VESC Ep16: Using the National Standards for Quality Online Learning in K-12 Virtual Education

Cynthia Hamblin, Director of the Virtual Learning and Leadership Alliance (VLLA) and John Ashworth, Executive Director of Virtual Arkansas share about the history and continual improvement of the National Standards for Quality Online Learning. Released in 2019, these revised standards for quality have been downloaded over 20K times during the COVID-19 pandemic. Practical application of the standards by online educators, synchronous and asynchronous learning, and professional development opportunities are discussed. Visit the National Standards for Quality Online Teaching portal powered by 2gnoMe to access free professional development resources aligned to the online teaching standards. Blog: A University Professors Perspective on Online Teaching

Transcript

Amy Lyn  0:02  
Best brings you exciting and practical tips for improving your virtual teaching and virtual learning experience. 

Hello, everyone and welcome to today's podcast. I'm excited to be here with two guests, Cindy Hamlin and John Ashworth. Cindy is the director of the Virtual Learning Leadership Alliance. The Alliance is a nonprofit association that brings together leaders of some of the most innovative virtual schools in the United States. In 2018 to 2019, the association collaborated with quality matters, and in 2019, revised and republished  the national standards for quality online learning. 

John Ashworth is one of those contributing members. He's the executive director of virtual Arkansas, in 2020, virtual Arkansas was recognized by Quality Matters, with the making a difference for students outstanding impact by a K 12. organization or individual. It is such a pleasure and honor to have both of you here today. Thank you so much for joining us. Could you say a little more about yourself, Cindy?

Cindy Hamlin  1:08  
Sure. And thank you for inviting us, I'm always excited to share more about the national standards for quality, and the impact that can make for districts and students. Actually, I am a secondary educator, but have spent most of my life in the field of educational technology. In 2009, I actually had the opportunity to lead Illinois State virtual school as the director. And just to clarify our members, types of programs, they're all state wide or large consortium supplemental online programs. That really means the students remain enrolled in their local public or private school. And the students typically take one or two online courses to supplement their schedule. So just to clarify kind of the types of programs we have, of course, with the pandemic, all the members jumped in and provided many more support services to local districts. I will mention the Alliance are really our mission is to enhance and support quality online learning. So with the national standards, this was a natural fit for our group.

 Amy Lyn 2:19  
It's a great, and you were mentioning an example of some of that work that was being done right before we started the podcast. Did you want to say anything else about that? I thought that was an interesting situation.

Cindy Hamlin  2:31  
Sure, I was I was sharing the fact that North Carolina virtual school, one of our districts actually jumped in with a wide range of training opportunities, just over lunch kind of webinars where teachers could jump in, that we're having to move from their traditional classroom to online, and just give me little tips. They're one of many of them that the provided that kind of support to districts. So

Amy Lyn 2:57  
it's really wonderful to share that. Yes. It's really wonderful to hear about that. I know, having worked in a rural school, how challenging it was to make that transition. And, John, can you tell us a little more about yourself as well?

John Ashworth  3:11  
For sure. I'm in my 22nd year of education started out as a biology teacher in brick and mortar school. Really love that love, love advanced placement. My advanced placement courses anatomy, so so I love science, became an administrator later in my career. And I can remember when I was first an administrator, I read an article that said by it was something like 2025, half of students will be taking an online course. Well, we're there we've passed that right. So you know, my first my first experiences with digital learning was with a smaller rural school. And, and it was delivered over compress interactive video. And so it's a lot different. It was a lot different back then than it is now. But I could see what a benefit just by just through that we were able to offer two additional electives for our students. 

And that was a big deal for us to be able to offer additional electives, and that was important, especially for a rural school. So I saw the benefit of that, then I go to a larger school district. And you know, I was able to implement a new online learning program in the state was offering it was virtual Arkansas that never knew that I would be working with and Ford virtual Arkansas at the time. But we implemented that we increased our electives. It was something like 2324 electives, just with one decision, and so that that was a big deal. So So that's kind of that's kind of how I got into into virtual learning. I saw the impact that it was made making with our students. And, you know, the the real reason why I really wanted to be involved with virtual learning. My last year, as a principal at this high school, we're able to offer five of our students graduated with associates of art degrees. 

And I remember thinking just down the road here, we have real schools that cannot offer one college credit hour to their students. And so I knew that that was a major, a major equity factor in education, and I wanted to be involved. And so that prompts me to join virtual Arkansas, and here I am loving it.

Amy Lyn  5:54  
I hear you loud and clear. Back in the 90s, I was a first year teacher where the virtual High School in Massachusetts was founded. And I heard those same things that you're saying. And I continue to see that play out throughout my career. It really does help to offer students in more places, more courses. And we see that with the advanced placement courses, and then just the variety of courses, right, yeah, really? Yeah, it's so exciting.

Cindy Hamlin  6:21  
And if I could piggyback me if that's okay. When I hear the passion with John, it takes me back to when I was the director of Illinois virtual school, and the number of calls I would get from desperate parents, I'm looking for an alternative for my student that for health or variety reasons, just could not attend school as the normal student. And there wasn't, we were a supplemental program, we did not provide a diploma. So seeing districts now begin to implement programs to support those students to ensure all students have some path to graduation that works best for them. It's so exciting. And I'm so glad we're finally getting to that point.

Amy Lyn  7:06  
I couldn't agree more. Thank you for saying that. It's true. So let's start with talking a little bit about the history of the standards for quality online learning. Um, can you talk about that, Cindy, and the revision process and research behind those standards? 

Cindy Hamlin  7:24  
Sure. As I mentioned, our association, the Alliance, a really is pushing for quality online learning. I mean, this group offers half a million enrollments every year, and that's of course, pre pandemic. And so they wanted to ensure that what is happening out there is is of quality. In 2018, as you mentioned in the introduction, we partnered with quality matters to update the national standards for quality. And the online standards actually include three standard sets, there is online programs, online teaching, and online courses. 

And all three are meant to complement each other, and are designed really to provide that framework for schools and districts, or even online programs to design and evaluate their program include guidance for online teachers and the professional learning programs, they offer teachers, and to develop effective engaging online courses. So just a little history. In 2006, the Southern Regional Educational board actually put out the first set of teaching standards. Then that was taken over by ima called this is now the Aurora Institute. 

They updated the program standards in 2009. And then the teaching and course standards in 2011. And that was the last time they were updated. And as we all know, things changed. They became a standard for schools. But technology changes how we know instructional pedagogy in the online environment enhances. So we partnered, as we said with quality matters, and decided we needed to update those standards took us about a little over a year, with a very rigorous process of review. You mentioned research, each standard set did have a literature review created and that was one of the guiding elements for the teams working to review each standard, and then make recommendations for the future or for the update. When we brought teams together we had over 200 volunteers across the country and Nate and the globe. So we had some international volunteers come in. 

And that would include practitioners partnered with researchers. So it was a great combination, have the two of those teams to go through and update and make recommendations to the standards. So those were released in 2019. All three sets just in time for what needs Any more jumped into especially our teachers with the pandemic. I haven't looked in the last little bit through our Google Google Analytics, excuse me, Google Analytics, we had over, you know, close to 20,000 downloads of the teaching standards, just during this pandemic of teachers really looking for guidance.

Amy Lyn  10:22  
That makes a lot of sense and so timely, what the the luck that was involved in that timeliness is kind of kind of outstanding and amazing. Really glad that that was there for people to use as a resource. Can you I'm going to also put a link in the or there will be a link to those standards in the description of this podcast if people are interested in downloading those or looking at them, as well as a link to Cindy's organization, the Alliance. Cindy, can you say a little bit more about planning for the future. And, John, if you want to chime in, please feel free.

Cindy Hamlin  11:00  
I'm sure. So part of our commitment with the standards was not only to update, but to keep them maintained. And I would I would mention, we do have a new partner that's just joining the two organizations. And that's the Digital Learning Collaborative. So they'll be joining us here as we start to maintain those standards over time. One thing that we are that's guiding our decision on when things are refreshed or revised, is the research. So we're going to constantly look at research out there. With this pandemic, we know we're going to see much more what worked what needs to work better, what did we learn as we moved into a not only emergency remote, but as we start building a quality online programs in schools. So we'll be using that research to kind of be our test to see when we really need to jump in and revise those standards. I do envision a few other resources to go with the standards, supporting documents. So as we were looking at online, as we're seeing more hybrid and some other types of environments emerge, I think we'll we'll do some crosswalks to help users that may not be totally online in an asynchronous online course, with some guidance, and how they the standards and indicators support them, as well as case studies. So right now, we are really seeking How are districts implementing the standards and trying to share those stories, so others can connect to see how they best can implement the standards.

Amy Lyn  12:43  
Okay, that sounds great. I'm wondering, does John, how are your educators using the standards is that something that you could give an example or maybe talk a little bit about the professional development that that educators receive on the standard?

John Ashworth  12:58  
It drives everything I can remember, you know, we're talking about national standards of quality, we also look at the standards of online courses from Quality Matters. So those are the types of thing we we want to use standards that are nationally recognized, and that point us in the right direction. You know, I was I was thinking, you know, as a parent, you can be talking to another parent in a parent can say my child is good in what's your frame of reference for good. So we're where that child is good to one parent as child's not very good to another parent, what's the frame of reference, we need a frame of reference to tell us what quality is right. And so and so this is it's, you know, I like to call it our North Star or our compass, this, this points us in the right direction. And so it it guides, everything that we do everything that we do, if you talk about our courses, we want, we want the the national standard quality for online courses, to be our framework to be what we're gearing everything towards professional development, we want our professional development based around those standards. So yeah, absolutely everything that we do ties in to those to those standards, and it drives our decision making draws how we do things, and why we do things in our organization.

Amy Lyn  14:23  
That's great. That helps us to have a vision of what that looks like, you know, in the field. I'm circling back to something you said, Cindy, I want to mention that vesc We have a team of recent researchers that are about to embark on a study of secondary students through the lived experiences of educators during COVID. So we'll be hopefully having some information to contribute to the field. Because we agree we're seeing that, excuse me, people needed to make some pretty quick changes and to really adjust, not just you know, the teaching, you know, where they're doing the teaching, but how they're doing the teaching. Trying to take what we're doing in the classroom and then do that online. It doesn't always transfer as easily as some people might think that it does. And I'm hoping that we can talk a little bit about that. So distinguishing aspects of, of effective synchronous Virtual Education. Um, is there something that John or Cindy would like to say about that? 

John Ashworth  15:21  
I'll start there. You know, when we're talking about synchronous learning, so let me talk about online learning. In general, there's two major major components, because you have your asynchronous learning, obviously, that's going to be done. Without a teacher sitting in front of you, that's extremely important, that has to be done well, for the course to go well, for the student. And for that experience, to be a fantastic experience. But the synchronous component for us has to be has to be a great experience for the student, as well, because that for us, that's, that's a main area where those relationships are developed. But when I think about the synchronous component of online learning, 

I don't see it as much different than than a lot of the strategies that are utilized in a brick and mortar school, they're very similar. How do you get students motivated? in their, in their courses? Well, you use strategies to make it fun and interesting, you know, are an easy way. When I was the director of academics, we talked about the synchronous synchronous component a lot. And there was four things that I said, we want to see the students do in these synchronous session sessions, we want to see them read, write, speak. 

And listen, if you can get all those components in there, you're going to have an interactive, interesting session. And when I say read, write, speak. And listen, I don't want the teacher reading, and speaking, and doing all those things, we want the students to do those things. And so if they're just, if they're dedicated to making and putting together planning, and that's a huge part of it, you can't just jump in into a synchronous session, expect it to go well, you have to put thought and energy into it, we have a lot of our teachers that use a strategy. That's, that's often used in in brick and mortar classrooms. It's where you have students in the center. So in a brick and mortar environment, you will have students in the center. And then you'll have other students around the edges. Socratic sessions, I knew. 

And so that's, you know, we did that a lot in a brick and mortar environment where the students in the center are having a conversation, you give them a prompt, they have a conversation, the students on the outside are invited later to come in and provide their input on that conversation. And so there's a lot of interesting things that come out of that. Well, if you think outside of the box, as as an online teacher, you can do things like that, in an online environment, where you ask your students on the outside, turn their cameras off, and the ones on the inside their cameras are on. And the ones on the inside are having a robust, wonderful conversation, and then you invite the others to join in their strategies like that. That that, that teachers, especially new teachers to online learning, they just need to become aware of how you do things.

Amy Lyn  18:39  
Right. Right. I love that strategy. It's one of my favorites from when I was a teacher and when that I worked with a lot of teachers in different schools, before coming to NCU to start to implement strategies like that. But I think sometimes what I saw as a school administrator during COVID, was kind of if that wasn't already happening, and teachers classrooms, and then they tried to transfer their their teaching that looked more like a lecture on to the online environment. It didn't work so well. And a light which sort of shined on the disengagement of students. Did you Was that something that you experienced as well?

John Ashworth  19:23  
Absolutely. We, I mean, we saw that but but that, you know, when this when the pandemic hit, and everybody made the switch, we knew it was going to be difficult and it's not it's not the fault of teachers. I mean, our teachers in an online environment go through extremely robust training. We have a we have a robust and onboarding process to, to get them to learn the new strategies. A lot, a lot of teachers coming on board with us that were brick and mortar they think Well, I'm just gonna, is this gonna be the same thing? And I quickly find out, it's it's much different. There, there are aspects that are, are the same. But it's much different. But that takes training, a lot of training, and a lot of inexperience as well. And so we knew that that was going to be a difficult transition for teachers. And it was it, it turned out to be be a difficult a very difficult transition.

Amy Lyn  20:32  
It is, and I definitely agree with you. It's not the fault of the teachers, as an administrator, I would say, I take that responsibility. You know, if you haven't received the training that's on me, I need to make sure that you do right. So there is definitely shared accountability here. And and teachers are working so so hard. So you bring up though train, you know, I mentioning training, and you're talking about training. And I feel like that's a perfect segue to talk about the professional portal for educator self assessment and training that your organization offers Sunday, would you like to share about that? 

Cindy Hamlin  21:09  
Yes, thank you, Amy, for asking that question. And I just want to piggyback on the conversation we were having, in thinking about what teachers had to do on a Friday, they were teaching face to face in a classroom, Monday had to be online, and thinking about just with no training, how difficult that was. And what they led to was, I'm sitting in front of my class. And that's, that's kind of what I was trying to do in front of the zoom zoom camera, or the zoom meeting. And we know from our experience, how much time in professional learning opportunities we provide our teachers to ensure that they have great communications with their students that they do formative assessment. 

So there's a lot of training to be prepared to be an online teacher, it's just not an easy transition. So I would like to mention a new Professional Learning Portal that's aligned to the national standards for quality we've teamed up with, to know me, it's to G and o MB, to power, some professional learning opportunities that all our alliance members have contributed to teachers come in, they take an assessment of kind of a self reflection tool aligned to each of the standard sets with an online teaching. So this is the online teaching component. And then after they take that assessment, it does guide them with some just in time resources, or some more in depth training, to help them develop those skill sets. To be a more effective online teacher that is free, I'd encourage people to try that out in so to know me, and I know that will be something that will be available in the resource. So professional learning does have to be teamed up with the standards to ensure that teachers are ready.

Amy Lyn  23:01  
Absolutely. And I agree, I think we all share our concern for what teachers have been experiencing and compassion for the challenging situation that they were placed in and, and performed, like continue to show up and perform their work with students. That free resource will be available on vesc and written in the description of this podcast. So please take advantage of this free resource. I know I will be searching it out immediately. So as we wrap up our podcast, I know that we all three of us are advocates for virtual education and see a lot of advantages. But we also understand that has to be designed and facilitated effectively. Can you say sort of in a nutshell, what do you think are the are some of the greatest advantages when it is designed and facilitated? effectively?

John Ashworth  23:56  
I'll take that here. So you know, I'll go back to what I said earlier. I can I can remember after I implemented the online program in my high school, the director of virtual Arkansas times, she Kathy Swan, she liked how we did it. And she said I want you to come talk to the superintendents about that. And so I didn't I can. This was many years ago and I can remember the very first sentence I said to those to those superintendents I said virtual Arkansas and our state virtual Arkansas is the vehicle to equity for for the schools and the students. And that's really, I mean, that's the first thing I'm going to say is virtual learning provides equality in equity and access and opportunity for students throughout the whole state. We have a big focus on our rural students. 

So if you look at the rule school, we Y'all know, the difficulties that are there that they have a lot higher teacher turnover. They're not able to offer the variety of electives that that the urban or suburban schools are able to offer. That have they have a difficult time offering higher level courses like Advanced Placement concurrent credit. So that CTE courses, you know, and so what we are able to do is we're able to address that by opening up the the options, variety of electives and opportunities for those students, essentially, students in our rural schools here in Arkansas can take anything that they want through us. 

And so that's just, you know, knowing that you're part of something that that in which you're able to impact so many students in that way, it's extremely, extremely rewarding. So I would always start out with that, you know, access and opportunity. Online Learning provides access opportunity. But beyond that, there's so many I mean, you can do a podcast just on this, right. I mean, there's, there's so many, so many ways that online learning opens up. opportunities and it for, for local learners, I don't know, I don't know, if you were able to look at the the blog that was put out by the DLC. But john Watson in his group put out a really good blog post about a Harvard professor that talks about his experiences with online learning. Now this, this professor put everything he had into it, did his research about, you know, the the types of strategies you need to implement. But he came back and he said, I'm convinced that online learning is better, and I don't want to go back. And it's really, really impressive his story. But, you know, and flexibility is huge. Flexibility is huge. It's huge for the students, and it's huge for the parents. 

And so I think, I think, you know, we're at a, we're, we're experiencing a paradigm shift, we're at an inflection point where, and when you reach that point, it scares a lot of people. Because they're not familiar with it. But we're at that inflection point. And I think what you're gonna see is that is that this door has been opened to online learning, and it may not be right for some people, but it is for for a lot of others. And so I think, I think just that option available for students or families that that see this as a better option and opportunity for their students. I think, I think that we're not going to close that door. 

And I don't think we should close that door. So it does provide flexibility. One of the things that I always think about is that's not talked a lot about is diversity, there's increased diversity students who don't experience a lot of diversity at their local school, they are immediately embedded with students of different cultures and backgrounds. And that is a great thing for those students to experience at a younger age, because that's the world they're getting ready to enter.

Amy Lyn  28:38  
So it prepares them for that world. We know that that online learning, even in military training, development, most of that, or a lot of it is going to online, it gets them experience with that. And for us, we have a really great connection with the parents that I didn't have as an educator in a brick and mortar because I have a button that I can press that says, copy the Guardian on any communication that I have. And in the the parents have really responded to that. And and, you know, given us feedback on how great that communication was, for them to be able to see and have regular updates in real time on their students. So so there's a lot of advantages, the tech advantages, immediate feedback and a lot of cases that there's just a lot data analysis tools, that that aren't necessarily available in a traditional setting. So there's a lot of advantages to the online to to virtual and online learning. Go ahead, Cindy.

Unknown Speaker  29:54  
I was just gonna say John mentioned several great advantages. I think to me if I just put it in a nutshell Quality online learning provides the opportunity for a more personalized learning experience. That student can go at a pace that they need if they need to spend more time on certain content or need individual support reaching out to their teacher, it does give that mechanism and we all want that more personalized individual student experience. And Virtual Learning done well can provide that.

Unknown Speaker  30:30  
It's great point. Um, yeah, John, I was really captured to, as I think Cindy wants to by the passion that you speak, a virtual education. And just really, in even in what you said, you brought up several things like the communication tool that I wasn't aware of. And I would invite, if there's a couple of teachers that I could interview from virtual Arkansas, I would love to do that I would love to hear firsthand about their experiences, I think our listeners would benefit from that as well. So hopefully, we'll have some future conversation that involves Yeah, then of awesome teachers. And I would also love the the link to that blog, I had not seen that blog, I I will put that it with the description, and also on the best website as well. That sounds like a great resource. I thank you for that. And thank you for your points as well, Cindy, it has been such a pleasure to talk with both of you really an honor to have you here on the podcast and to hear about the work that you're doing. And so I close every podcast with the same sentence, fill in the blank. And john, if you'd like to go first I used to think virtual teaching and learning was now I think virtual teaching and learning is

Amy Lyn  31:49  
well i think that that's a pretty easy, easy one for me. Because long ago, and it's not really it's not really that I thought it was this way, I thought how do you do this, and that is develop relationships with students. So so if I was going to answer that, I would say I used to think it was non relational. And now now I'm, I think the complete opposite. It's, it's it's all about relationships, everything we do in life is about relationships, you know, and as I get older, I like to say this, as I get older, and I'm getting older and older. I find that everything in life is about relationships, I think we were built for relationships, and that is so important in, in, in education, relationships are everything. You know, I always cite a study that that was done, where they go around, they asked the students, you know, what's the number one thing that you that motivates you in the classroom? And the answer is that my teacher cares for me. And, you know, that impacted me so much when we do our intro, or do our surveys of our students, we have anything that you want to get better at you better measure, right, you better get some data on it. And so we ask a question is my teacher, it's a prompt says my teacher cares for me. And so they're able to write that essentially from one to five strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree? When we first did that, many years ago, the very first one, the positive agree, strongly agree with 78%. And I was devastated by that. And so so what do you do with that? Well, you find the strategies to get better at what you want to get better at. And so we implemented strategies to make sure that the students knew that  their parent or  their teachers cared for them. And now we're at about 94%. And so huge grant. And that just goes to show you when you want to improve on something, you put the plans in place, it will happen. So I would say I used to think it was non relational. But now I'd say it's fully relational. It's all about relationships. Thank you. Cindy, do you want to answer
the quick sentence? 

Cindy Hamlin 34:16  
Sure. And john would would take my my thought to I agree that that student, a teacher and student a student relationship is much more enhanced than I originally thought before coming into virtual education. But I'll add one more dimension. to that. I thought from the virtual teaching and learning the actual course. What might be would be easy, but I did not know that. The detail from the instructional design perspective of what it takes for a quality course and making sure the scaffolding is there for students to learn the environment to to know where to put their assignments, to know how to reach out to the team. You're really the various multimedia used the multiple opportunities to interact with content. 

So there's really much more of a science design when developing a quality online course. So that was enlightening and enlightenment to me, as I worked in this environment, both incredibly important points, my backgrounds in STL. So I really love hearing about the relational part, and I couldn't agree more. And then as a course writer, I have experienced what you're talking about. I write courses for MCU and work with instructional designers. And it is it's a challenge, but it is really exciting. Not to be taken lightly. For sure. Take takes a lot of collaborative effort effort.

Amy Lyn  35:47  
And do you think the expectation for just the classroom teacher to write their online course, you know, again, more professional learning opportunities need to be made available as we move forward with this new endeavor?

Cindy Hamlin  36:03  
I agree made available and funded and funded, right? Yes. Not just funded with money, but time allotment? educators, you need that so I couldn't agree more. It's been so wonderful to talk with you. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your expertise with our listeners, and I hope to have many more conversations. Thank you. This has been a blast. Thank you. Thanks Amy, it's been wonderful. 

Thanks for joining us on VESC. This is Dr. Amy Lynn. Remember, learning is right at your fingertips.