MILWAUKEE, Wis. – Milwaukee Public Schools is using “Telepresence” to connect students with advanced placement classes not offered at their schools using instructors working remotely online.

“We had some schools that had several AP courses, but you had schools that either didn’t have offerings or had one or two offering,” MPS chief innovation officer Tonya Adair told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If students are exposed to more rigorous courses, then they will go on to complete college successfully.”

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Last year, MPS partnered with technology company Cisco to offer two AP statistics classes: one at Washington High School taught by a teacher at Bay View High School, and another at Milwaukee School of Languages taught by a teacher at Riverside University High School.

District officials expanded the program this school year to link students to AP classes in Spanish, calculus, world history, macroeconomics, microeconomics and government, with plans to add courses in heath and linguistics this spring.

By next school year, 11 district schools plan to use the remote learning technology to expand class offerings for high schoolers.

Telepresence allows instructors at one school to broadcast lessons to others, where students participate in classroom discussions and activities through large computer screens fitted with video cameras. Twice a month the instructor travels to the receiving school to monitor progress, according to the news site.

“It feels like a regular class,” said Albany Dodd, a senior at Vincent High School, “we’ve just got some extra kids on screen.”

The Telepresence technology is opening up new opportunities for schools looking to use resources more efficiently, and homebound students who are often cut out of the classroom.

At the University of California Irvine’s School of Education, Ph.D. candidate Veronica Newhart has worked on using Telepresence to reconnect students to the classroom through a Telepresence robot that allows students to experience learning in a much more hands-on way, by talking with friends and their teacher, raising their hand in class via blinking lights on the machine, and even participating in field trips that were once impossible because of disabilities.

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“People always talk about robots takin over and replacing us, but you can actually use them to improve the human condition, especially that of homebound children,” Newhart told Phys.org. “Just because these kids can’t go to school doesn’t mean they can’t have a presence in the classroom.”

And while Telepresence has obvious advantages for homebound students, it also holds potential for drastically cutting costs for schools while improving instruction.

In theory, students in one location could connect to a virtual classroom of a world-renowned teacher in another location. Several school districts including Milwaukee, Redlands Unified in California, and the Kodiak Island Borough School District in Alaska are already putting the technology to use, though it’s largely limited to classrooms within the same school district.

The ability to expand Telepresence across districts, states, and even the globe, holds a lot of potential for the country’s public schools, by expanding available classes, improving instruction, and offering a very cost-effective way to tackle the nationwide teacher shortage.

The innovative practice is the next frontier for online learning, but it faces one massive political hurdle that’s so far kept schools from expanding beyond their own borders: teachers unions.

Despite explosive growth in online learning in public school districts and colleges across the country, American Federation of Teachers President Rhonda Weingarten is among union officials emerging as the biggest obstacle to taking the next logical step.

Teachers unions are infamous for demanding low teacher-student ratios in schools because unions rely on dues paying teachers for survival. If one teacher can effectively educate 100 or 500 students by leveraging technology, the financial loss would be devastating to the union’s bottom line, and that’s what union officials care about most.

At an appearance at West Virginia’s Jefferson County School last week, the AFT union boss badmouthed online learning and insisted her members are the only truly effective way students can understand what they’re taught.

“Our job is a human job – it’s a connective tissue job – working with students,” she insisted, pointing out that AP classes are especially difficult to teach remotely.

“When you’re talking about AP, you are talking about critical thinking,” she said, according to The Journal. “You’re not just memorizing some facts – you’re really trying to acquire critical thinking. How do you do that if you don’t have any human engagement?”

Milwaukee AP government teacher Joseph Shokatz told the Journal-Sentinel it took some getting used to, but with a little training from Cisco he’s managed just fine.

“It was intimidating in the beginning,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 10 or 12 years, so I know how to teach it, but now the technology automatically connects.”