009). This is an excellent example that fully online courses and programs for higher education have been in place for more than a decade.

Conclusion:

Virtual school has a vast array of uses, ranging from grades schools to graduate school for master’s programs. There are many different online resources ranging from Zoom, that can be used by everyone of all ages, to the original setup of Red Hate Enterprise Linux utilized in a graduate program. High school and collegiate virtual schools can resemble each other in a way, however, the biggest difference in the teacher’s involvement in guiding the students to focus as well as the difficulty in material. In college, virtual school is the easiest way to view a lecture and ask questions. Most high school zoom classes are more interactive, with questions ranging from math one on one help, to breakout groups to do the PowerPoint equivalent of a poster board project. The concept from virtual school isn’t new, however, due to the technological advancements, the virtual school system is far more prepared to be utilized by a mass crowd than ever before.