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Room for Debate - Can Young Students Learn From Online Classes?

Last week's New York Times Room for Debate - Can Young Students Learn From Online Classes? - had some interesting perspectives on online learning, particularly for middle and high school students. I think one of the perspectives was not based on any experience with online learning, but the rest added to the conversation. As with many such online articles, the discussion is as interesting as the main articles. Maybe they'll do one on "Can young children learn in overcrowded classes?" which I think might be a more relevant topic than this one.

As a parent of a child who completed one semester of 8th grade online through Kaplan, I know there can be challenges with online classes for young students. He suffered through 30 different teachers in 5 weeks for the 6 courses he was in! Imagine starting each week with a new teacher and sitting through a different live presentation about how each class would work every week for 5 weeks. Not a good thing. He also had to deal with auto-graded Spanish tests which ignored all accent marks and incorrectly marked every answer he submitted with the proper accent mark as wrong. When I pointed that error out, I got no response from the principal and as far as I know, every student in the Spanish class was graded incorrectly unless they also complained about the error.


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