Yukon's fledgling virtual school helps students connect

After breakfast, Bronwyn Goodwin kicks her dad off the computer and logs into her online learning community. 

The Grade 8 student lives with her parents at a remote research camp on Kluane Lake in the summer and moves between small communities in Yukon and Alaska in the winter, so she has always studied from home. 

Goodwin previously studied through a virtual school run out of northern B.C., but is now a student of a new distance education provider in the Yukon.

Aurora Virtual School offers an alternative to traditional homeschooling methods. 

The number of home-educated kids in the Yukon is on the rise and Edward Frisson, Aurora's team leader, says the traditional method of homeschooling — where a student works in solitude, plugging away at the kitchen table —  tends to have a low success rate. 

'Meaningful' connections with students

He says it's the student-teacher relationship that creates engaged learners and Aurora uses technology to accomplish this. 

"What we wanted to do was try and provide the most success for our learners," says Frisson. "How do we do that in the digital world? Having the teacher be able to interact, in real, meaningful ways, with the students." 

Jenna Frerot, one of two teachers at the school, used to teach at a bricks and mortar school but agreed to join the virtual-education world because she thought it would be a good opportunity to reach out to kids she wouldn't normally be able to interact with.

​Frerot sits in a windowless office in front of two computer screens, wearing headphones with a mouth piece. She logs into her system at the scheduled class time, as do her students. In front of her is a tablet, on which she can write with a pencil-like object. When she writes on the tablet, it appears on her screen and that of her students. 

They greet each other in a chat screen and talk about their weekends, then they work through the lessons Frerot has prepared. 

Ironically, Frerot says the virtual classroom allows her to know her students in ways she never did when she stood in front of a class.

"Kids seem to be a lot more willing to share in a typed format when you don't see them. I know more about some of these kids than I would have when I have 28 kids in one classroom when you have five minutes before each class, you don't really have time to check in with every kid to ask how their weekend was."

Goodwin agrees. She says she gets more help from her teachers through distance education and thinks that ups the ante. 

"I think it's better because we have higher expectations for ourselves. Kids get more work done on time when they have a stricter teacher."

Along with students like Goodwin, the virtual school brings education to students who can't leave home easily for medical reasons and to those with scheduling conflicts at other schools. 

Aurora currently only teaches high school students starting at Grade 8, but Frisson hopes it will provide adult education one day.

He says Aurora is fledgling but his dreams are big and he wants to make education as well-rounded and accessible as possible for all students in the territory.