Education Week has an interesting story on online credit recovery that I highly recommend to anyone interested in new ways to reach high school students at risk of failure or dropping out. Perhaps, this topic isn’t the traditional coverage area for this blog, but I see it as another piece of the larger out-of-school-time puzzle.
Reporter Mary Ann Zehr reports that Boston, Chicago, and New York City already or soon will be offering online credit-recovery programs for high school students who have fallen behind in their course credits. She says policies vary on whether students must be in school taking online classes or whether they can complete them from home.
Particularly intriguing, I thought, was Mary Ann’s opening paragraph:
Interest in online credit-recovery courses continues to surge, prompting some policy experts and educators to consider whether traditional rules requiring students to spend a certain number of hours in the classroom, rather than simply demonstrate their proficiency in the subject matter, are increasingly outdated."
This certainly sounds like expanded learning to me. I’d love to hear what others think.