Taking High School Classes, Online?

AtariDatacenter asks: "I have a teenage family member who has left the formal education system and we're wanting to enroll him into an accredited online high school curriculum. Happily, this is his wish as well. There seems to be a few services available online, but it is hard to tell very much about them from the outside. What should we be looking for? Are there any good deals (as far as quality or cost) out there?"

Comments

home schooling

[zogger]

--instead of asking here per se, a better bet is to seek out your local home schooling organization and get some recommendations from "been there, done that, this is good and this isn't, etc" folks as you'll not only get the actual info, but it will come with the hoops that are needed to jump through that are specific to your location. These are a big variable it appears, state by state.

With that said the "no social life" bugaboo is a red herring that detractors use. Any kid can have a social life. I know families with public only educated, private bricks and mortar only educated, and home schooled. On a scale of adjusted-normal to weird I'd give the nod to the public school kids as being more or less less educated, less informed, and their only acceptable normal behavior seems to revolve around wearing the same clothes in a trendy manner. They learn to clique up. The public schools have changed a lot, they are more social engineering propoganda brainwashing centers then houses of education it seems. They learn to conform and be politically correct and to not "think", only parrot approved dogma.

Yes, I know this is a generalization, this is a general topic, obvviously exceptions exist in both spheres.

Good luck on your quest for real education. And google will find you course outlines if that's all you want. I've forgotten the name but I know there are complete k to 12 outlines available on CD's for reasonable, but I honestly have forgotten the name of them right now.

Re:Well..

[MrResistor]

I couldn't agree more. I have not known anyone who has done HS online, but I've known plenty of people who were home schooled, and they all have the same basic problems you describe. Some of them are OK, but all to many of them are impossible to be around.

I imagine online schooling would be even worse. At least with normal home schooling they need to go in and meet with their teacher once a week.

My High School

[pixelcort]

http://deltahigh.com/

This is the high school that I attend. It uses a proprietary product called Portal that appears to work over Telnet. It's an older interface, however it gets the job done. Myself and some peers set up a Yahoo Group to manage social gatherings and such. We also have online courses available on site. An excellent choice of curriculum is available, and someday they plan to move to a SQL database and 'bad HTML' web-application system. It is a public charter school so it doesn't cost anything to use it. (Other then ISP fees.)

Digital Bridges resource

[Stavo]

For those interested in distance learning, you might find our resource useful: http://www.netc.org/digitalbridges/ We are the Northwest Education Technology Consortium (NETC) at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL), a private, nonprofit institution. We are not affiliated with any company or distance learning project. See: http://www.netc.org/ and http://www.nwrel.org/