How To Get Started With Virtual Education

Virtual education is changing the face of today's schools. Students can take Italian online, work in a virtual chemistry lab, and do group projects with other students hundreds or thousands of miles away. Schools that are not yet involved in virtual education will find it easier than they might think to offer these opportunities to their students. Schools that sign up to use a comprehensive virtual education platform like the IQity Learning Management Suite, can begin offering web-based classes easily and economically.

Degrees of Virtual Education

Virtual education can mean a school that is entirely online, serving students who never set foot in a physical school building. Or it can mean that students take some classes online, such as specialized courses for which a teacher is not available at their bricks-and-mortar school. Virtual education can even mean a blended learning environment where some aspects of a class, like a chemistry lab, are offered online while the teacher presents other parts of the course in the traditional classroom.
Regardless of how extensive your first venture into virtual education may be, you need to make sure that the content of your online class is aligned with state standards. Working with a virtual education provider like IQity makes this simple. The IQity Learning Management Suite comes with a learning object repository called Reactor that provides teachers a wide choice of lessons already aligned with state standards. With a few clicks of the mouse, teachers can search Reactor for lessons they want to use, transfer the lessons to their virtual classroom, and assign them to students.

The Virtual Classroom

Virtual education requires a computer solution to common educational tasks like enrolling students in classes, monitoring attendance, assigning homework, grading tests, and so on. Schools use administrative software called a Learning Management System (LMS) to perform these virtual education tasks. It is important to choose your LMS carefully so that your costs are minimized, both from a financial point of view and in terms of how much time your teachers spend administering their virtual classroom versus how much time they have available for students.

The IQity LMS is easy for anyone with basic computer skills to use. Getting started in virtual education is as simple for teachers as using their home computer to email friends and surf the Internet. IQity automates many tasks, such as keeping track of how much time each student spends logged on, grading certain kinds of quizzes and tests, and maintaining a grade book. A secure messaging system makes it easy to communicate with students, and the web-casting tool allows teachers to address the class in real-time.

Costs of Web-Based Teaching

Some LMS solutions are much more costly than others. An LMS that requires a license for each user can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. "Free" open source software can actually be quite expensive, because schools need to install in on their own servers and take responsibility for making sure their virtual school is available 24/7. The IQity Learning Management Suite is free to schools and school districts. To see how IQity can help your school get started in virtual education, schedule an online demonstration led by an elearning expert.