Looking Forward

Brad Rathgeber

​Over the past year, I’ve written about our lessons learned from ten years in online education.  I hope this sharing has been helpful to you, as you work on similar topics at your school from increasing student engagement to designing inspiring learning environments to solving financial challenges to valuing the understanding that every student learns differently.

This month, I’d like to look forward to the future and share a bit about where we’re heading next year.

Earlier this year, the Independent Curriculum Group (ICG) merged with One Schoolhouse.  Many of you know that the ICG created a treasure-trove of good resources for schools on topics ranging from moving beyond standardized advanced curriculum to living out the mission of the school in the classroom to hiring to schedule changes and more.  Since our merger, we’ve been hard at work organizing the ICG resources and creating new resources to share in 2020.  Next year, each month we’ll release these resources on our website.  You see new podcasts, ebooks, on-demand programs, and more!  We’re excited to share this good work with you.

We’ll also be expanding our course catalog even more.  Next year, we’ll focus on increasing language offerings and semester elective offerings.  As you know, our goal is to be a partner in innovation to schools around the country and around the world.  Increasingly, schools are moving language courses online and looking to expand language offerings for students. At the same time, more and more of our schools are looking to take advantage of our exciting semester program -- last year, semester program enrollment grew 50%.  Schools love that students get to explore an area of interest first in the fall semester and then identify a compelling question in the spring semester, exploring the possible answers through research or design.  This coming year, we’ll add a third option to increase student agency! Look for all of this to be announced with our 2020-2021 course catalog in January.

I also want to let you know that we’ll be hiring two new staff members at One Schoolhouse, starting in January, as we expand our administrative team.  We’ll be adding  an additional Assistant Head of School to join our team to lead our professional development program and non-credit student programs. And, we’re also in search for a Director of Student Support to join our current academics team, as we double our commitment to supporting schools and students in online course work. If you have any questions about these new positions, let me know.  They’ll be posted online by the start of next month.

2019 has been great.  Thank you for your partnership during ten years in online education.  Here’s to starting the next 10 years strong in 2020.

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