NESA Virtual School - An Exciting Year of Trial and Transition
Read the Winter Update on page 2 of the Winter 2010 NESA NEWS
NVS at the Fall Leadership Conference in Athens
Fall Update 2009
The fall 2009 meeting of the NESA Virtual School administrative group, representing 14 of the currently 17 participating schools, took place in Athens at the NESA Fall Leadership Pre-Conference, October 20th and 21st. Our agenda included the requisite "administrivial" but necessary procedural items as well as two main agenda items - to discuss our experiences with school closures this fall due to the H1N1 situation, and to consider whether we might migrate the NVS Project from Blackboard to Moodle.
Regarding H1N1 closure experiences, our group overall had very successful experiences using our NVS platform to sustain ongoing academic instruction online. Most of the schools involved had the working advantage of having the faculty and tech support staff at school, even though the students were home, which allowed for both a very rapid "professional growth" experience, and for a relatively high caliber teaching environment. We tried to share various aspects of these experiences to help each other consider ways to best approach a similar situation "next time".
As regards to a possible transition to Moodle from Blackboard, our efforts have three possible outcomes:
* we are ready to make a transition for the 2010-2011 school year
* we postpone a possible transition until the 2011-2012 school year
* we decide against a transition for now
Our areas of approach to the task of studying a transition are:
1. Credibility - learning from reputable institutions (such as UNC) who did a similar transition
2. Comparing Blackboard to Moodle as thoroughly as possible - from administration to ease of use
3. Studying "interoperability" with Moodle - how well it can be integrated with other school systems, particularly school information systems
4. Finding and pricing ASP services comparable in reliability to Blackboard ASP
5. Developing a healthy transition process which meets our timelines
The NVS schools will continue to rely upon and to use our Blackboard system to our best advantage this year. We are all very pleased with the spirit and unity of our group in forging ahead with this groundbreaking project.
Please direct any questions about the overall strategies and implementations of this project to Kenny Paynter, NESA Virtual School Project Manager, at nvsproject@gmail.com