Online Physical Education?
This may sound absurd or impossible, but don’t mention that in Minneapolis where several school districts are already delivering physical education courses that allows students to exercise when and where they want and to email their teachers with the results as part of a standard physical education program (to minimises cheating, parents must validate all information).
Right now Minneapolis Public Schools only offer 27 online courses however the popularity of online learning is so huge that thousands of US school districts are either creating their own or buying in courses that cover everything from Japanese to Advanced Physics.
Online secondary courses are not new with many being developed during the dotcom boom when school districts tried to expand the delivery of Advanced Placement (AP) courses. AP courses are popular with students because they deliver college credits (potentially reducing tuition fees) and for schools it allows their students to be taught by specialists without having to have them employed by the school.
Unfortunately, when the dotcom bubble burst it killed off most of the companies offering online AP courses and it has taken several years for investors to have enough confidence to start backing new ventures like. So what does this tell UK companies? Firstly that there is an international market for content, courses and assessment that they can participate in and secondly that online learning is not restricted to the FE/HE sectors. For example, a similar online physical education scheme might help the government to meet its target of each child having two hours exercise each week. Rather than having to be delivered in schools, student’s extra-curricula activities could be counted.