Academic Challenges in Isolated Communities

Superintendent Matt Grose, a math major during his undergraduate days, has an especially personal view of the difference technology has made in his 900-student rural district in northern Minnesota.

Grose’s teenage son wanted to take pre-calculus but there were too few students to justify a dedicated course. Fortunately, the Deer River Independent School District is part of a thriving regional effort to ensure rural students have access to a rich set of course offerings to meet their academic needs and interests.

Grose’s son got to take that pre-calculus class with just over a dozen students dispersed across a handful of farflung school systems through “telepresence” classes taught by a remote teacher using immersive video technology.

Consisting of eight rural school districts that together enroll some 7,000 students across 3,500 square miles, the Itasca Area Schools Collaborative in north-central Minnesota today offers 25 telepresence courses in subjects such as business, physics and Spanish. The newly added content became so popular that participating school systems had to align bells and bus schedules to accommodate student demand. The telepresence courses help fill the gaps in hard-to-staff subjects or courses that may not generate a critical mass of students at a single school site.

Rural districts such as Deer River often struggle to deliver the same educational experiences provided by their larger suburban and urban peers. They face a double-whammy of higher per-pupil costs and stretched budgets. Technology’s ability to bridge long distance, boost administrative efficiency and personalize experiences at relatively low cost holds great promise for rural communities working to improve student outcomes and best manage existing resources.

At the Center for Reinventing Public Education, we recently brought together a national consensus panel to evaluate technology’s role in rural education and identify opportunities for states to support rural technology use. The panel’s mix of rural education and technology experts, technical assistance providers and researchers discussed how technology can support rural school systems’ work and boost productivity through such means as virtual learning, blended learning and virtual professional networks.

Virtual Learning

Owing to the limited size of their teaching forces, Deer River and other small, rural systems are challenged to offer specialized content. Virtual learning programs are filling that gap as they become more sophisticated. Many today are interactive, incorporate video and other media, promote collaborative and shared workspaces and can be accessed on smartphones and other devices.

Although it’s unlikely that a K-12 system will ever shift to a fully virtual environment, rural areas can use virtual learning to complement traditional classrooms or fill holes in their curricular offerings, particularly in hard-to-fill roles, such as STEM subjects, world languages and Advanced Placement courses. Many rural school systems are already leveraging virtual learning for credit recovery.

Launched through a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service program, Minnesota’s Itasca collaborative also offers an extremely local telepresence course option: the Native American language Ojibwe. It’s taught by one of the dwindling fluent speakers, who lives some 20 miles from Deer River. It’s a fitting option because roughly 45 percent of Deer River students are Native American, primarily Ojibwe. In addition, the district offers drum and dance circles and incorporates Ojibwe culture and history in the curriculum.

“The language is very important to my community,” Grose says, crediting the Ojibwe offering with helping better engage students. “And I love that we’re teaching one of the oldest languages on the continent using 21st-century technology.

Grose, who has been the superintendent for 10 years, notes the district uses the telepresence technology not just for students, but for teacher training and administrative meetings. It sharply reduces travel costs.

Virtual content also can connect rural students with institutions beyond the K-12 classroom walls, such as museums, universities and other cultural and scientific resources. Aspirnaut, founded in 2006 by two Vanderbilt faculty members (one of whom grew up in rural south-central Arkansas), lets students become rural scientists engaging in hands-on, inquiry-based STEM labs led by university faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students. Weekly labs are streamed or video-conferenced to rural schools in 10 districts in Arkansas, Maine and Tennessee. Onsite at the rural school, a teacher or aide, sometimes with assistance from former Aspirnaut school interns, helps students with troubleshooting and ensures student safety with the lab.

Blended Learning

Rural school systems also could use blended learning to improve instruction and rethink the school schedule and classroom structure, possibly saving money. According to the Christensen Institute, blended learning is “a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online learning, with some element of control over time, place, path and/or pace.”

Technology opens the door for students to do more meaningful at-home work independent of a teacher’s physical presence. Some online setups let teachers closely monitor and respond to student progress whether students are working at school or at home.

For students with no Internet access at home, there now are readily available, high-quality, stand-alone apps and content, such as Native Numbers and Dwelp, that can be used off-line on mobile devices. Some rural school systems, such as Vail, Ariz., covering 425 square miles southeast of Tucson, even have tried to make long bus rides more productive. They have equipped school buses with wireless Internet access, creating a mobile study hall of sorts.

Blended learning eventually may enable districts to reduce the number of days students are on campus, potentially lowering transportation costs (which can be two to three times that of urban districts) and freeing up independent or collaborative work time for teachers and students.

The 550-student Waco Community School District in Wayland, Iowa, has run an extended Monday-Thursday school week since 2013. But the drastic scheduling move wasn’t budget motivated. (In fact, district officials say it may wind up costing more, owing to the expanded enrichment and professional development offerings for students and teachers.) The goal of the new schedule is to boost both teacher and student learning and, in part, better prepare teachers to use technology as a teaching tool. The district adopted a one-to-one Chromebook program at the same time it moved to the four-day week.

On designated Fridays (14 during 2015-16), the vast majority of Waco students still hop aboard the school bus to participate in optional teacher-led enrichment activities, take college-credit classes or get small-group or individual help. The other Fridays are dedicated to teacher professional development around technology and other needs.

Under the new arrangement, Waco students receive more instructional time (240 minutes a week versus 215 minutes a week) and longer class periods than they did in the standard five-day week, according to the district’s technology coordinator, Andrea McBeth, who is also a veteran teacher.

McBeth sees more teachers taking advantage of the time to integrate technology in their classroom and use it to personalize instruction. District test scores are up in many areas, though she hastens to say technology may not be the reason why. McBeth’s own 9th-grade algebra students go online to graph problems or watch videos of different concepts. She guides each student to the materials they need on a given day.

“The technology helps me hit all the kids’ different levels,” she says. “And the technology has definitely helped us better engage kids.”

Unfortunately, not much research exists on the overall effectiveness of a four-day school week. In general, it seems to have a neutral effect on student achievement. Some fiscal analysis shows transportation costs could be reduced by up to 20 percent, but overall cost savings are relatively low. One estimate caps savings at 5.43 percent of a school district’s total budget.

Blended learning can help rural teachers do better what good teachers do already: differentiate instruction and provide students deep learning experiences. Technology enables a different classroom structure, where students use mobile devices in a one-to-one setup or in small groups, freeing the teacher to individualize student learning and take it deeper with more nuanced craftwork, problem solving and troubleshooting.

Further, software can adapt to student performance and provide a customized learning path. Rural communities boasting deep school-to-home connections and relatively small class sizes seem particularly well-positioned to keep technology-based instruction from becoming impersonal.

Virtual Networks

Rural districts also are using technology to help break teachers’ professional isolation and deliver quality professional development. Rural teachers sometimes lack subject or grade-level peers in their community, making online professional learning communities, online training or online resource banks that allow teachers to share and review instructional materials particularly helpful.

The Wabash Valley Education Center in West Lafayette, Ind., helps communities of schools learn from each other, enabling a rural algebra teacher to connect not just with other algebra teachers, but other rural algebra teachers. About once a week, the center facilitates a virtual teacher meeting using Elluminate (virtual conferencing software).

Online professional development can give rural educators access to timely learning experiences while lowering travel and facility costs. Arkansas created a state-funded portal in 2006 that provides thousands of free online professional development courses. Teachers earn 19 hours on average. The Teach LivE program, developed at the University of Central Florida and now used at 42 sites nationwide, populates virtual classrooms with student “avatars” to help teachers learn new skills and hone their instructional practice.

Also, the University of North Carolina’s LEARN NC charges nominal fees for online workshops and helps rural schools deliver state-mandated training if they lack capacity themselves. Nearly 70 percent of the state’s rural schools access  www.learnnc.org.

Research suggests quality online professional development is a viable option. A rigorous 2013 study by Barry Fishman, a professor of learning technologies at the University of Michigan, and colleagues found online professional development has the same effect on student learning and teacher behavior as more traditional in-person models.

Technology also can help rural school systems hold teachers more accountable for what they actually learn in professional development. Often, accountability in face-to-face workshops is no more than simply signing an attendance sheet. 

Technology can measure changes in teacher knowledge (like a simple pre/post training survey), changes in teacher practice (sample lesson plans, digital recording of a live lesson) and changes in student performance (digital portfolios, online assessments) that are embedded within or linked back to online professional development opportunities.

Policy Support

Technology offers considerable promise to rural districts working to improve instruction with limited resources. To take advantage of these opportunities, policymakers must support improvement in rural America’s technology infrastructure.

More than 70 percent of the 26 million people without high-speed Internet access live in rural areas. And fewer than 50 percent of educators nationwide have an Internet connection that meets their teaching needs.

Addressing the existing gaps in access will ensure every rural student and educator can leverage technology to improve teaching and learning.