Digitize This! (Can online education be better than in-person?)

The Hypothesis

Last year, we gathered our school community every full moon to update them on our plans and engage them in critical conversations. We're the Coyotes. We'd even all howl at the end of the meeting. At our gathering last March, I asked how many families were interested in keeping their students online in the upcoming school year. This year. I presented a possibility for a school within a school, nearly entirely online, with a dedicated faculty and staff. We would serve students in grades 5-8, where we believed the need would be greatest. Within the next 36 hours, the families of 101 students were signed up as interested. Of course, we knew that the conditions around the pandemic would change in ways we couldn't predict between March and August, but we decided to develop the project anyway. We gave it a name that captured the moment. We call it "The Academy of Extraordinary Circumstance". This year, we are asking a lot of questions of it as the future of The Academy is unclear. It was designed to address a community need in a very particular moment in time, but its usefulness may not yet be totally clear.
In this episode, we'll explore the still open question of the effectiveness of online learning - specifically two questions:
1) Can online learning be as effective or even more effective than in-person learning?
2) Has the pandemic changed the way we think about the actual purpose of education for students in grades 5-8?
Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico.