Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a parent information night for a new digital academy being started by the Escondido Charter High School.  For those of you who are not familar with the school, they are a very high performing charter school organization which currently runs a high school, a middle school, and several programs under California’s Independent Learner model.  They are very successful as an organization, with a beautiful set of buildings and a very long waiting list.  Their site is http://www.echs.org.

The Digital Academy marks a new initiative for them where they will be taking kids through what I would call a blended model with most coursework done on the web / on-line with some brick and mortar instruction.  As opposed to some efforts such as Pennsylvania’s PA-CYBER (http://www.wpccs.com/) where they look to deliver all instruction online, Escondido presented parents with a blended model.

I was very curious to see how the parents responded to the presentation and what their questions or concerns were.  What was truly interesting was that their were very little (if any) questions on the quality of the instructional material.  The parents seemed to take it on faith that their children would get as much knowledge from the digital content as they would in a brick and mortar classroom.  The only question that was posed that related at all to quality was a question about whether the program was accredited.

Instead, the questions related to the concern parents had about the lack of social interaction.  One parent asked if his child would be eligible to play sports at the “regular” high school.  A second parent asked if her son would be able to go to the prom.  They were reassured that all social and after-school activities would remain open to the students in the Digital Academy.

This led me to think a bit about programs which are not grounded with a brick and mortar program.  How would they be able to offer the same social activities?  Distance learning programs have had this issue for a while, but in those cases, it is understood that if you live in a rural or remote area, your social opportunities are limited by your locaiton.  My conclusion is that this experience reinforced my belief that digital learning will be an augmentation of traditional school programs for some time to come, and that this “blended” model is probably a good (better?) approach.