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National University officials acknowledge that training teachers online comes with challenges, but say they are constantly working to improve their courses. The "faculty have been active in looking to improve ways to model, test, and assess the types of personal interactions [educators] will regularly experience as part of their profession," Provost Eileen Heveron said in a statement.
National has increased the amount of training faculty members get for their live chat system and is building a media center for videos, to which teachers and students alike will contribute.
No one has studied how effective online programs are at producing high-quality teachers compared to the traditional colleges. In hiring, school districts tend not to differentiate between online and in-person training programs.
A January 2012 study conducted by Eduventures, a consulting firm that has studied online teacher training programs, found that principals are just as willing to hire from online programs as from traditional ones. New teachers trained online also feel just as prepared as their traditionally trained counterparts, according to the firm's surveys.
San Diego, where National is located, has probably hired the university's graduates. But the district does not track how many, or how they perform in the classroom. Sid Salazar, San Diego's assistant superintendent for instructional support services, said "it would be hypocritical of us to turn around and say, 'That teacher went online, so we're not going to hire [him or her],'" particularly since the district has its own virtual high school.
On-campus programs, which still produce the majority of teachers, have been criticized for low admission standards and not teaching important pedagogical skills and content knowledge. The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, found in a May 2010 report, for example, that less than a quarter of undergraduate elementary-teacher preparation programs in Texas cover the essential components of reading instruction.
In terms of quality, online programs are "all over the place, just like they are with college campus-based programs," C. Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for Education Information, a D.C.-based research organization, said. "I don't think online teacher programs have yet capitalized on the possibilities for providing a superior pathway to teaching."
Leavitt would agree. For starters, she'd like to see courses where students are required to tape themselves teaching. Currently, privacy issues block them from doing so. In most districts, parents must sign a waiver before their child can be recorded.
For now, in-person observations of teacher candidates are conducted during student teaching. Claire Cortney, a 2012 graduate of National, spent 80 days as a student-teacher, with eight evaluations from a supervisor at National and four from the teacher in whose classroom she taught.
"I was getting the most important pieces of learning on my feet," Cortney, a former dancer, said. "I feel really prepared, really energized, really excited to get into my own classroom."
In her other classes, she had to observe teachers and write reflections as well as plan her own lessons and teach them. In my online course, one assignment involved visiting a school to interview a current teacher but I cheated and did mine over the phone. (Disclosure: National gave me permission to take this class and informed Leavitt.) Most of the assignments were written work. Each week, we had three discussion board postings, a 200-word journal entry and a 500-word essay due, as well as a 10-question multiple choice quiz.
Leavitt said she would like to require more videos and oral presentations, a direction that the entire university is moving towards. Her heavy reliance on textbook readings and written assignments means students cannot pick up cues from her teaching strategies and she is unable to gauge how they might present themselves in a classroom, she said.
Unlike most universities, National offers one-month courses and students are only enrolled in one class at a time. In ours, Leavitt tried to increase the amount of personal interaction through live chats and even a one-on-one welcome-to-the-course phone call. But most of our correspondence took place on discussion boards, which Leavitt carefully monitored and responded to, as she tried to gauge what students understood about a given topic.
My classmates came from a variety of backgrounds and were encouraged to draw from past experiences. Some were already teachers while others had only just finished their bachelor's degrees. In our second live chat, when talking about different cultures and multiculturalism in the classroom, students spoke about traveling or living abroad and their own experiences in schools. With the technical glitch fixed, this chat lasted the full hour allotted for it, unlike our first live discussion.
Forty minutes into that chat, as technical problems persisted, Leavitt gave us the option to click a smiley-face button if we wanted to end early and work independently.
The response was instantaneous: a row of yellow smiley faces next to everyone's name.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.