A virtual school is modeled on a traditional brick-and-mortar school, but is located online and uses digital technologies and the web to facilitate learning. Virtual schools thus can transcend the physical boundaries imposed by a school building.  Created primarily to provide education for middle and high school students, virtual schools often (though not always) maintain the traditional school calendar and timetables.  In general, virtual schools also tend to organize content into courses along traditional disciplinary lines.

In terms of the concept of ubiquitous learning described by Cope and Kalantzis (2016), virtual schools do allow teaching and learning to transcend the boundaries of space.  The Montana Digital Academy (MDA) is an example of a virtual school that is leveraging the affordances of a digital teaching environment to provide educational opportunities to students in rural areas in Montana.  By providing the kinds of remedial education or electives offered in the state’s larger communities to underserved rural schools, the digital academy is improving access to education for students in the state’s rural communities.   Because the MDA is a state public virtual school state and residents do not have to pay tuition, however, enrollment is limited to Montana residents. Consequently, the learning experience is still constrained by geography. While students can access the courses anytime during the day, the MDA still follows the traditional school calendar and organizes courses by semester. As a result, the organization of the learning experience is still quite linear and individualized, much in the way of traditional correspondence courses.

A virtual school where ubiquitous learning is more in evidence, at least in terms of spatial arrangement, is Florida Virtual School (FLVS). Similar to the Montana Digital Academy, FLVS offers online courses to Florida residents, but it also has a Global division that offers courses to non-Florida residents, and even to students across the globe. Students who for one reason or another are not able to, or aren’t motivated to, study in a classroom (students with health challenges or needing remedial work, entrepreneurs, athletes or artists in intense training programs) can have access to a traditional school curriculum.  At FLVS, learning is still heavily tied to traditional timetables so it is not so clearly ubiquitous in temporal terms.

The following podcast is an interview with one of the founders of the FLVS and she gives some background on the school's history as well as a prediction about where virtual schools like FLVS are headed.

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. "Conceptualizing e-learning." In e-Learning Ecologies, eds. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. New York: Routledge (forthcoming).