I am going to include this link because it touches at the heart of so much of the debate about online learning, even if it is not about online learning. The story, in a nutshell, is that students at a Catholic school received extra course credit for taking part in an anti-abortion demonstration outside an abortion clinic. Now before you respond with joy or outrage - I have seen students recieve credit for working for such causes as international development (indeed, I recieved credit for that, many years ago), the promotion of multiculturalism, raising money for Oxfam, and more. Now part of what is good about online learning is that it gets students out of the classroom and in the community. But online learning is being used to encourage a proliferation of specialist schools - CRLFcharter schools in Massachusetts, for example, or privatized schooling in Philadelphia. Well, OK, but... when you have a lot of different schools, you have a lot of different social, cultural and political agendas... and the simple idea of getting students into the community becomes the complex idea of using students to advance these causes... and even that is fine, if it's the student's choice: but more and more, it becomes the parent's choice, or the school's choice, because the students are on the bad side of a power imbalance. Something to think about.
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