Secondary Students' Perceptions of Web-Based Learning (Survey‪)‬

Schools in rural jurisdictions have historically faced challenges in providing comparable curriculum opportunities to their students as compared to school in urban and suburban areas (Barker, 1985; Beckner & O'Neil, 1980; Benson, 1998; Crocker & Riggs, 1979; Government of New York, 1992; Harrison & Downey, 1965; Riggs, 1987; Ryan, Sackney & Birnie, 1981). Over the past 25 years, one of the ways rural schools have addressed this disparity has been through the use of distance education. For example, Barker (1991) described how over 1,000 schools in more than 40 states in the United States were using satellite telecommunications, audiographic, or two-way television distance education systems. Over the past decade, one of the more common forms of distance education has been Web-based or online delivery, often called virtual schooling. The first two virtual schools in the United States were the Virtual High School (VHS) in Concord, Massachusetts and the Florida Virtual School (FLVS). The VHS was created through a 5-year, $7.4 million federal grant (Pape, Adams, & Ribeiro, 2005), while the FLVS was established through an allocation of $200,000 from the state legislature (Friend & Johnston, 2005). The following school year (i.e., 1997-98) the VHS offered 28 courses to 28 schools that were a part of the initial consortium. The FLVS also began offering courses that same year with an enrollment of 157 students. Even before these two virtual schools in the United States, four schools in the Canadian province of Alberta created virtual schooling programs and offered courses to their students as early as the 1995-96 school year (Haughey & Muirhead, 2004).