Douglas+County+Schools

Douglas County School District
Contact: Sohne Van Selus (720) 641-4265

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** Program Descriptions: **

** Program 1: The Colorado Cyber-School – Full- and Part-Time Online Learning Program ** “Learning That Takes You Places”

This program, which serves students in grades K – 12, provides an alternative to the traditional classroom learning experience. The program supports various students, including: advanced students, home-bound students, athletes and performers, home schooled students, students on travel, alternative learners, and at-risk students who might otherwise drop out of the system. Students can participate in Colorado Cyber-School on a full-time basis, or on a part time basis while enrolled in one of the traditional DCSD schools. Colorado Cyber provides a path to graduation and an eDCSD diploma. Colorado Cyber is a multi-district online school and enrolls half of its students from outside of the Douglas County school district.

Colorado Cyber emphasizes flexibility in its program offerings to meet the students’ needs, and offers more than 250 online courses. Students’ work is self-paced using multi-media courseware which includes text-based, integrated audio/video, and full hypermedia presentations. Along with the self-paced online course of study, students participate in facilitated online interaction and online labs. High school courses run for full 18-week semesters, lower level classes are 9 weeks in duration. The program commits to class sizes that are the same as Douglas County’s traditional “brick-and-mortar” classrooms.

The primary learning resource is the Lincoln Interactive learning system which provides most course content (The Little Lincoln system is used for K-2 students). Other sources of content include Compass Learning, and eDCSD teacher-developed course content (to augment the commercial courseware). A Moodle LMS provides students the learning portal into the system. The Blackboard system serves as an intermediary between the Moodle LMS and the Lincoln systems. Labs and interactive class sessions are hosted using Adobe Connect and GoToMeeting, and teachers make use of the Google suite of Web 2.0 tools to support learning.

The teachers lead the educational process, tracking students’ progress, and providing supplemental resources, labs and virtual classroom sessions. Students must attend the interactive virtual classroom sessions to enhance their learning. Colorado Cyber students also have the support of student learning advocates for additional student support. Field trips, school sponsored events, and online social interactions round out the students programs with a community component.

Colorado Cyber-School staff includes its Director/Principal, an IT specialist, two 0.5 FTE Student Learning Advocates (counselors), a registrar and a bookkeeper/secretary on its administrative staff. The teaching staff includes seven full-time teachers with the two advocates taking half-time teaching roles as well. The teachers are all licensed, highly qualified DCSD teachers. The services of a learning specialist, a psychologist, a social worker, and a speech/language specialist are available from Douglas County Schools as needed. Colorado Cyber has 230 full-time and 200 part-time students enrolled in the program.

Douglas County students participating in the Colorado Cyber program are supported by district per-student funding. Students from outside Douglas County have their PPOR follow them from their home district.

The current cost to eDCSD for the Lincoln Interactive system is $75, which is anticipated to go up to $170 plus $55 materials per student. Other materials costs, including lab materials, cost the program $50 per student.

** Program 2: Douglas County Schools Blended Learning Model – OLL as an Experimental Resource ** In this program, all Douglas County school teachers may use the Moodle LMS installed on a district server as a technology base that will allow teachers to innovate using teacher-developed content and open educational resources. Teachers create digital content that they use as a supplement to their classroom teaching.

** Program 3: Douglas County Schools, STAR Lab – Online Credit Recovery Program ** This program provides a credit recovery opportunity to high school students on a part-time, supplemental basis. Each of the nine Douglas County high schools takes their own approach to delivering the program; some run the program as an after school or night school program, others offer it within the context of the regular school day. The program is intended to earn high school credits so that students may catch up on lost credits, to support students in expulsion periods or during a medical emergency and to help students in transition. The program is funded by the district.

The district credit recovery program will serve approximately 14580 students at each neighborhood school. OdysseyWare and NOVA Net systems are used to deliver the credit recovery program. The district pays $300 per concurrent seat for use of the OdysseyWare system and $1,000 per seat for the NOVA Net service. Click Here for more details...