K12 International Academy, the first online school in the UAE, is looking to recruit pupils for the next academic year.
The first online school in the country is looking to recruit pupils for the next academic year.
K12 International Academy has so far attracted 17 students to its home schooling courses and hopes to increase this to 200 by the start of the 2008-09 academic year.
The school is the first overseas branch of K12 Inc, a US-based online school that has tens of thousands of pupils in America.
The academy believes home schooling will be popular because of an increase in private school fees and the struggle to find places, with popular institutions attracting 10 applications per vacancy.
The academy’s Middle East representative, Sara Sayed, said she became interested in home schooling after struggling to find suitable schools for her children, two of whom she sent back to Canada to study.
“The fees in private schools are going up,” she said. “Often, people stay here and send their wives and children back to their home country, but it’s not good for families to be apart, so people need an alternative.”
Ms Sayed said the academy did not offer home schooling, but schooling at home. The difference between the two, she said, was the way in which the academy’s teachers monitored students: either online, over the telephone or through the computer.
The school has two teachers and a high-school adviser, and is planning to recruit a second adviser and an additional two teachers.
Parents of children in kindergarten, or grades one to eight, are expected to spend four hours a day helping their children with lessons, while grade nine to 12 pupils are supposed to work eight hours a day.
About three-quarters of the academy’s pupils are studying full-time, with the rest taking single courses.
Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), which regulates education in the emirate, has granted approval for the academy to be given a licence, although this has not yet been issued.
Pupils who complete high school successfully receive a US and a UAE diploma, which is recognised by one American and one international accreditation organisation.
The academy’s programme allows students to speed through their stronger subjects and spend more time on those they struggled with, something Ms Sayed said was more difficult at conventional schools.
“If a teacher finds the pupil is spending three days on fractions, she will offer to help,” she added.
Full-time places for a year cost about Dh18,500 for kindergarten to grade eight and Dh25,000 for grades nine to 12.
Children who attend conventional school can sign up for courses in single subjects for between Dh2,000 and Dh3,000.
Dr Peggy Blackwell, dean of the College of Education at Zayed University’s Dubai campus, said online schools could be “quite good” if parents used them to help their children to catch up on particular subjects.
However, she said if they were used to replace conventional schools, the children could suffer through lack of contact with other youngsters.
“I have always thought children might be getting a reasonably good education with home schooling, but they miss so many other aspects of being in school that I think are important for well-rounded pupil development,” she said.
However, Ms Sayed said there were monthly get-togethers for pupils and their parents plus an end-of-year party.
“This is the number one question from parents: how does my child socialise? We provide events and we work hard to develop a community because the social aspect is important,” she said.
She said home-schooled children met people of different ages during day-to-day life, such as when they accompanied their parents to appointments or to shop.
“It’s not exactly a natural situation to sit quietly in a classroom with 30 children and then go outside and have all this pent-up energy,” she added.