My good friend Eric sent this tidbit over the weekend, and I have to say, I’m fascinated:

CNN.com: Students offered online PE courses
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/06/22/online.pe.ap/index.html?section=cnn_offbeat

I’m all in favor of online courses, and I’m quite certain that this idea has some merit behind it. In fact, the online course may well promote a more rigorous physical program than the average PE course. And certainly, the scheduling flexibility would be wonderful– I know kids really struggle with PE requirements when trying to build a well-balanced schedule that adequately prepares them for the workforce or for college.

But the news that PE has moved online raises several questions for me. I think my greatest concern is the problem of perception. I already wonder how online courses are viewed, and have tried to steer our program towards courses that I think students and parents could easily conceptualize as “online courses.” We’ve begun to explore more adventurous territory, tackling a foreign language (Latin) out of necessity, and an art course out of the belief that we can use online courses to create more meaningful offline experiences in online courses. But even those efforts have met with some resistance because it’s hard to envision what a course with a heavy speaking component would look and feel like asynchronously, and I think people naturally think of art as so hands-on that removing the immediate presence of “the master” would render the course impossible. So I can imagine serious concern about an online PE course.

My biggest question would not be the validity of the experience– there’s an abundant amount of information about health and wellness on the Web, and people are able to use that to create personalized workout regimens that help them feel better. I’d worry more about liability and supervision– part of the school’s responsibility during a PE course is to create opportunities for students to exercise and learn about fitness in a monitored environment. Does online PE take the capable teacher out of the equation and replace him/her with an untrained eye (or worse, no supervision)? If the answer is yes, I think you have a safety issue; you may have a student who ends up exerting himself beyond his limits and no reasonable capacity to catch that behavior. If the answer is no, what does the online course do that the face-to-face teacher could not do?

Still, it’s worth considering that we are definitely able to supplement or augment our physical education curricula with Internet-based tools, and hey, I may come around one day and trumpet the virtues of online PE.

(Note: The CNN article will expire on July 22, 2005.)