EAST GREENBUSH -- A pair of Tech Valley High School seniors are taking a new online national course that has them completing projects virtually with fellow students across the country.
Alysha Gagnon and Liana Pondillo are taking statistics online through the New Tech Network (NTN) - a first for TVHS and NTN.
While online courses are nothing new, TVHS and NTN don't offer traditional courses and having students learn online through project-based learning and in teams does offer challenges, making the new course an innovative venture for NTN and the students taking the class.
In fact, learning how to manage time zones and virtual communication is as part of the course work as statistics.
"NTN online courses do not follow the 'log in, watch the video, take the quiz and move on to the next lesson' model. At course launch, our facilitators told their students: 'Here are your group members. You don't know them, and they live all over the country, across four time zones. Here's the task you all need to accomplish together, by Friday. Here's a spreadsheet with the email addresses for your classmates'," NTN's Sarah Field wrote in an NTN blog post.
Virtual communication is a key ingredient of the course, agreed TVHS teacher Diana "Dee" Weldon.
"Students across the country are participating which makes team meetings - a key ingredient of project-based learning during which student divvy us assignments and review what they have accomplished and learned - a challenge given the time differences between California and New York," Weldon said.
Though only a week into the course, Gagnon said she and her virtual classmates have already learned valuable lessons.
"Communication is key! I think the next couple weeks will be somewhat easier though, simply due to the fact that we've already started communications with our teammates. Now that we've established these basic 'virtual communication' skills we can start building on other content areas," said Gagnon.
For their first project, Gagnon and Pondillo are "using mode, median, mean to evaluate unemployment" trends across the country.
"I am calculating the measures of central tendency for unemployment in Albany County and sharing it with teammates from different states, who have done the same with their local data. Using our collected data we are analyzing 'national' trends which we will put into a 'newscast'," Gagnon added.
Pondillo said the course is similar to those taught at TVHS in terms of the expectations and learning.
"It's very similar to TVHS in the sense that we're being graded on the same areas such as self direction, communication, content, and everything else, but it's like one giant distance learning day. All of our group meetings are online and sometimes at night based on what time zone each team member is from and when everyone can get online," she said.
Principal Dan Liebert said the innovative class is a big part of what TVHS and NTN are trying to innovate in education - creating an online classroom that allows students to learn together and in hands-on mode no matter what part of the country they live in or whether they live in a rural area or a bustling city.
"Virtually every job today requires some form of online communication and many jobs require people to communicate and work with coworkers who are based around the world. Learning how to learn online and how to communicate on line and overcome all of the obstacles that are created by times zones, etc. is a huge skill these students are mastering," said Liebert.
NEWS10 ABC
