Virtual high school becomes a reality for Israeli math and science students
Teacher’s CET
CET views the project as an innovative pedagogic experiment, explains executive director Gila Ben-Har: “In reality, a new pedagogy is developing here - how a teacher who does not see the student face-to-face teaches a group of students.”
Significant progress has been made in locating where students have difficulty, she added: “One of the hardest things is to understand what is happening when a student gets 60s or 70s - what doesn’t he understand? Since they work after the class in small groups, it is possible to understand the problems and difficulties,” said Ben-Har.
The Education Ministry hopes the investment in developing the course content can help all Israeli students in the future, once such content can be integrated into regular classroom lessons, or through homework. Then it will be able to make use of the system of supervision and tracking, and it will also be possible to know exactly who has done their homework.
Such a system could also be used to help prevent students from dropping out of science studies. For example, there is a large abandonment of science classes between the 10th and 12th grades - over 50 percent of physics students stop learning the subject and never take the physics matriculation exam.
The vast majority of the students in the virtual physics classes will continue on in 11th grade, but this is the year with the highest dropout rate for the subject. Eli Hurvitz, the executive director of the Trump Foundation, believes this is the first significant test the program will have to face.
However, the virtual high school cannot completely replace the classroom teacher, says Hurvitz. “Studying in a virtual high school is not appropriate for everyone. To learn through a computer requires much more motivation and effort on the student’s part. If the virtual high school succeeds, our maximum goal is 2,700 students – that’s a very low percentage.
“The main solution, in which we are doing the most work, is training good teachers. There is no replacement for this,” added Hurvitz.
Yarden Skop