The state Department of Education’s decision to expand its offerings of online courses is a welcome one, long overdue and signifying a determination to overcome unevenness in access to highly qualified teachers, one of the problems diminishing the quality of public school education.

The best way to develop Hawaii’s virtual classroom is not entirely clear, however. An educational system that achieves a good balance of remotely accessible classroom materials and the in-person intervention of a teacher is still a work in progress, and Hawaii educators need to proceed carefully to get it right.

This week the DOE announced plans to offer about 20 new courses in the 2012-13 school year, bringing the total of Web-based classes to 60. The estimate is that the student population of the state’s e-school program could increase by up to 1,000 to 2,500.

The strategy of the expansion is a cautious one, which is smart. Hilary Apana-McKee, administrator of the DOE section that specializes in extended-learning opportunities, said the department is phasing in the expansion, starting with its Advanced Placement course offerings.

That’s a good idea on two fronts. First, the most advanced students often get overlooked in public school policy, because there may not be enough on a given campus to justify additions of enrichment courses to the curriculum. Second, the stronger students may have stronger independent-study skills that often are key to success in the online-learning setting.

For the first time, some of the classes offered will be available only on the Web, designed for middle-school students. They will need orientation to be sure they understand the time-management challenges of Web classes. The state plans to hire up to 40 part-time teachers to manage the expansion, and these teachers need to be given the capacity to monitor student mastery of the material and intercede when needed with individual consultation sessions.

Further, the state will need to ensure that students from lower-income families, who may not be able to afford computers and Internet service at home, have access to computers at schools.

All of these are issues confronted across the country by school districts experimenting with online education. One such experiment was featured Sunday in a segment on the news magazine "60 Minutes," a feature about the Khan Academy, already known to many in the homeschooling and e-school community here in Hawaii.

The academy — founded and headed by former hedge-fund manager Sal Khan, who discovered an affinity for online teaching — is a nonprofit that makes its lectures available free to all (www.khanacademy.org). But it also supports the lectures with online student testing that enables teachers to track student mastery. This means it’s best deployed as a supplement to in-classroom teaching rather than only as a remote-learning replacement for it.

Schools that succeed with it do so by making provisions for all students to learn, regardless of their family income, keeping computer labs open late.

Hawaii’s e-school program was founded in 1996, but it grew at a snail’s pace, only reaching its current enrollment more than a decade later. And now the DOE finally seems poised to make the critical next step, aided with a $1.9 million federal grant that was aimed at improving educational offerings for military dependents.

Let’s hope it does so with a sensitivity to the challenges and the potential of distance learning. A place must be found for the personal touch in the online classroom, too.