Physical Education is a particularly challenging course to design in a fully-online K-12 environment. Although several national and state-run programs offer the course, each has a unique take on how to ensure students engage with the course material and achieve a healthier lifestyle through exercise. The solution for one program, a statewide virtual school in the Midwest, is to use fitness trackers. The use of fitness trackers has allowed for increased student engagement and new opportunities for student/student and student/instructor interaction. Of course, using fitness trackers is also a logistical challenge, especially after the virtual school, housed within a school district, moved statewide in 2017. Still, the Physical Education course is one of the most popular in the catalog: almost 2000 fitness trackers were handed out to enrolled students over the summer of 2019 alone.
In this presentation, a P.E. Coordinator for the curriculum department and an instructional designer for the virtual school come together to discuss how they have collaborated in building online Physical Education courses for Middle School and High School. In particular, the speakers focus on how they have used their cross-departmental collaboration to build assignments that creatively apply critical thinking skills, ensure alignment between learning objectives and the materials in the course, and expand the definition of student to student interaction in a fully-online course.
