Aurora+School+District

Aurora Public School ﻿ District
Contact: Randy Wood (303) 437-9792

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** Program Descriptions: **

**Program 1: APS Online High School – Full-Time Online Learning Program** “Providing Students a Choice to be Successful”

This program provides students with a full-time alternative to traditional “bricks-and-mortar” learning experience. The program serves students, grades 9 – 12, from various groups including alternative learners, students with special medical needs, students in military families, pregnant and new mothers, students who want to accelerate their high school career, and students who might otherwise drop out of the system. APS-Online provides a path to graduation and an APS -Online diploma.

Students work with Education 2020 (E2020), a fully online program. Students’ work is self-paced using multi-media courseware. The courseware, provided by E2020, has been customized to match the APS curriculum pacing guidelines. The courses include text-based, integrated audio/video, and full hypermedia presentations. In addition to working with the online material, each student is required to attend twice-weekly sessions that are used for course interaction, testing, and academic skills remediation as appropriate. The online courses are staffed with highly qualified instructors provided by E2020; the live sessions are staffed by APS instructors. The APS staff takes an active role in keeping contact with APS Online students and their parents.

APS-Online students are provided with network-enabled laptop computers while they are participating in the program on an as-needed basis. Approximately 30% of the students receive these computers.

Number of Participants: APS-O has 135 full-time students. The program is expected to grow to 250-300 students.

Students participating in the APS-O Program are supported by district per-student funding, half of the students allocation going to the district and half to the APS-O program.

The APS-O instructors are funded by APS as full-time teachers.

**Program 2: Aurora Public Schools– Online Credit Recovery Program** This program provides a credit recovery program to students on a part-time, supplemental basis. The student is expected to carry a full traditional course load along with the credit recovery course(s). The credit recovery courses are intended to allow students to catch up on missed or failed courses and allow the student to proceed to graduation and an Aurora Public School District diploma. Students wishing to gain original credit may also participate in the program.

Students work with the E2020 online system (as with the APS-O program) either during an available school-day class period or after school. The individual high schools are responsible for placing students into the program, based on counselor recommendations, for scheduling students into the school-day lab, and for providing staff, typically comprised of paraprofessionals

The credit recovery program is a self-paced program and is adaptive to the students’ level of knowledge, so that the students need only spend as much time on the course as needed to master the content.

There are between 3,000 and 5,000 students taking at least one and as many as six credit recovery courses.

Funding for the credit recovery programs comes from the individual high schools.

**Program 3: APS Blended Learning Model – OLL as a Supporting Resource** APS has the Moodle LMS installed on a district server to allow for teachers’ use. It is used to support delivery of instruction, at the middle and high school levels. Teachers are using the LMS to build either supplemental resources as learning aids or to create entire courses. About 16,000 students are benefiting from this application of technology, including traditional students as well as adult learners. Using Moodle as a content repository allows and encourages resources sharing within APS. Teachers who have chosen to participate have been given basic Moodle training; in the future, a “train the trainer” approach will be used to pass on what has been learned.

E2020 for is delivered via the web as a fully network-based resource. One important attribute of the resource is the extensive amount of management data that it provides to APS. E2020 also provides Help Desk support to students and faculty. The district holds 100 concurrent user licenses, paying $800 per license. Each high school holds a fixed number of the licenses for their credit recovery programs; the remaining licenses are used at the online high school.

APS -O staff includes its principal, two full-time teachers a part time (.4FTE) special education professional and a part-time (.4FTE) counselor.