2.3 Towards the virtual k-12 educational organization: an emerging  (Page 3/11)

The emerging k-12 educational organization

This school district was actively adopting technology and software as integrated, and integral, components of the traditional bureaucratic hierarchical brick and mortar system of schooling. Not only was technology changing the nature of teaching and learning, aspects of the educational organization were being replaced by software that extended the nature of school organization into virtual management, virtual leadership, virtual pedagogy, and virtual learning that resulted in online and hybrid courses that, taken together, were an extension of the local school and school district. This study indicated that this K-12 educational organization was taking technology beyond a useful application of computers as one-dimensional tools to an emerging multi-dimensional media rich structure (or potentially structures) that extended learning into a personalized digital educational experience.

The infrastructure of the more digital k-12 educational organization

The infrastructure of the K-12 educational organization in this school district was beginning the transition to a blended structure in support of virtual learning. This transition began to accelerate with the convergence of (1) connectivity to the Internet, (2) dynamic use of software for learning, and (3) a desire to provide high quality individualized and personalized learning. High quality software made possible, through the Internet, a more individualized learning experience. Expectations for learning were moving to a point that school administrators began utilizing laptop computers as integral tools for learning. As one administrator stated:

"When you give a kid an assignment that would benefit from a computer, I want that kid to have a computer available to him at that moment so he can do it. So we have the responsibility to have that . . . to have that available to students. And the other piece is we have to make sure that we have a connection so that it’s efficient, and high speed . . . it’s at least as good as what a kid’s going to experience outside the school. We have to make sure it’s working all the time."

The infrastructure issue meant that in this district the computer would become on-demand for student use all day long every day of the school year. It meant that the educational organization was intending to build, and would continue to build, a structured network of servers, wires, towers, routers and personnel to maintain and support on-demand use for multiple classes of students who required Internet connectivity. The question that needed to be answered was: “What must the educational organization build or implement in order to establish the capacity to support multiple users for all day every day learning?” Another administrator indicated that organizational support required a rethinking of learning support.

"Well, from a pure technology standpoint we need to be able to have the right kinds of access, the right kinds of speeds for broadband access, for example. We need to have a reliable infrastructure and we need to have reliable access to the tools, resources, programs that students and/or a teacher might leverage . . . So you can have a beautifully designed network that doesn’t take into consideration the fact that three science classes might be teaching the same class at the same time down on the science wing. So, it’s not just thirty kids that are going to watch that video independently at their own pace. We now have one hundred and twenty kids that are going to watch that video. So we have to take into account capacity as a part of reliability as well."