A new virtual reality charter school will open in Florida in the fall of 2022. It is called Optima Domi, and it presents itself as the most innovative step forward in homeschooling/virtual learning.
Unlike old-fashioned virtual charter schools, Optima Domi will immerse students in “virtual reality.” Each student and their teacher will dons headgear that immerses them in the sounds and sights of an actual classroom, even though their classmates are avatars, not humans. The curriculum, says the promotional material, will be classical, based on the Great Books.
The Governing Board of Optima Domi is heavy with financial executives and two medical doctors. The Optima Foundation is deep into school choice. Many of the leaders have experience in the charter school sector. Several are graduates of Hillsdale College, a small, ultra-conservative college in Michigan that refuses any form of federal aid for students or for any other purpose. The CEO of the Optima Foundation is a CPA and wife of a very conservative Florida Republican member of Congress, who was endorsed by Trump.
One may safely assume there will be no teaching about “divisive concepts” here. It seems to be the perfect site for programming students, although I can’t imagine many teenagers who would enjoy getting their “schooling” in complete isolation, with a headset turned on for most of the day. Most schools have teachers who come from different backgrounds and bring different perspectives to their work; students too come from different worlds and enrich class discussions by offering their views. In the virtual reality world, the lessons will be carefully designed to enforce the school’s perspective, without the intervention of teachers or students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Students get a real “twilight zone” education. When they graduate, they get to enter The Matrix.
Nailed it.
Sounds like a nightmare come true.
Omg! Those poor students. Hope parents get wise to these nightmare gimmicks.
End result won’t be good.
My guess is that this virtual reality school is doomed to failure unless they jazz it up with great optics, special effects, car races and exploding text books. How long will a kid tolerate wearing headgear for any length of time. Something like this might be OK as a supplement once in a while but not as the main means of instruction, hour after hour, day after day.
The website is bare bones. It lacks course outlines and shows almost nothing in the way of sample course content. There are a few snippets of extremely crude VR clips, and that’s it.
I highly suspect that a) almost all the curricula have yet to be developed and that b) the folks at the helm, who don’t seem to include any courseware developers or even any professional educators, have no clue how enormous will be the task of actually developing the curricula for all these grade levels in all these subjects, much less curricula that will be of high quality from either a content or a technical perspective. People who haven’t worked in textbook and online educational publishing have no notion how complex an undertaking this is. No clue. I saw this throughout my career in textbook publishing. Well, I was a teacher. I know how this is done. LOL. No, you don’t.
So, putting aside for the time being the absurdity of education in the Matrix, as a practical matter, it’s difficult to see how any of this would come to fruition. The VR courseware development alone would cost many hundreds of millions of dollars. I could find no indication that they have access to that kind of money or the teams of thousands of content developers that it would take to create the courses that they are already listing on their website.
All that said, here’s a little thought experiment to explore. back in the 1940s, the nuclear physics pioneer Enrico Fermi famously asked, if extraterrestrials exist, then where are they? This has become known as the Fermi Paradox. Lots of answers to this question have been proposed. Well, they can’t travel over these distances. Or once they reach a sufficient level of technological development, they destroy themselves. Or they exist and created all this that we see around us, a simulation of a universe. with simulated beings in it (us).
We now know that ours is a young star and that our galaxy and thus, presumably, our universe is filled with potentially habitable planets with conditions amenable to the development of life. And here, life started very early, not long after the planet formed. So, life out there has had billions of years to develop, so maybe it’s too sophisticated to find low lifeforms like us at all interesting. When was the last time you tried to establish communication with a colony of amoebas? And here’s another thought that has occurred to me: perhaps these advanced lifeforms have long ago retreated into extraordinarily realistic simulated realities of their own creation that are a lot more accessible and interesting than are some primitive, undeveloped worlds across extraordinarily vast reaches of space. Mind you, I’m not talking about anything like VR as it currently exists. I’m talking about Matrix-level simulated realities. Perhaps they all started taking the blue pill very early on in their technological development.
The cost is the point – finding ways to de-fund public ed is the point.
Beta testing kids and data mining and writing their bitcoin futures.
https://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/21/12/ab24685392/next-gen-crypto-based-metaverse-spectrue-aims-to-elevate-clinical-diagnosis-for-people-with-speci
Spectrue (strue) powering Spectruths Metavers – where you can personalize and create multiple AI friends –
(A teacher version can arrive in home for a crypto currency premium)
Good enough “training” (“roll over, sit up, stay, good boy”) for the children of Proles. Teach them some gritful obedience. “Will you be taking your latte on the veranda, Master Gates?”
Will the students be allowed to remove their headgear during class? If not, how long at a time will they be staring at a screen only a couple inches from their eyes without being able to look away for even a moment? If they are allowed, how long will it take for them to figure out that they can play video games and text while they’re “in class”? This charter school takes all the worst things about pandemic remote learning and makes them worse. And the students get no social interaction with each other? No sunshine? No school dances? No real sports? No real friends? Not even real facial expressions? Just stay home all day, every day? How is it different from being chained in the basement? What an insipid misuse of technology, bordering on child abuse. If this” school” gets state funding, the state should be sued.
No Wonder The Two Doctors Are Serving As Board Members Because…
The U.S. Army has been using VR to train soldiers in Synthetic Training Environments that represent potential combat scenarios across the world.
VR can have an impact on learning and behavior but VR sickness is also a REAL thing.
It happens when humans try to “process” Virtual Reality and start to manifest a range of feelings/conditions.
Seizures
Headache
Nausea
Discomfort
Depression
Disorientation
Drowsiness
Eye Strain
Hearing Problems
Motion Sickness
Disrupted Brain Development
Yup. Great fun as very short-term entertainment, but far too crude and dangerous now to be a full-time thing. Here’s a little something the folks at this “virtual classical academy” might have learned about from their classical studies: hubris.
And it’s always been this way with the computer infatuated. Interestingly, things that we biological systems do quite easily turned out to be very, very difficult, even, perhaps, impossible to instantiate on digital computers, far, far, far more complex than the computer nerds thought they would be.
Sorry, but Clippy the Paperclip is not a replacement for an administrative assistant, and it requires a person who is simultaneously a nerd and way, way out on the autism spectrum to imagine that it would be.
Not all people with money have great ideas. Just look at Bill Gates. These people are trying to ride the technology wave by making money before people see the downside including all the real health concerns including brain development that are listed above.
ride the tech wave: yes
a very essential TRUTH: we are, as a culture, falling so deeply into a tech world where we will not find ultimate health and happiness
yup
This, or something like it, will probably be what education will be like in 20 years. And it will be better than remote learning today. But it’s depressing.
Nah!
I have a photocopy of an article from the Wisconsin Journal of Education from the 30’s with a pic of radio on a teachers desk asking if this was the teacher of the 50s.
They figured out fairly quickly a radio couldn’t do what a teacher does in the teaching and learning process which is more than just dissemination of information.
It ain’t happening.
Exactly, Duane. I once edited a textbook written by a physicist who was part of the team that, with Fermi, built the first nuclear reactor. He was telling me about how, back when television first became a thing, he and other scientists were involved in high-level talks with the U.S. government about replacing teachers throughout the country with television. LMAO.
Setting reminder for December 21, 2041.
I think I will have moved on by then!
Quite possibly me, too.
Hilariously, the folks who promote the achievement of “general artificial intelligence,” starting back with Herbert Simon and Alan Newell in the 1950s and ’60s, have always said this. It was 20 years away in 1960. It was 20 years away in 1970. . . . It is 20 years away in 2021.
Same with The Singularity.
Here is a hint of what is possible: https://www.with.in/watch/clouds-over-sidra/
No one is saying otherwise. I can think of no clearer means to demonstrate the differences and modes of operations of types of bicycle brakes (rim, disk, drum, etc.) than to have a zoomable animation of them in operation. These technologies have their uses, certainly. But not, obviously, as the primary mode for delivery of quotidian instruction to children. One would have to be pretty witless to think that.
Lol, Flerp! Hold a seance and let me know how it turned out!
My gut says you’ll outlast me.
Sheer orneriness might preserve me for a while longer!
These people are like someone in the 5th millennium BCE who has just invented a kite saying that he’s going to start a company to transport people and trade goods through the air to all parts of the world.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
But, but . . . this is the future! Kites everywhere, carrying people and rice almost instantly from anywhere to anywhere!
I have seen the future, and it’s kites!
And greening the deserts! We could use the kites to move lakes and rivers there!
Oases everywhere! Paradise! Brought to you by kites!
Has a big “products and services” division:
https://www.optimadomi.com/products-and-services/courses-and-curriculum
Expect ed reformers to be pushing public schools to buy the products.
100% rave reviews from the echo chamber, guaranteed! Buy, buy, buy!
Yep!
And then pushing it on students with special needs
https://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/21/12/ab24685392/next-gen-crypto-based-metaverse-spectrue-aims-to-elevate-clinical-diagnosis-for-people-with-speci
Amusing that there are no ed reform complaints about blatantly ideological and political charter and private schools, like this school.
Incoherent, as usual. If it’s a charter or publicly funded private school it’s okay to push an ideological agenda, but it’s not okay in a public school.
The ” ed reform movements” blatant bias against public schools and public school students is obvious to anyone outside the ed reform echo chamber. Two sets of rules- no rules for the schools they market and promote, and lots and lots of rules for the public schools they hope top eradicate.
How many glowing articles about this school will the ed reform echo chamber churn out? Tens? Hundreds? All identical, no real analysis or questions. Just cheerleading.
The echo chamber says that they benefit public schools and public school students with their work promoting and lobbying for charters and vouchers. Their belief is their work promoting and marketing schools that are not public benefits public school students in a “trickle down” manner:
https://www.educationnext.org/ripple-effect-how-private-school-choice-programs-boost-competition-benefit-public-school-students/
But if that’s true why should public schools hire them as consultants and policy advisors? Presumably they’ll keep lobbying for more and more charters and vouchers so any “trickle down” benefits will flow to public schools no matter what public schools do, leaving public schools free to hire people outside the echo chamber, people who actually value public schools.
There’s absolutely no reason for public schools to employ these folks. They return no value to your schools or students. Any benefit they claim to provide as “trickle down” from their promotion and marketing of charters/vouchers (if it exists) will happen anyway.
The concept of utilizing virtual experiences as part of a lesson might have some merit but not for an avatar of fake students.
They are trying to replicate a failed system of education. What next? Chairs set up in the child’s living room with dolls in the seats?
What if virtual experience showed an experience in a business or government activity? Better yet, once the virus clears to a reasonable level, get students into the community, out in the fresh air to gain real experiences.
Every crisis is an opportunity. The opportunity is here to replace the failed system of education, not replicate it.
It’s the same old scam but they are attempting to wrap it in a different-looking box.
The last budget I saw for development of a big basal textbook program–six levels of one program in ONE subject–was over 65 million, and that was fifteen+ years ago. Professional quality courseware development and VR development are both extremely expensive. These folks clearly have no idea what they are doing or what it entails, and the crudeness of the samples on the website demonstrate this quite clearly. But who knows, maybe a Musk or a Bezos or a Gates is willing to drop the kind of cash that would be needed to create year-long VR courses in every subject area at every grade level and would be willing to wait for the decade that the development would take to complete. But one could probably eliminate world hunger for the year for the cost of this.
Take a free Hillsdale College course or courses online and decide for yourself.
Hmmm, not sure of your point. Please explain more. Thanks!
See my comment at 6:16 below.
Atlanta Public Schools Leadership (APSL; school board and superintendent) recently decided to solve the district’s “disengaged students” problem by outfitting “innovative classrooms” with virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) and to characterize doing so as continuous improvement.
I replied, in part:
Unfortunately, continue improvement adds to keeping APS stuck looping in a state of perpetual systemic instability. Continuous improvement invites implementing change after change after change, without ever actually improving, without ever accepting failure, without ever being truly innovative, without ever achieving authentic breakthrough moments, without ever learning and acquiring new knowledge or wisdom, without ever moving away from ignorance and futility.
So, not surprisingly, implementing “innovative classrooms outfitted with virtual reality and artificial intelligence” in schools would be APSL’s latest ballyhooed “continuous improvement” change. After all, “disengaged students” is the problem and VR and AI are just the right solutions to solve the problem, right now.
Unfortunately, in true reality (TR), the problem is not and never has been the students. The problem is and always has been APSL—Atlanta Public Schools Leadership—insular urban school boards and superintendents.
And now, more than at any other time, today’s APSL have decided to risk psychologically harming children by exposing them to dangers associated with AI and VR. Obviously, APSL reason pros outweigh cons. That the short-term benefit of implementing AI and VR to solve their immediate “disengaged students” problem outweighs any long-term harm that will be done to children’s mental health and general well-being and how children so harmed will impact civil society later on.
No benefit of AI and VR in the classroom should be prioritized over knowing the technology “Devalues human connection.” Humans disconnected from each other in TR are likely to treat each other as objects, easily killed or otherwise disposed of without remorse. Consider the rise in Atlanta homicides.
Consider, too, Samuel Sotillos:
“Contemplation of the Real allows action to align with what it means to be truly human: ‘The virtue of the action of those who are free beings lies in the complete coordination of their being—body, soul and spirit […] at once.’”
“We can see the conditioning effects of behaviorism that do not lead to a more complete human being, but reduce the human being to a [technological] servant of behaviorism.”
–Samuel B. Sotillos, in Behaviorism: The Quandary of a Psychology without a Soul
Apparently, the fact that children’s inborn ability to develop as human beings in relation to interacting with physical reality through touch and in relations with their developing all other human sensory abilities naturally is worth preserving registers little, if any, importance with APSL.
Instead, pedagogy as technology-delivered behaviorism for Atlanta children registers great, enthusiastic favor with APSL. Without question, however delivered, APSL allow behaviorism in APS to ensure a great many certain children graduate APS psychologically conditioned to conform to certain APS partners’ purposes, even if those purposes are racialist, if not racist.
Continuous improvement requires noting better than performative copying or replication of some other actual or theorized program success, and implementing it with “fidelity,” while disregarding contexts that influenced the program’s success to happen elsewhere.
Virtual reality can be very useful for teaching things like surgery.
But virtual reality to mimic an ordinary classroom?
That’s just dumb.
What’s the point?
Gates’s old idea: the costs of schools are in facilities and teachers. Eliminate both. Buy more computers and computer software. This will make Gates richer, which he so desperately needs to be, but hey, that’s just serendipity, and this is another of the Gates Great Ideas TM.
It’s interesting to encounter this envisioned virtual reality schooling program on the same day that The Matrix: Resurrection is being released.
And it’s not surprising that a Christian Nationalist organization of schools would harken back to the supposed order and virtue of the classical world. The Italian and German fascists were also quite enamored of caricatures of classical Greece and Rome.
And, alas, the lesson these people seem to have thought that they learned from E.D. Hirsch, Jr., is not simply the virtue of knowledge-based instruction but that one needs a centralized authority deciding on what that knowledge will be. This is a tendency in Hirsch’s otherwise admirable work that is horrifying.
I have a little homework assignment for these “classical academy” folks: Read The Greeks and the Irrational, by E. R. Dodds.
I think it was the poet Theodore Roethke, if my memory serves me, who wrote, “I long for the administrator who will pound the desk and say, ‘I want to see a little disorder around here!'”
At the Hillsdale College site, there is info. about the College’s initiatives relative to K-12.
The site lists its member K-12 “classical schools” and, its K-12 curriculum schools. The definition of the second category is,”plan to open as member schools in the near future”. Thirty-two schools are listed as curriculum schools. Nine are Catholic schools. Four are listed as Christian.
One of the Hillsdale’s pages identifies a “1776 curriculum”.
“Optima’s goal is the successful launch of Hillsdale College Barney Charter School Initiative Classical Academies and other schools of excellence across the state of Florida.”
Bulwark.com posted 7-24-2020, “Hillsdale Must Join the National Reckoning on Race.”
It was written by a former student.
Hillsdale counts Erik Prince as an alumni.
In terms of “notable alumni”, very few women are identified. When the list of men excludes ball players (mostly football) and Republican legislators, the number of “notables” is significantly reduced.
The big money that came into the college was raised by Roche III, a conservative.
Hillsdale is possibly the most rightwing college in the nation.
The Bulwark article describes exactly what Hillsdale is. And, in terms of a reckoning, IMO, the school went the other way with the 1776 curriculum and the “classical” academies.
Colleges promoting the “religious” convictions, “government programs for the poor do more harm than good” and “let the poor die like feral dogs in the gutter”, are a threat to Christianity and democracy.
Not possibly, just is.
I would like to take just a moment to set a few facts straight. The name of the school is Optima Classical Academy, not Optima Domi. It is, as stated, a charter school, but it is a PUBLIC charter school, which is different from a Christian school or private school, in that they are still considered to be part of the public school system (at least in Florida) & as such are required to follow the same state laws, in regard to what can & can’t be taught in the classroom, as any other Florida public school. And the Optima Foundation, who is in charge of overseeing the school, may be “deep into school choice” as you stated, but if Florida parents weren’t given the option to choose where their child attends school, there would be no Optima Foundation to begin with because they oversee Optima charter schools. So, its kind of their job to be “deep into school choice”. Also, it would appear that Florida’s parents are “deep into school choice” as well, since they went to the polls & elected a Governor who is big on ensuring parents have choices about where their kids go to school. As far as any teaching of “divisive concepts” is concerned, once again, the laws governing the Florida Public School System apply to what Optima Classical Academy is and is not allowed to teach. So, while the teaching of “divisive concepts” may be limited, it does seem a bit unfair to single out one school for following state laws that apply to every public school in the entire state. My daughter is attending classes at Optima Classical Academy & there are most definitely students & teachers from diverse backgrounds & there are ideas being presented & enriching discussions taking place from a multitude of different perspectives. I can also assure you that the lessons are as diverse as the teachers & students. They are in no way “designed to enforce the school’s perspective” & parents are given the right to observe what is being taught and discussed in their child’s classroom. So, in addition to school board oversight & the oversight of the Optima Foundation Board, there is parental oversight as well. Also, while I imagine finding many teenagers attending the school this year in order to ask them about whether or not they are enjoying their classes might be tricky, since the highest grade they are currently teaching is 8th, the ones that you could find would likely be quick to let you know that they love virtual reality learning & that they aren’t “getting their schooling in complete isolation, with a headset turned on for most of the day”. Because when students are in the virtual reality setting, with their headsets on, it is like being in any other classroom. All the other students from their class are there with them & they discuss the learning material, in real time, with each other like they would in any other school. The only difference is that you see your classmate’s avatar instead of the actual person sitting next to you, but the conversations and interactions they have with each other through out the day are as real as any they would be experiencing in traditional brick & mortar classrooms. And while virtual reality technology is utilized, it is not the only type of learning tool the school employs, so while they do spend plenty of time in this setting, it’s not the only thing they do all day. I have one last thing to add about the school, my daughter has been receiving an education that far surpasses what I think she could be getting in any traditional classroom setting. The Optima Academy provides their students with a first-rate, classical education. Which, in case you aren’t familiar with this style of education, was designed to teach students how to learn & think for themselves, not just what they need to memorize to pass their next test. It is how
Institutions of higher learning across the world approach education, and it is the style in which most of the great minds through out the history of mankind have been taught. The idea that a school whose primary objective is to teach their students how to think for themselves, would utilize lessons that are “carefully designed to enforce the school’s perspective” is absolutely absurd & would be completely counter productive.
You are brainwashed if you believe that online learning is how “the great minds throughout the history of mankind” were taught. You don’t know what good education is. Virtual reality may be fun, but it definitely does not deliver a “classical education.” The school was founded by the wife of a Trump-style Congressman and several of those associated with it come from the extremist Hillsdale College. True classical education debates issues. Your children are being indoctrinated.