Research in Social Sciences and Technology VIRTUALLY READY? PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF A VIRTUAL INTERNSHIP EXPERIENCE Stewart WATERS University of Tennessee, USA kswaters@utk.edu William B. RUSSELL III University of Central Florida russell@ucf.edu Abstract The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand the experiences of six secondary pre-service teachers that completed a semester long internship with a supervising mentor at a virtual school in the Southeastern United States. The secondary pre-service teachers in this study voluntarily chose a placement in the virtual school over a traditional classroom placement for completion of their initial licensure field experience. This study sought to examine why secondary pre-service teachers chose a virtual internship and what their experiences were like as online instructors. A total of six participants completed a sixty- minute semi-structured interview at the completion of the semester long virtual school internship. Results of the study indicated that secondary pre-service teachers’ primary motivation for entering a virtual internship experience was “convenience.” Additionally, participants felt prepared for future employment in virtual schools, but had some reservations about their prospects in a traditional classroom setting. Keywords: Virtual schools, qualitative, pre-service teachers, teacher education, technology. Introduction Online learning is one of the most debated and controversial topics at all levels of education in today’s society. From graduate programs at universities to elementary schools, the presence of online instruction has continued to grow over the last decade both in the United States and abroad. In fact, as of 2011, online courses represented 31.3% of total enrollments for colleges and universities in the U.S.; while every state in the U.S. also offered some type of online learning option to K-12 students (Allen & Seaman, 2011; Watson et al. 2011). For teacher educators, this growth simply cannot be ignored and a more direct effort needs to be made in order to ensure that future teachers are being prepared to reach students in both traditional and online settings. Unfortunately, “very few teacher education programs in the United States offer a curriculum for online teaching, leaving districts, states, and virtual schools to train online teachers” (Dawley, Rice, & Hinks, 2010, p. 11). The lack of attention