Advanced Placement Online
AP courses are available at the click of a mouse
by Pamela Burdman
SAN FRANCISCO
IT IS THE END of the spring semester,
and Richard Lam, a senior at McAteer
High School, is preparing for his Advanced
Placement Macroeconomics exam.
With a click of his mouse, the bespectacled
18-year-old is watching a little cartoon
man in sunglasses and a Hawaiian
shirt jog across his computer screen. “Preparing
for the exam is like training for a
marathon,” a man’s voice tells him.
“I like this kind of new design,” said
Lam. “It’s fun, especially when you turn in
an assignment and it said you got 60 out of
60. It’s not just sitting in the classroom and
listening to the teacher. If I learned it in
class, I think I would learn it, but just some
of it.”
For high schools with few AP-ready
teachers or students, distance learning is
providing a new way to enrich curriculum.
Though few advocates claim the online
courses are better than the brick-and-mortar
kind, they are an attractive option
when the alternative is no AP class at all.
Since the technology is still in the early
phases, glitches are not uncommon. And
cyber education has yet to circumvent
some of the problems, such as race and
poverty, that plague other aspects of the
educational system: Often the students
who are hardest to reach via the Internet
are the very ones who already tend not to
take AP courses.
“The toughest thing is making sure kids
have a computer at home,” said McAteer
High School social studies department
chair Julie Coghlan. “The computer labs
are only open until about four o’clock.”
Lam and his classmates completed the
course successfully. At Balboa High
School, the other San Francisco school
that entered the University of California’s
College Prep program, however, only one
student survived the semester in an AP
course.
Indeed, UC officials confirm that at the
33 schools that participated in College
Prep, the number of students enrolled
dwindled from 206 to about 160 by the
end of the spring semester.
With a budget of more than $4 million
in state funding, UC covers course fees
ranging from $395 to $750 for each student
who enrolls in a course provided by one of
three corporate partners or a UC campus.
The program has ambitious expansion
plans, and the Legislature has more than
doubled its funding for next year. Elaine
Wheeler, the UC Santa Cruz administrator
who directs the program, said she
expects to enroll about 1,500 students in 53
schools next year.
The states of Florida, Michigan and
Washington also are supporting programs
to deliver AP courses electronically. They
are working with companies such as
APEX, part of Microsoft co-founder Paul
Allen’s empire, which has offered its five
AP courses to some 600 students.
“One of the biggest things we’re
learning is we need to develop a whole
prerequisite program, because you can’t
just drop the kids in in the junior year.
Students most likely to succeed are those
who get strong school and parental support,” said CEO Sally Narodnick of
APEX.
“With students from the outreach
schools where there isn’t a strong AP
culture and where they may not have had
rigorous prerequisites, or where there isn’t
ready access to a computer, we’re getting
high dropout rates. That’s because they get
behind and they get discouraged.”
As with any pilot program, the online
AP courses have had their share of glitches.
Lam ran into problems getting his assignments
and quizzes graded, and that
turned out to be the result of an instructor
error in entering grades, according to
APEX.
APEX Director of Instruction Jack Babani
said prompt grading is something he
still is working on, because students need
feedback in order to move ahead in their
coursework.
The technological problems don’t seem
to have disheartened Lam. He will attend
UC Davis in the fall, where he hopes to
study computer science. “I would like to
design a course like this, because it’s cool,”
he said.
