Affiliation:
1. The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, USA
Abstract
K-12 online education has come to be one of the most transformational trends in education, with K-12 full-time online schools serving 313,000 students in 33 states with enrollment in those programs increasing at a rate of about 6% per year. The growth of the K-12 online education setting has outpaced the ability for researchers to study and generate data supporting its best practices. Researchers recognized that there must be a change in epistemic beliefs, of how knowledge is created and developed, and how learner agency is facilitated in virtual learning environments. While most research on online teaching is geared towards higher education, there has been some research addressing K-12 online teaching. This chapter covers asynchronous instruction and synchronous instruction in virtual classrooms, frameworks that support these practices, and differentiation and its implementation in K-12 virtual classrooms.