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Last year I sat in the opening keynote at NACOL’s Vitrual School Symposium while NACOL’s President Susan Patrick spoke about the emergence of WiMax in China. This will reportedly provide high-speed Internet access across a 50 kilometer radius (sixty Wimax towers would cover a state the size of Pennsylvania). This will allow China to carry out their plans to dramatically increase their use of online learning to educate their children.
So what this means is that the type of online learning you can provide in areas covered by WiMax would dramatically change. No longer will you need to worry about sticking to static images and text as the primary delivery method for students in largely rural environments. Flash-based interactive instruction is possible. So is streaming video, for that matter. Imagine how streaming video of several students at a time via web cam can close the transactional There is still an infrastructure used by many districts nationwide in the US that uses cable TV and satelite link-ups to provide this now, When this level of video instruction is used, students often have to travel to centers to access it – which is a bit at odds with one of the largest benefits of online education: accessibility.
Wimax could be a piece of the puzzle that leads to true equality in access. Kid in cities like Baltimore already benefit from having high-speed access throughout most of the city. Kids in your town can be next. All of this is possible – as long as bureaucracy and greed do not get in the way of effective and fair deals leading to equalizing access for all citizens.

No – I’m not here to stump for McCain, Obama or even Nader (am I the only one who was surprised to see that name on the ballot?).

Instead – in the spirit of the election – I want to talk about choosing a different kind of candidate: your online school program’s next teacher.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently spent three months as a High School program administrator, starting up the school year for an existing online school run by my employer. One of the most important tasks I faced was that of hiring new online teachers. In trying to fill these positions I learned some valuable lessons: Read more »