Love it or hate it, there’s no question that Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is an integral component of a Florida students’ education. In 2011, the Florida Department of Education made it a graduation requirement to have at least one online course credit. This means that every student in Florida will experience the wonder of FLVS at least once. For some, FLVS is just a box to check. For others, it’s their full-time schooling. These students often don’t experience the bad side of the platform. For the box-checkers, they choose a common course like Financial Literacy where the teacher knows their goal, and as such pushes them through the course with minimal resistance. For the full-time students, FLVS has a responsibility to ensure the teachers treat the students nicely, lest they experience the rage of thousands of angry parents. As such, they are shielded from the problems with the platform. There’s a third group of students, the part-time students, who continually enroll in courses concurrently with their normal school. These students are the ones who see the glaring issues with the platform.
My first experience with FLVS was when I moved to Florida in the seventh grade. In order to continue my Latin education, I enrolled in Latin 1. For a while, I was enjoying the course. I was able to work when I could and get ahead of my peers credit-wise, leaving room for a flexible schedule in high school. And for the first semester, I liked my teacher. She seemed to care about me.
It was in the second semester when issues started. In all courses, FLVS places Discussion-Based Assessments (DBAs) in each module to ensure academic integrity and promote teacher-student collaboration. They are required, and seem like a good idea in practice. However, the problem arises with scheduling one. In my Latin class, I had gotten to a DBA but it was spring break, so not wanting to fall behind I completed the assignments after the DBA. That was my mistake. After break, I received a stern message from my teacher telling me that working past the DBA was unacceptable since I had not proved my proficiency of the previous content yet. Attempting to resolve the issue, I asked when I could schedule by DBA. Almost ironically, she told me she had no availability that week, and that I would need to wait until next week to have my call, forcing me to fall behind.
That same school year, I also took Astronomy. Since this class didn’t have very many other students, I had no issues with scheduling DBAs. However, during my DBAs, my teacher would never ask questions, instead ranting about current topics in the news. I distinctly remember one DBA where he told me that clean energy was not the solution to climate change, rather that it was a lie made up by green energy companies. Other DBAs would be him ranting about stories in the news instead of asking me questions. On the one hand, I appreciated not having to answer many questions, but on the other hand it was a waste of time. I wasn’t interested in his indoctrination.
Last summer, FLVS pushed a large-scale UI and content update. Previously, courses had a course page that grouped all lessons by module. Each course page had different styles of module buttons and background images depending on the type of course: Latin had a picture of the Colosseum with a Tyrian purple color, while Financial Literacy had piles of cash and a piggy bank with coin module buttons. However, this new update does away with the course pages, replacing them with a new table of contents. The table of contents is bland, uninspiring, hard to navigate, and has many UI glitches. The old course page was a whole dedicated webpage. This allowed lessons to be split into columns for increased readability. However, the new table of contents only takes up about a third of the page, which makes it extremely difficult to see all of the lessons in your current module. In planning out my week, I like to get a holistic view of the lessons in the module. However, the table of contents makes it very hard to see what lessons are still to be completed. Thankfully, the lesson page can still be accessed, albeit through a much lengthier process.
The new Table of Contents, which cannot show all 10 module lessons on one page.
A small yet extremely inconvenient change in this update was to lesson quizzes. Before the update, you would take the quiz and it would immediately show you your score and questions missed. However, after this update, taking the quiz reverts you back to the assignments page without showing your score or questions missed. While this is a small inconvenience, it makes it very annoying to find out what questions you missed. This change is the opposite of a quality-of-life change, and there is seemingly no reason why such a change would be implemented.
Another part of this course update was an increase in lesson length. Lessons consist of pages, and before the update each lesson would have a variable number of pages. Most would only have five, while some would be longer. Now, all lessons are standardized to eight pages. You would think that this would mean that courses with smaller lessons would now be forced to teach more content. Instead, each lesson has become more drawn out. This makes it harder to gauge how long a lesson would take since all lessons are eight pages long. To confirm or deny my suspicion that no new content was added, I reached out to Florida Virtual School for comment on this change, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Florida Virtual School is a great platform. It lets students get ahead and take classes that would be otherwise unavailable. If it wasn’t for FLVS, I wouldn’t be able to take Latin or the math classes I needed. It fills an important niche and allows students to customize their education. However, the platform is by no means perfect. Namely, the DBA system can make you fall behind, and the quality of DBA instruction can be quite variable. Additionally, the new update has made the courses bloated and harder to navigate. The convenience and flexibility that virtual courses provide is unmatched, so I don’t want our state’s program to become worse. I’ll be awaiting future updates that right some of these wrongs.
