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Teaching, Learning and Evaluation in a Transparent and Monitored Environment: The Case of the Virtual High School in Israel

Recently, an Israeli Virtual High School (VHS) was launched as a joint initiative of the Ministry of Education, the Center for Educational Technology (CET) and the Trump Foundation. Its mission is to increase the number of high school students from the Israeli periphery that score well in high level of mathematics and physics matriculation exams. The Israeli VHS has joined other virtual schools across the world, to serve as ",transparent laboratories", that provide a fresh look into the processes of Teaching, Learning and Evaluation (TLE(.This VHS operates all TLE processes fully online, through synchronous classroom lessons, synchronous small group practice sessions, monitored homework and online tests.The unique characteristics of the school, based on a virtual Learning Management System (LMS), are: classroom transparency, online monitoring system and feedback mechanisms. These serve as the means to design, improve and personalize the TLE processes. The analyzed data include time spent by the students in the virtual environment, scope and quality of homework performance, evaluation given by the teachers, etc. All the synchronous lessons are recorded and used as a powerful resource to help teachers and students acquire a deep understanding of the teaching and learning processes. Most of the students', online tests are automatically scored and provide feedback to the student as well as to the teacher .The transparent environment, along with the comprehensive and immediately –, available analyzed data, promotes a broad understanding of the students', performance in the virtual environment. These characteristics facilitate personalization and adaptation of teaching and learning according to each student',s unique needs.The VHS students are expected to be independent learners who can fully utilize the feedback mechanisms due to their high self-efficacy (SE). Findings from a formative evaluation research show that the VHS students are equipped with this characteristic. Moreover, the research shows a significant correlation between the degree of students', SE and their achievements.Key words: virtual learning, synchronous lessons, classroom transparency, online monitoring, personalization-based learning

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