From Newfoundland to Illinois: The Development of an AP

European History Course for the Illinois Virtual High School

Michael K. Barbour

Centre for Advanced Placement Education

Jim Kinsella

University High School

[This article has been modified from an earlier version.]

Introduction

The state of Illinois is not unlike many jurisdictions throughout the United States and Canada.  While large urban centres, with high student populations, have the ability to offer a wide range of curriculum, many of the schools in rural areas simply do not have the student interest or the teaching allocation to offer much beyond the required curriculum.  In many cases, this excludes these rural students from programmes designed to challenge the small percentage of gifted students in these schools.  Over the past two years, the Illinois Board of Education has embarked upon the creation of a virtual high school.  One of the primary purposes of this body will be to provide rural students with an opportunity to go beyond the required curriculum and have access to some of these enrichment opportunities.

One of these enriched opportunities include courses from the Advanced Placement curriculum.  The Advanced Placement programme, created by the College Board, is designed to provide secondary school students with a college-level course and the opportunity to achieve advanced standing or college transfer credit for success in this course.  While the Illinois Virtual High School entered into agreements with a number of external organisations, such as the Kentucky Virtual High School and the Advanced Placement Excellence (APEX), two teachers were contracted to develop the AP European History course.  One of these teachers was well-known in Illinois for using technology in his teaching of AP European History.  The other teacher was not known in Illinois and not even located in the United States, but in a small, remote part of Canada.

The Province of Newfoundland

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is located on the far east coast of Canada.  It has a long and rich history, being Britain's oldest colony and Canada's youngest province.  The region which Vista School District serves is a large geographic area covering about 7,000 square kilometers.  The region has a population of about 35,000 located in 24 municipalities and about 80 unincorporated communities.[1]  The district has approximately 4500 students being taught by 350 teachers in 18 schools.[2]

As with most schools in rural areas, many of the schools in the Vista School District did not have the required number of students, many were unable to offer such a curriculum (or did so to the disadvantage of other students and teachers, who found larger class sizes to accommodate the few students taking these AP courses).  In this closed environment[3], rural schools could not compete with their larger, urban counterparts.  It was at this point, that the Vista School District embarked on the first of its two online AP initiatives.

As the year 2000 dawned on the Newfoundland and Labrador school system, a Ministerial Panel on Educational Delivery in the Classroom, made the exact same recommendation when it called upon the Government to create a Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation.  At the time of the Ministerial Panel report, the Department of Education offered most of the high school French, mathematics and science courses through distance education.  However, during the same seven year period between these similar government recommendations many school districts, individual schools and educational organisations have made other significant advances in the field of distance education.  The Vista School District is one of the organisations which has been involved in making many of these advances, in particular online course initiatives involving the Advanced Placement curriculum.

Advanced Placement in Newfoundland

The Advanced Placement (AP) program was first introduced to the province of Newfoundland during the 1992-93 school year.  (As a grade 12 student, the author was member of the first class of the AP European History ever offered in the province).  Table 1 indicates several significant trends.  One is that only AP Social Studies course,  European History, was ever offered on a consistent basis.  There were instances where other AP Social Studies courses were offered, for example during the 1998-99 school year ten students enrolled in the Comparative Government and Politics, but these courses were usually discontinued after a year or two (largely due to low subscribership).

Table 1 - Number of Newfoundland Schools Offering AP Courses (by course)

Another trend is that AP Mathematics and Science courses did not experience the same problems on their introduction to the province.  Courses such as AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Mathematics, and AP Physics have not experienced the same growing pains that any of the AP Social Studies courses have.  This has largely been due to a general push in the subjects areas of Mathematics and Science began in May 1989, with the Task Force Report on Mathematics and Science Education, Towards an Achieving Society, which recommended that "some courses be at a more advanced level than typically found in high schools and that there be some provision for advanced credit at the post-secondary level for such courses."[4]

Development of the Vista School District Intranet

The development of the Vista District Digital Intranet (VDI) was a step towards creating open schools within the school district, which is "schools academically and administratively integrating with one another for at least part of a school day."[5]  The Vista District Digital Intranet, or by its full name "The Vista District Digital Intranet: The Delivery of Advanced Placement Courses to Young Adult Learners in Rural Communities," was a project of the Vista School District and the Centre for Tele-learning and Rural Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland.  The project, which was funded by a federal government grant in 1998, saw the school district and the Centre develop four Advanced Placement courses for online delivery to students throughout the entire school district.

The VDI project allowed any student in the district to enrol in AP Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics, however, the courses were offered over the World Wide Web and were only being taught out of one location (Biology -- Clarenville High School, Clarenville; Chemistry -- Discovery Collegiate, Bonavista; Mathematics -- Musgravetown Central High School, Musgravetown; Physics -- Centre for Tele-learning and Rural Education, St. John's).  Prior to the creation of the VDI, only two or three of the ten schools with secondary grades were able to offer AP Science and Mathematics courses to their students.  The VDI allowed students from all ten schools to take advantage of these courses.  Two years later, a second initiative was launched to offer the AP Social Studies curriculum, this second initiative was the Centre for Advanced Placement Education.

Creation of Centre for Advanced Placement Education

The Centre for Advanced Placement Education (CAPE) was the creation of a teacher and an administrator, both with social studies backgrounds, at Discovery Collegiate in Bonavista (the district's largest school).  Within the Vista School District and for the most part, all throughout the province, the social studies curriculum had taken a backseat to mathematics and sciences.  To illustrate this fact, while there were six AP social studies, during the 1998-99 school year only the European History course was offered.  This occurred in two different schools: both of these schools were urban schools.  During that same period there were four different mathematics and science courses offered in thirty-two different schools: Biology - 13; Chemistry - 15; Mathematics/Calculus - 22; Physics - 10.[6]  The online AP social studies course offer by the CAPE were largely a two person crusade to address this inequity.

Unlike the VDI, courses offered by the CAPE were offered in a totally asynchronous environment.  This removed the need for schools to synchronise the timetabling to accommodate students' distance learning experience.  In its first year of operation, the CAPE offered the AP European History course as a pilot to three students attending two different schools.  These students took the online course as an overload to their regular schedule.  The fact that the course was asynchronous was useful, as these students simply did not have time allocated in their timetable for their AP course.  All three of these students went on to take the AP exam and all three were successful in obtaining the level necessary to achieve university transfer credit (with one student obtaining a level 5).

Building on this success, the CAPE offered four different courses during the 2000-01 school year: the AP European History and AP Human Geography in an asynchronous format and the AP Comparative Government and Politics and AP United States History as an independent study courses.  Over this two year period, the online course being offered by the CAPE have been taught as an extra-curricular or volunteer initiative.  The teachers that have been involved have maintained a regular in-class teaching load and have taught the online courses in their spare time.

The primary means for course delivery by the CAPE was through a piece of e-learning software known at Web Course Tools or WebCT.  This system provided a complete delivery tool, allowing students to access online lectures, complete tests and assignment and participate in an online discussion forum.  However, with only a half dozen students in this online environment, discussion became very stagnant over the twenty-five to thirty week period that the teacher wished to sustain it.  With this problem in mind, the teacher of the AP European History course sent a message to a listserver for teachers of that course, looking for a teacher who had a class of about twenty-five students and who would be interested in having those students participate in an online discussion forum.  Within a few days, a teacher from the University High School in Normal, Illinois responded.

Over the course of the 2000-01 school year, these students from two different schools in two different countries participated, not only in an online discussion forum, but became involved in collaborative projects which would be assigned and evaluated by one teacher or the other.  In essence these two classes from two sides of the border became one class, completing the same assignments, taking the same tests, being instructed by the same teacher.  This long distance, asynchronous, online initiative caught the attention of those establishing the Illinois Virtual High School and both teachers were contracted to develop a course for the secondary students of Illinois.

Conclusion

Within Newfoundland, the success of initiatives to bring online AP opportunities to students in the Vista School District speaks for itself.  During the 1999-2000 school year 2.5% of all students in the Vista District were taking at least one AP course.  This figure also represents the approximate number of students who are taking AP courses in the Avalon East School District, which is the educational authority that includes the metro St. John's area and the highest concentration of large, urban schools in the province.  It also has about ten times the student population of the Vista School District, with approximately 30,000 students.  If the underlying goal of these AP initiatives was to create some form of equity between the large, urban schools and the small, rural schools, than these initiatives have achieved this goal.  The equal proportion of students enrolled in AP courses in both districts indicates that equal opportunity for students to take advantage of these higher learning opportunities does exist.

This fact was particularly apparent when it came to AP social studies courses.  During the 1999-2000 school year, the only AP social studies course that was offered was the AP European History.  Excluding the online AP European History course offered by the CAPE, this course was only available to student attending urban schools.  During the 2000-01 school year, excluding the course offered by the CAPE, only two AP social studies courses were offer throughout the province (AP European History and AP Human Geography).  However, students in the Vista School District had twice that selection, with the CAPE offering four different AP social studies courses.  This trend will continue into the 2001-02 school year, when students in the Vista School District will have the opportunity to take six different AP social studies courses, providing them with a greater number of AP social studies courses than students in any other educational authority.

Within Illinois, the Illinois Virtual High School began offering AP European History for the 2001-02 school year.  There were four students enrolled.  Three of these students came from schools where AP European History was not offered in the traditional classroom format.  For these three, the Illinois Virtual High School was the only means that they had to access this type of learning activity.  The fourth student came from a larger school that had a traditional classroom version of the AP European History course being taught in their school.  However, due to this student's timetable and the scheduling of other required courses needed for graduation purposes, this student was not able to access the AP European History course offered at their own school.  Even though while this student was completing a Mathematics or English course there was a class of AP European History being taught, he was unable to access it without enrolling in the Illinois Virtual High School's course.

The needs of these four students illustrate the need for state virtual high schools to offer courses that go beyond the required curriculum.  In the case of the AP European History course being offered by the Illinois Virtual High School, this course illustrates the ability of virtual high schools and web-based learning to take students outside of their own school and, as in this example, outside of their own country to access the enrichment opportunities that these students deserve.

Selected Bibliography

Barbour, Michael K.. "Delivering Distance Education: The Ministerial Panel report and the new Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation." Small Schools Newsletter. 14  1-2. St. John's, Newfoundland: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2002. [In Print]

Barbour, Michael K. and Jim Kinsella. "Teaching University Level Courses to Pre-University Students in an Online Environment." Paper presented at the Bits and Bytes: The Evolution of Technology in Education electronic conference. <http://www.stemnet.nf.ca:8900/public/bitsandbytes/index.html> Centre for Advanced Placement Education and Faculty of Education (MUN), 2001.

Barbour, Michael K.. "Enrichment Opportunities for Gifted Students in Rural Areas: Online AP Social Studies Courses." OCSS Review. Summer 2001. Shaker Heights, Ohio: Ohio Council for the Social Studies, 2001.

Fizzard, Garfield.  "Distance Education"  Our Children Our Future: Commissioned Studies.  St. John's, NF: Queen's Printer, 1992.

Government of Newfoundland. Towards an Achieving Society. St. John's, NF: Queen's Printer, 1989.

Government of Newfoundland. Our Children, Our Future. St. John's, NF: Queen's Printer, 1993.

Riggs, Frank.  Report of the Small Schools Study Project.  St. John's, NF: Queen's Printer, 1987.

Stevens, Ken. "Two Approaches to Teaching Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics to Senior High School Students in Virtual Classes" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Australasian Science Education Research Association, Rotorua, New Zealand, 1999.

Stevens, Ken. "A New Model for Teaching in Rural Communities - The Electronic Organisation of Classes As Intranets."  Prism - Journal of the Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers' Association.  6  1  1999.

Vista School District.  A Handbook of Essential Information: Designed for New Teachers with the Vista School District.  Vista School District: Clarenville, NF, 1999.

Vista School District.  About the District - The Region/Location.  26 December 1999  <http://www.k12.nf.ca/vista/aboutus/regionlocal.html>.