Access to Equal Opportunities: building of a virtual classroom within two ‘conventional’ schools

ABSTRACT The development of information and communication technologies has made it possible to establish inter‐institutional electronic networks to enhance the quality of education in small schools in sparsely populated countries like Finland. Along with this development, new kinds of virtual classrooms have emerged in symbiosis with conventional schools. A virtual classroom in a school context is a new, mostly uninvestigated, phenomenon. This article reports results of a Finnish project which linked two lower secondary classrooms to one virtual classroom. The article presents five practical settings in which the virtual classroom took place: Classroom ‐, school ‐, local ‐, regional ‐, and state contexts The rapid development of pragmatism, together with intellectual and social partnership were considered as major pedagogical advantages of the virtual classroom. Two major disadvantages are also analyzed: First, pupils inability to tolerate the electronic lack of intimacy, and second, the difficulties some pupils had with self‐discipline and self‐monitoring in the face of learning tasks in the virtual classroom