Online Schools: Hawaii

“The Aloha State” became the fiftieth state in 1959, but the history of Hawaii—a state comprising a chain of 132 islands—dates back nearly 1,500 years, when Polynesians from the Marquesas Islands sailed over 2,000 miles in canoes to migrate to the Big Island. Five hundred years later, Tahitian settlers arrived in Hawaii, bringing with them unique beliefs about gods and demigods and instituting a strict social hierarchy known as kapu. Tahitian influence greatly contributed to Hawaiian culture; today, Hawaii remains the most ethnically and racially diverse state of any state in the union, a mix that encompasses Caucasians, Polynesians, Puerto Ricans, and Americans of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Filipino descent.

With the recent addition of $75 million in Race to Top funds, Hawaii is in a unique position to implement innovative education policies at the public level. Currently, Hawaii educates more students in independent institutions of secondary education than any other state and is home to four of the nation's largest independent schools. With only 64 percent of public high school students graduating in four years, Hawaii has sought educational strategies that grant students better access to online programs in the hopes that more students will graduate within four consecutive years.

The Department of Education is in the process of restructuring its funding in order to expand online schools in Hawaii. The state has already taken critical steps to provide distance learning programs by following the model of the highly successful Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a K-12 online school which has vastly improved test scores and retention in its own state. Hawaii's E-School, a supplementary program run by the Department of Education through the Advanced Technology Research Branch, enrolls approximately 800 students during the academic year and offers courses at the regular and Advanced Placement level in Mathematics, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies, World Languages, Fine Arts, and Health.

There are notable limitations that keep students from experiencing the maximum benefits of Hawaii's online schools. Though E-School allows middle school students to take classes, the school does not grant course credit to students at this level. In addition, students are allowed to enroll in no more than two courses per semester. The Department of Education is considering policies in which online schools would allow a broader range of students the option to pursue studies on a full-time basis as well as granting course credit to elementary and middle school students.

The need for distance learning programs continues to increase at the post-secondary level. The state's island geography, which encompasses remote areas and imposes physical separation among the campuses in the statewide system, is a contributing factor to the expansion of online schools; Hawaii continues to be responsive to the needs of distance learners, especially in light of a recent analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, which found that 65 percent of Hawaii’s jobs will require postsecondary education by 2018. The University of Hawaii Manoa offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in Business, Education, Nursing, Psychology, and Social Sciences. In order to meet the needs of the 2,761 full-time undergraduate students now enrolled in the University of Hawaii Hilo's distance learning program, the school now boasts a total of 146 online courses, up from 63 in 2008, recently adding an advanced Doctor of Nursing degree to the mix. In addition, the University of Hawaii Hilo is considering, for the first time, to offer distance learning "hybrid" schedules—a mix of face-to-face courses as well as online ones—during the summer of 2012.

• Colleges & Universities