Networked Virtual School – beyond OER and MOOC

Abstract

In the article there are presented basic assumptions and pedagogical results of IT School Program run from November 2012 by Warsaw School of Computer Science. Starting from a group of distinguished academic computer science lecturers and scientists from 15 best Polish universities who developed and implemented the idea of Polish Open Computer Science Online Academia – Open Educational Resource (OER) for Polish computer science university students, then launching (non virtual) MOOC “Informatics Plus” program for secondary school students in which took part over 20000 secondary schools’ students from 5 Polish Voivodships, finally basing on experience gained in previous two projects Networked Virtual (IT) School Program (supported by personalized IT learning system – PITLS) for secondary school students and teachers from over 500 schools in Poland was designed and implemented. The author explains the aims of the Program, its pedagogical key layouts such as usefulness, partnership, networked learning environment, diversified and high professional level of materials, Interactivity mechanisms, personalization, built-in incentive mechanisms (individual and team), and automation of selected elements of the educational process and system data analysis. The virtual educational tools and techniques used within the Program are listed. Great emphasis is put to presenting the pedagogical and statistical results of the project based on author’s own surveys done within three years on population of students and teachers taking part in IT School Program and big data analysis generated by PITLS. Finally the main future directions of IT School Program development are shortly discussed. In conclusions author will among others try to answer the question what is the reason of the phenomena that over 60 000 students registered in the Program within 2,5 years since its starting and till now have performed altogether almost 400 000 online courses confirmed by IT School Program course certificates. The openness of the program places it among OER initiatives, massive number of participants involved and number of courses performed resembles MOOCs, but primarily it has a kind of networked virtual organization (NVO) structure, thus it is called Networked Virtual School (NVS), which seems to have characteristics going beyond what is described today as OER or MOOC.