Karl Kapp: Mark, can you tell us a little about what Keystone National High School? Why is it unique and how does the school address online learning?

Mark Burke: Keystone National High School is a private licensed school. You can learn more about the school at http://www.keystonehighschool.com. Our roots are in helping kids in the public schools as well as home schooled kids. We offer a variety of programs…everything from summer school to full credit high school courses. More importantly when you were talking about online delivery of content, we offer multiple deliveries. We have a very traditional paper-based mail back program, which is a correspondence program from the days gone by. But we also offer everything up to digital and online communications and courses. We offer the full gamut, summer school to full credit correspondence to online.

Karl Kapp: So a student can actually graduate from high school taking all the classes online?

Mark Burke: That's right. Keystone is a private licensed school in the state of Pennsylvania. We are recognized nationally and internationally as any other brick and mortar private school. What that essentially means is that we are licensed to educate students in a certain way, we have certain standards, and more importantly after so many credits are completed by a student, we grant a high school diploma like any land-based local high school.

Karl. Kapp: Do you have to be a Pennsylvania resident, or can you be a resident anywhere and take these classes?

Mark Burke: You can be a resident anywhere, the key is that the diploma is actually granted in Pennsylvania but that does not mean you can't be a student from Nebraska or any other state, or a foreign country for that matter. Anyone can "virtually" attend Keystone and graduate with a high school diploma.

Dr. Kapp: What kind of kids then attend an online high school? Do you have a big population?

Mark Burke: Yes, actually we have over 25,000 students right now across all of our programs. Students taking our credit make up programs (our shortest courses are 30 hours) to students who are taking our full credit program for a diploma. They really are like any other students you would find in a local high school, they may have learning problems and need additional help, so they have tutors at home and felt, for whatever reason, that their local school or even another private school was not able to give them that kind of help that they can get individually.

Or we have a number of average students who don't socially fit into the high school they were in. We also have kids who just want more control of their day. Then we have students who are exceptional, students who are athletes and are fortunate enough to be stars in their field. So they are very busy and all day, they are going to meeting and practices, they don't have time to go to a typical 7 to 3 school. Keystone is an excellent option for them.

Karl Kapp: I heard that you have students that were sailing around the world and things like that.

Mark Burke: Yeah absolutely! We have students who fortunately have the opportunity to have parents that want to show them around the world. And they get to see the world in a way that most kids would die for. They get to experience things all over the world but their education is rooted in one place, Keystone. So Keystone is very mobile and successful in this situation, for example with the correspondence program, the student can do a simple mail back as long as they have access to a postal service. Online also has certain mobility. If the student can gain access to the web…he or she can access their classes. So they can be anywhere in the world but their school, education and teachers stay in the same place. We provide continuity and security.

Karl Kapp: So can you explain how a typical class would work. If I'm a high school student and I sign up for a class do I have to be there at a certain time? Is there really a teacher on the other side? How does the online portion of the program work?

Mark Burke: Online there is total flexibility. Students do not have to report at a certain time, even though they can if they want. For example, if they are an international student, there are obvious time issues. So a student can arrange with a teacher to meet at a certain time if they want to. And that can be done through chat or a whiteboard session. But the majority of time is really up to the student; the instructional model is that they receive a textbook and a learning guide. The learning guide walks them through the content, tells them what to concentrate on, it gives them their reading assignment. With honors courses it gives them the extra projects they are going to do, whether this is in print or online. So their goal is to do that as an independent learner and if they have questions they can contact their teacher by chat or whiteboard sessions but they don't have to.

Karl Kapp: So what would they do online? Chat and whiteboard of course. Would they take tests online, would they read material online, is it interactive online, how does that work?

Mark Burke: I think the important one that you brought up is the testing. If you are online…the testing is definitely online. We have a variety of testing methods; the basic one is the question/answer that may consist of multiple choice or true/false questions. It is hard though to assess the students through only objective questions so there is a lot of writing in our online assessments. Any of our objective tests through Blackboard (an online course management system) also have the requirement of writing small essays or short answers that are then graded by a certified teacher who reads the essays and short answers.

In addition students also do projects online that may include journal entries, or research papers, web searches; all different kinds of things can be done on their computer. Really, whatever document they can create on the computer, perhaps a Word document or sometimes pictures and graphics, they then send them in through the Blackboard course management system to be graded. So that is how an assessment can be done. Students also participate in class, through chats and discussion boards that we have for every one of our courses. For the chats and discussion boards, teachers are there to monitor and contribute. They talk about specific trouble points, the goal there is that some student has most likely asked that question at another time, so the student having trouble can go into the chat or discussion board and say "I have this question has anyone else asked this question in the past."

Karl Kapp: Can they search through the questions to seek past questions? Are they learning from other students questions?

Mark Burke: Yes, that's correct. And they might see some things or think about some things that they didn't before that they can expand on those thoughts. That's why we like the chat and discussion boards, because the course is not just the content that we offer, we want the teachers to expand the topics and the students to think in different ways.

Students also read the online learning guide. They read the topic and headers describing what they are going to be learning about. So it is sort of a teacher replacement. It's the section that if you're a teacher in a classroom you would be talking to the students about the topic, obviously this is not face-to-face teaching. Students are pointed in the right direction in the textbook, and they are pointed towards practice activities that they may have in the textbook that they don't have online.

Karl Kapp: So there are activities such as drag and drops, fill in the black, embedded questions as you go through the learning guide?

Mark Burke: Yes, the online learning guide has opportunities for students to participate in manipulative type activities. This is a little gaming area were students can test themselves against the computer. There are drag and drops and crossword puzzles. Students can use these interactive activities to assess themselves; they are automatically checked but not recorded towards the student's final grade. So it's more like practice to get them ready for a graded test.

Karl Kapp: Speaking of tests and assessments, how do you really know it's that student on the other side of the computer taking that assessment and not their mom or dad or older brother or something like that?

Mark Burke: Well Keystone has always had an open model about assessments; our goal is to not paint the assessment as "sitting in a room by yourself with a pencil, a white wall, and a clock." The first thing for us has always been using a model where students are encouraged to use their textbook. We encourage them to use the content that is online, so when they sit down to take an assessment they are not expected to take the assessment without the tools and the guidance of the course.

But to get to your issue about security, the key is that a test that covers our content is virtually impossible to pass if you haven't personally covered and studied the content. In actuality if I'm a student in one of these classes and I solicit the assistance of my brother, or sister, or mother to take the test I'm really not helping myself. So it's about nine chances out of ten, and we actually believe its ten chances out of ten that those people, whether it's Uncle Bob, or whoever will not be successful at taking the test. Our students understand that if a person is trying to help them through the exam it is not going to help them.

More importantly, from a technical side all our teachers have tools and resources that we give to them to help check for improper academic behavior. Many are web based, such as turnitin.com which is a great resource for teachers to post parts of essays. Then they can go back to the student and say, "You know I don't think you cited this correctly, or did you get it from here or there." Then the students or parents can say "oh yeah they did get it from this source," and it teaches them how cite sources correctly. There are teachers that are live and have gone through a state preparation system, they are trained and certified, and most importantly they get to know all of their students. The teachers know the student's writing style, or even their handwriting if they mail in an essay or something. This is what you would get at any good quality school where the teacher expects a certain level of performance from the students and knows what the students are capable of doing. We do the same thing.

Karl Kapp: So how many students is one teacher responsible for?

Mark Burke: It really depends on the course. We work with the teachers to monitor their workload and decide when we need to add more teachers to cover the workload. For some math courses, where the testing is very easy and is done on the computer it doesn't take long to grade that topic. But, on the other hand, these teachers spend most of their time answering questions such as, "I don't know how to solve this problem can you help me?" So in these classes a teacher can maybe handle up to 400 or 500 students because the exams will be graded automatically, and the students that need help can contact a teacher. On the other hand in an English course, where all the assessments are about how well the students write and prepare projects, it is very intensive. Each assignment is quite extensive for the teacher to grade, so in these classes a teacher may only be able to handle around 100 students. So it really depends on the subject area which determines how many students a teacher will have.

Karl Kapp: There are a couple issues with e-learning that people often wonder about. For example, Is there student to student collaboration? Is there student-teacher collaboration? Is there team work on projects?

Mark Burke: Our courses are designed to be independent. We find, in term of need, that is what the students want. We have had some courses that we designed using a virtual classroom model but…let me go back and give you a little history of our release of some courses to explain. About a year-and-a-half ago we actually created an online course and called it our "Virtual Classroom series," it was designed to be exactly what you asked about, student to student interactivity and student to teacher interactivity, and the course schedule was geared this way. Everyone started at the same time and ended at the same time, and what we found is that it lost that independent feel to it. It lost the feel of the student knowing what he or she needed to get out of their learning. The students felt that the teacher was spending extra time on stuff some of them were already comfortable with; it wasn't quite suitable for them. So we moved away from that model, but we did learn that even though the classroom structure was rigid, and not quite what our student population was looking for, that student to student communication is critical.

We learned that we still need to keep the students connected, they want to be connected, and the student-teacher communication is should be based on student need. We also learned that we wanted to be proactive, we made some changes in how the teacher interacts with the student and instead of waiting for the student to come to the teacher with a problem, we had the teachers be proactive and ask the students, "Are you having trouble in this?" or "Do you need extra help?" We found out that many people really started to appreciate this proactive effort.

We also realized that the student to student communication was great when they were taking a class together but the students were missing some basic aspects of school. Students were saying, I need a homeroom, I need to be an individual with an identity, I need to have my own locker, and be part of an organization. So this year we really blew out our efforts in our community systems. Now we have someone in charge of working on clubs, and getting kids around the country together, working on community coordinators that will be positioned around the United States that will get students talking.

Karl Kapp: So you can actually have something online like a virtual chess club?

Mark Burke: Absolutely, we have a chess club, a photography club, a growing school newspaper and a soon-to-be yearbook, and many other online clubs.

Karl Kapp: Are all of these non-credit?

Mark Burke: That's right these are all clubs that are no-credit.

Karl Kapp: So it literally is like the whole high school is virtual. Neat. But it does bring one question to mind…I know you said these kids are independent, but are these kids' geeks or nerds? What kind of kids are these, are they the kids that sleep all day and play on the computer all night, are they different from other kids in high school?

Mark Burke: Well we do have some students that like to spend lots of time on the computer and are super talented in that way, but that is not the typical picture. The typical picture of what a Keystone student is this. Just walk out your door and observe any student walking to the local high school and that is the type of student we have.

It's just that these kids felt that they could not be in successful in the traditional system, but they still want to be successful. For example, we have success stories all over our walls in our office. You have the student that says "I like to sit at my computer and I'm a programmer and I want to take online classes." Then we have students that say "I don't know much about computers, but I need to be where I'm at, so the computer happens to be the tool." So the student that really loves computers can take classes online, but the students that are not as interested in computers but want a quality education find the same system works for them. It's about the students needing to be flexible and independent.

Karl Kapp: So do these students go on to online colleges or traditional colleges? Where do they go after Keystone High School?

Mark Burke: Yeah I think that's an interesting question, because we think about where our students are going a lot as does any other high school. We ask "Are our students going to traditional colleges and universities?" To see where our students go you can look at a list we placed on our website that indicates where our students have gone after our program. You will see Purdue University, Stanford, Texas A&M, University of Pittsburgh, West Point, Utah State University all on that list. You'll see the list is quite large. So do these schools have online programs there? Yeah I'm sure they do because it's just another way to deliver educational needs. But they have traditional programs as well and our students go to traditional programs in traditional universities and colleges. I think the most important thing is that we see our students being accepted to typical universities just as any other average high school would.

Karl Kapp: So when they graduate are they a little more computer savvy than your average high school student, because they've been assessed online and they study online? They must be very comfortable online.

Mark Burke: I think the key is that these students are not just using the computer for single points of productivity, they are really using the computer as multiple points of productivity, and it all boils down to one goal, to be educated. These students leave our school knowing that the computer they sit in front of is about productivity and results, so they can be not only be good communicators online but also people that can develop good projects, and develop good examples of what they have learned online. They can communicate in a shared environment online, and most of all…they know how to test in that environment. I think of all of the systems where we are tested online, whether it's a driver's license, or getting into a university. Online testing for someone not familiar with it can be very frightening and now at some point in your life you are going to have to take some sort of test online. These kids already have that advantage, they have done this every day. You put all these things together and yes, these kids definitely have an advantage. They know that sitting at that computer is about pulling everything together and making it educate them.

Karl Kapp: So do you think online schools like Keystone are going to change the workforce? I'm assuming that it is only growing, Florida has an online high school system as well, are you seeing more of these online high schools cropping up? Are there going to be online middle schools…online elementary schools?

Mark Burke: I think it's interesting; Keystone obviously pays a lot of attention to the competition. We see growth in the brick and mortar school districts themselves. They want to expand the day for their students, so they have started to realize that what the Keystone model has been… anytime communication…any time education is something they can expand into. So we see changes in local high schools and also our partner high schools where they are saying "well, we are going to start expanding our traditional 8 hour school day" which we didn't see before.

Before it was well "it's the end of the day so we are done educating." We see it as a great benefit for us as a school because we see that schools are becoming committed to continuing the education beyond the school day for their students. But what the school district soon realizes is that they have a choice of either under taking the massive development effort themselves or of form a partnership with a great organization that already has it all planned out and has the support systems in place. And we are there for those partnerships.

Karl Kapp: People have said the typical high school system is based on the Agrarian model that has to do with the seasons, and now we in the technology age or digital age and don't need workers to plow the fields three months of the year. Do you think this is going to break apart tradition high school education? Is this the wave of the future, or is this going to be a segment of continuing education like it's always been?

Mark Burke: Well that's a hard question, because if I knew that…(laughs)..I could predict the future. Somebody asked me the other day about learning online and mentioned that we were a dotcom school, and I am pretty quick to say we are not a dotcom school. Yes, right now we deliver content online to reach out to our kids. Will that change in the future? Yeah I think it will, and I think it should as things evolve. We used to deliver in paper, and now we deliver in paper and online, and eventually we will add another method. To get to the point, all those things are delivery methods. They are ways to get education in the hands of kids. So will it change as a model? I think the model has to change, because I think people have started to understand that education is not about the time of the day or about the seasons, it's just about getting the education that you need. Why wait for the school year to start, and why wait for the bell to ring?

I think the need for anytime education will force all schools to think about themselves differently. Yes, they should still think about themselves as schools, but now also think about how they are going to get that education out there...to thier students through any method available. I'm not sure if I answered that question, because I'm not sure if I know the answer to that question.

Karl Kapp: Yeah that is a tough question about the future; none of us have a crystal ball. Another issue in e-learning is that a lot of organizations have a high drop out rate. A lot of people start out with the classes and then drop out. How do you guys deal with that or what is your drop out rate?

Mark Burke: We actually have been measuring our drop out rate for a long time, and we know that between 70 and 90 percent of our students complete our courses, meaning they start and finish the class. We monitor the reasons why they leave pretty carefully. We want to know if its expectation, quality or what. We are very introspective because we want to know if we are doing something wrong.

Interestingly enough, the students who do enroll in a course and never finish usually make that decision based on family, or something external that comes up, or before they even started the class they started thinking I'm not so sure I need to learn this topic or I don't think online learning is right for me. It ends up that it has nothing to do with the quality of our offerings or that our instructional system is not what they expected. It has to do with the type of learning.

So we think the quality of our school is really high, and it's not just about offering courses online. If you want to have an organization that retains students and graduates successful students you need to supply everything that they need to do to make their four years successful. That covers transcript evaluations, knowing how to enroll students in the courses, the accreditations, the quality teachers, transferring credit to other schools and offering a diploma that is valuable and achieved through some degree of effort. If we just put courses out there we wouldn't be as successful and I'm sure our drop out rate would be higher.

Karl Kapp: So your goal is to create an entire school online, how do students get a sense that, "Hey I'm a Keystone student?" How do they get that sense of community, do you have an alumni program or something like that?

Mark Burke: That sense of community is important in two ways. For example, sometimes our students don't go to traditional schools because they are afraid of that sense of community. That option is here for those students, they can take classes by themselves, and if it meets their need to never reach out to the community they can choose that option. On the other hand, and for a much larger group of students, they may need friends, pals, and time with peers; we can also address that need. For example, we do small things, like Keystone has a school store and we have pride items that students can go and buy. These are things like t-shirts, sweat shirts and mugs. And you would think they are just trinkets and wouldn't be that important, but these are kids and kids want to throw on their Keystone t-shirt and walk downtown. And have someone say, "Oh Keystone I've never heard of that is that in town." And they can say "Oh no I am taking my courses through Keystone which is a great international school with online and correspondence programs." So sometimes it's not always about the bigger things necessary to build community. Sometimes it is the simple things like having pride items that help to build, not just a school, but a community.

Dr. Kapp: So you've been online since when?

Mark Burke: 1999

Karl Kapp: A lot of the schools started having an online presence in 1999 and many of those former schools have been left in the dustbin of the dotcom bubble burst. Closed because of skyrocketing costs or lack of enrollment. Why is Keystone successful where some other of these other initiatives failed?

Mark Burke: There are a couple of reasons, I think one of them is the honest assessment of what your organization can spend. We want the best education that we can provide but still remain a profitable organization. Keystone has always been about effective educational development but, quite frankly we do not take a wiz bang approach to online education. We don't have the approach of spending a ton of money on all kinds of games, puzzles or unnecessary flash for the sake of flash.

We have interactivity, but we do it with a sense that it's not what the people want, it's not what the kids or parents want. And that's why Keystone has been successful. We know ultimately that the students and parents that come to us want a quality education, and quality courses, and they are not people who just want to sit in front of a computer and play tons of games and get a report card. I think other organizations were tempted by the games, interactivity and flash. I think keeping budgets reasonable and putting the money into smart, educationally sound development is important.

Secondly I think forming partnerships is important, we know that we cannot be developing courses in technology and in some areas like foreign language; if we were we would constantly be spending money to update those courses. And quite frankly admitting that we are not the experts in all the technologies is important, because then we can seek out partners and then license those courses. We realize that to be a school is not always about developing your own thing; it's about knowing when to reach out to those other folks who do it very well and partner with them. It is about getting those courses in the hands of your kids as a service organization. That's a big thing.

And thirdly I think that it has to be our history. We have been in the learning and correspondence business for 30 years, and we know that providing a solid education to the kids has always kept people coming back to us. So we are cautious of changing our market and cautious of changing our products and services. We do so only after tons of evaluation and assessment. I think we were able to get the message of our educational value out there and quite frankly that's when we saw our growth. And today we still see growth and still people might say we have a very simplistic course model with a few games and some interactions but the secret is they are just where they need to be.

Karl Kapp: So being the Director of Keystone high school might be an analogous position to someone responsible for a Corporate University or a corporate training department offering online courses. What kind of advice would you give to them in terms of serving their employees or what can they do to make an online university as successful as the Keystone High School model?

Mark Burke: I think the key is that at the center you don't forget about the quality of the educational offerings and the design of the instruction. The quality of the education that you make available all comes back to instructional design. If you think about it instructional design really is the key. It's not about pretty pictures on the screen; it's not about the learning management system having all kinds of tools it's not about giving learners places to gather files, it's not about that. It's really about whether or not your objectives are good and whether or not your instruction is sound…that should be your goal.

You want to ultimately produce good education. Sometimes taking the time to make sure that the classroom-based instruction you want to transfer online is effective instruction in the first place. The transfer process is your opportunity to assess whether or not your current instruction is good instruction. If you put bad education into a good system it is still bad education. The key is to concentrate on having good instruction, then the other pieces fall into place.

Karl Kapp: Yes, I agree. Let me ask another, somewhat related question. I teach a graduate program in instructional technology, so what kind of advice would you give to a student just entering into the workforce who is going to be developing e-learning and online instruction?

Mark Burke: I think it's about learning how to integrate all that knowledge from graduate school into an existing system. One of the hard things we run into is that a graduate enters the workforce with so many ideas and so many great things to do but in the work environment often times you need to focus on a specific area. In the instructional technology program at Bloomsburg University for example, students are working with one software tool one day and the next day they are working with a different software tool.

In the industry we find a lot more consistency on a day-to-day basis. Here we are exposed to one tool and spend a long time developing courses with that one tool. So people coming out of an educational program should focus on learning a tool or a couple of tools in-depth. Because knowing a little bit about something is a great start, but now in the work arena it's really about learning about how to use the tool to its fullest potential. So while initially new workers in the workforce might think working with one tool would be a little boring or dry and they might be thinking "Oh I'm using the same thing everyday, how boring." The truth is that those tools are universities of their own to learn about. So I would say "Find out what tools your organization is really using and then truly becoming an expert in it so you can go the long haul with it and learn how to use it and expand its use."

Karl Kapp: Ok, one more question, what is the future as you see it of online learning and e-learning, are you going to be using hand held devices, is it through instant messaging?

Mark Burke: Yeah, I think it's interesting because we come back to the evolution of our school and where are we going. I think the one thing that is interesting is to ask the question, "Is it online learning?" Is that even really the appropriate way to state the future of online learning? In the end I think it comes down to what is the next delivery method that makes sense.

Certainly in our school we have reached a point now since 1999 where online courses are starting to outselling our correspondence program. Our online program took some time to ramp up, so now we see our online outselling our paper-based courses, and we are seeing that online delivery is working for many of our students.

What is the next delivery; yeah, we already started looking at handheld devices to get content out to students who are more mobile. Actually what is interesting is that we have printed textbooks and we are working with the publishers to get those textbooks online. So the students would have more than just a textbook online...they would have an interactive online experience. For our school I know that we want the evolution to occur where we don't need to worry about delivering hard bound textbooks to students, online textbooks are so much easier, and that's what customers want now. That's where we see it shifting over to.

Second, we always see connectivity as an issue, so the actual aspect of being online is a little bit of an issue for us, but still students want that in an online format, the online format doesn't just mean I'm online but I have the technology to deliver the book and the course. So in some way I see an evolution to being online for a short amount of time, downloading learning materials, and then being able to take those learning materials anywhere the student needs to go. We aren't there yet, but I think I see that's where we will go.

Karl Kapp: Well thank you this has been a lot of good information, and thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule and talking with e-learning guru and best to luck to you at Keystone.

Mark Burke: Thank you, I enjoyed the interview.