Online PE classes: Sneakers optional?
September 20, 2010 by Claire KnightPosted in: Tech Trends
More and more students are taking classes on the Internet — including online PE classes! But is this a good idea?
Twenty-two states allow students to earn their required PE credits online, according to the 2010 Shape of the Nation Report conducted by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education.
Problem is, less than half of those states (only 10) require the online courses be taught by state-certified PE teachers. And that’s not all.
The study found other concerns, including:
- Only six states offer “comprehensive” PE, which meets all state and national standards
- Just nine states offer a course on personal fitness and wellness
- A mere three states offer a sports course, such as golf or tennis, and
- Only four states offer weight-training classes online.
Based on this information, should students be allowed to take PE online? Sound off below.
Tags: online education, physical education, student health, Tech Trends
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September 21st, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Should students be allowed to take PE online?
Whether or not online PE should be acceptable depends primarily on what alternatives are available. Is the student physically able to attend a school that offers a suitable class that will include supervised physical activity? Is the student emotionally able to attend a school that offers a suitable class that will include supervised physical activity? Does the student have any religious issues with attending a school that offers a suitable class that will include supervised physical activity? Since all students are required to take P.E. to graduate from a significant number of schools does the online P.E. class provide a “way out” for a student trapped in a situation that would probably be at the least highly challenging for the student and at the worst physically, emotionally or ethically disastrous? Who is offering credit for the online P.E. class? Is the judgment of the people who will decide that the student can take the online class and get P.E. credit for it trustful? In my experience the choices made by the parents, the child, and the accrediting institution normally should be accepted and that general assumptions should be avoided unless there is hard evidence of abuse of power by those directly involved in the situation.
September 22nd, 2010 at 2:58 am
PE Online? I really thought this was a joke…it should be.
September 22nd, 2010 at 12:46 pm
How are you supposed to play dodge ball alone? Baseball? Bad mitten? Sad. Will we, culturally, loose our team games if no one is there to pass on the game rules or good sportsmanship habits?
I think kids need more human interaction and face to face skills…maybe a city wide “open lab” concept could be started. Show up to a certain park during a block of time to participate in activities, professional athletic & medical staff, and get school credits. Or start giving each student a wii fit with their supply packs. Students could report their hours spent directly to instructors.
September 22nd, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Wow Mary. If we are going to make PE a free credit because people aren’t “emotionally able” to attend a class, why don’t we do that with Math and English courses. Better yet, Biology courses. I’m “emotionally” unable to attend Biology because it bores me to tears. Tears being a symptom of an emotional response.
If there are reasons I can’t attend a class (no matter what the class is), I have to weigh the importance (religious *raspberrys*) of those reason against not recieving credit. It’s like a blind person wanting to be an airline pilot. They are “physically” unable to complete the course. Maybe we should offer it online and then when they do complete the course put them right to work.
September 22nd, 2010 at 3:22 pm
A Key part of PE is the personal interaction with the other people involved in the sport. There are no truly individual sports. Even running as a sport is done against or with other people to measure yourself and learn about yourself through participating.
As for the way the states seem to be implementing this it seems as if te accountants have made the decisions to save money and nobody is actually monitoring the quality of the product they are delivering.
September 22nd, 2010 at 3:30 pm
If the physical activity portion of the course is verifiable (fitness center attendance, participation in organized competative sports or recreation programs), why not?
I gotta tell ya: In high school I used to suit up for gym and then “jog” over the hill behind the soccer field and smoke for 35 minutes. An on-line option may have been more effective.
September 22nd, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Online courses and institutions are a growing part of today’s culture. Almost any subject can be taught online. Can Physical Education be taught online? I think that it most definitely can. Can the students that take Physical Education online be held accountable? No, no they cannot.
Online courses are a good thing, don’t get me wrong. There are people that are busy bees and simply do not have time to sit in a classroom. However, cheating and cutting corners is made extremely easy with online courses.
Example: Johnny needs to pass his math class online in order to graduate. Johnny doesn’t like math and doesn’t care to learn math. Johnny asks Susie, who likes Johnny and is really good at math, to help him. She obliges and completes all of Johnny’s tests and assignments simply by signing in under Johnny’s name online. After all, the computer doesn’t know the difference.
I understand that this is not always the case but; my point is that if I am taking a class online there are easy ways to get it done without much effort. Perhaps I’m taking a biology test online. What is to stop me from asking Bing, Yahoo, or Jeeves what the answer is to number eight?
I can’t even fathom the corners we could cut with an online physical education course. I can see the lesson for the day now…”Warm-up with a light five minute jog. Run two miles, and cool down by walking four minutes and them completing our static stretch routine.” The student reads the lesson, opens up Nacho Cheese Doritos and pops in Call of Duty to his X-box 360. After an hour or two he checks off his workout for the day on the physical education online site.
I’m sorry folks, but interaction with other people, having encouragement from someone working with you and pushing you, and accountability doesn’t seem to be there.
If I’m wrong, missing something, or you just don’t agree, I would love to hear from you!
Have a wonderful day! Smile, and get outside and get that heart rate up!
September 22nd, 2010 at 5:18 pm
I truly believe that most online classes are a waste of time. As a college instructor I’m appalled at online courses; it is far, far easier to cheat online than in the classroom, and cheating happens everywhere, so the odds are not on the side of online. Online PE is ludicrous! There is no way to adequately ensure that students have done an activity or not. PE was not my favorite class in school, but when it was time to play soccer, I was out on the field dutifully trying to kick the ball. In college, I took ice skating and every morning I was on the ice at 8 am. PE is a contact sport, like life. You have to show up in person.
Online classes are the death of education. For every 1 person who actually devotes themselves to the class, there are 10 who cheat their way through and don’t know any more about the subject than when they started. I wish they’d never been invented.
September 22nd, 2010 at 5:26 pm
We all seemed to be concerned about child obesity, yet 22 states allow on line Physical Education? How stupid is that? If a teacher in any area is not certified then the course is not a legimate course. How would parents feel if their child took an english class on line with a non-certified teacher? I’m guessing not to happy. Children need to be physical. Test scores are higher when children have active time during the school day. If you are not certified in Physical Education, you are not a teacher. You are wanna be.
September 22nd, 2010 at 6:44 pm
Come check out our online blog. Don’t worry, all of our students are taught physical education in person.
September 22nd, 2010 at 6:56 pm
Are these actual high school “gym” classes or are they like the PE classes in college where the student is not really required to do any physical activity, but to write up training regimens and care plans or lesson plans for how to teach Physical Education?
I do agree that DodgeBall for the Wii is not exactly the same thing as playing the game with other kids. There needs to be actual physical activity in these kids’ lives. But I can also see Mary’s point. Some kids to have physical limitations and do not qualify for adaptive PE. Some kids do have religious objections to participating in sports or other activities in a mixed-gender setting. Some kids have been traumatized in their past and are not emotionally stable enough to dress out in an unsupervised locker room — or even ready to handle the freedom of being allowed to run and play inthe gym with their peers. Other accomodations should be made for those individual cases, but online gym class doesn’t sound quite right to me.
September 22nd, 2010 at 6:58 pm
[...] now allow students to receive credit for Physical Education online. What do you think about that? ONLINE PE Comments RSS [...]
September 23rd, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Unfortunately, the computer age and growing number of online courses are a fact of life but I find P.E. a huge joke. In our Jr. High Physical Education Handbook we state that students have an opportunity to work off steam, interact with others, develop teamwork and encourage sportsmanship. How can these areas be learned with a computer? More students isolate themselves using computers or computer games on a daily basis. In a society where high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels and obesity are concerns for 10 year olds I fail to see how an online physical education class is going to help this. Some areas just need the “old-fashioned” method of teaching and participation. Surely these students and our society will benefit in the long run.
September 23rd, 2010 at 4:52 pm
As a former PE teacher and now an instructional technology specialist (I’ll spare you the details of the transition) I have mixed feelings about online PE.
First, I believe that PE can be described as physical experience not just physical education. Anyone can tell you the benefits of living a healthy, active lifestyle. However, far less can actually prove it through actually doing something (even if it’s a FitnessGram assessment) let alone describe the experience of feeling healthy and active.
Second, PE *should* provide a social environment where all students are comfortable to experience new activities. If you’re playing dodgeball or solely “teaching” traditional sports for your entire curriculum, you’re part of the problem. Students need new experiences that they can reasonably pursue in their leisure time, in their local area and at low cost.
These bring me to my final point, teaching a PE class completely online shouldn’t even be part of this conversation. Effective online teachers know a hybrid approach of face-to-face and online interaction is ideal for actual learning. To that end, if you are providing assessments or assignments that have no real value (i.e. – questions that can be Bing’ed, Googled or Yahoo!’ed) you are doing it wrong. Our traditional view of assessments, answering multiple choice questions or writing essays, are not sufficient anymore and that is a good thing. Assessments that involve students in aggregating and mapping areas to local activities, parks, YMCA’s and requiring some outreach might fit the online component
If you think about it, an effective teacher could somehow add an online component to a PE course, at any level. Let’s face it, physical education’s value is the impact is has on life choices. Those life choices are not ones that are solely made at school. Any connection made outside of school from subjects taught in school can be powerful.
September 23rd, 2010 at 6:35 pm
I teach an online high school PE class in Oregon. I am writing in to tell you it is a better class, as far as Physical education and fitness knowledge, than any PE class I had in high school. I am teaching about physical fitness. These students will leave my class and understand why being physically fit is important as well as knowing how to do it. Let’s face it; most of us do not have a bunch of adults to play dodge ball with. Most of us excercise on our own to stay fit. These students will leave my class with a host of activities they can do by themselves. Thes activities do not require a gym fee either. Each person is trained to be their own fitness trainer. Each student is required to do physical activity daily. They log it and I monitor the logs. We set goals and my students work hard. I am very excited about what is taking place in my classes. I do agree with the comments about being qualified to teach the courses. I am considered a highly qualified PE teacher.
September 27th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Roy Hale,
Being a P.E. Teacher myself and formerly working as a manger in a large health club, I completely disagree that most exercise on their own. I see more young and older people signing up together (friend, co-worker, family member) to get motivation to workout. Most people request the larger exercise classes (spinning, pilates, yoga, step, ect…) to be around other people for motivation and competition. When I talked to most of the people in the health club, they love to come when it is packed as it just really gets them going to workout.
Every client that I have ever trained, including the ones that had a fitness background, needed to learn how to be pushed and compete a little bit. I have rarely seen anybody being successful on their own.
You will also rarely see personal trainers just giving information out for their clients to follow. As you know, many kids learn by different methods (auditory, visual, kinesthetic) and need that hands on approach in physical fitness to learn certain movement patterns and proper techniques.
Big difference between knowing the path and walking the path when it comes to physical fitness on any level….
September 27th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
. I am a high school PE teacher and track coach, and see the kids that enter high school now only physically developed at a 6th grade level. Since kids are not allowed to “play” outside of school nowadays, let us compound the problem by taking the only opportunity most kids have to move out of schools completely. What an asinine idea on so many levels. With obesity being the #1 health issue in the US, The United States will become the country with the most intelligent corpses in the World. , WOW! what a great idea.
October 1st, 2010 at 9:46 pm
At our online school we require students to wear a heart rate monitor when they do their activity. Students must bee in the cardiac zone to get credit. They have to sweat! That is better than any face to face class.
January 29th, 2011 at 3:04 pm
Interesting comments on all sides. My daughter is not enjoying high school gym class. running laps and doing situps has been a good majority of her classes. Outside of school, she completes 8 hours of various dance classes and another 6 hours of hunter/jumper horse instruction. Not too concerned about her physical fitness. Considering online PE to free up a semester for another more meaning full class