Online High

Alyssa Cao, who is a student at DPS Online High School (Denver, CO), will be awarded the Gold Award by the Girl Scouts. The award is given to girls who work to make the world a better place through acts of community service.

Iowa has a total of two online high schools. The first, Iowa Learning Online, provides students with the opportunity to take courses that would otherwise not be available. This is similar to the second, Iowa Online AP Academy provides Advanced Placement courses to small school districts and rural settings.

Coquitlam Open Learning offers online courses for summer school. While in Canada, what these students saying about learning online applies, in varying degrees, to all online high schools. The students offer very practical advice.

The United States Distance Learning Association this week recognized the efforts of Laurel Springs School and its founder, Marilyn Mosley Gordanier. This award is the most prestigious in the world of distance learning and pushes Laurel Springs to a new level. If you would like to read about the award, go here.

As I have said before, if you want to know how to run a successful online school, look no further than Ojai, California.

Orion High School is an online high school working toward accreditation with both CITA and NIPSA. While new, it is working toward being a school of choice.

I received this question in my email today. The student was wondering if there was a difference in that and an online high school. “Cyber high school” is one of those terms could have been the one that made it. Another one that was in the mix was “virtual high school.”

These are both terms for what are now primarily called “online high schools.” Perhaps the second most common would be that “virtual high school” one. I rarely see the “cyber” one anymore. For a while, though, people were attaching “cyber” to anything related to the Internet. While I won’t call the term dead because it is certainly still out there, it has suffered from overuse, that is certain.

However, for our purposes here, all three terms - online, virtual, cyber - are synonyms. There is no difference at all.

If you are considering a Christian online high school, I would encourage you to read this interview with a parent of a Liberty University Online Academy student.

Yet one more reason to go to an online high school.

The relevant quote from the Hays Daily News:

“When there was a chance for her to do online high school, it was such a relief,” she said. “We don’t have to worry about what time she starts her school work.”

Hoosier Academy-Indianapolis is due to open in the fall of 2008. It will begin as a K-10 school and move to expand to K-12.

One type of online high school that can get ignored are those that are housed at universities. Often these schools have some interesting advantages such as dual credit where you can get credit for a course both for high school and for college.

We now have a significant number of these schools on the BestOnlineHighSchools.com website. They include:

University of Missouri High School
Liberty University Online Academy
EPGY, Stanford University
Indiana University High School
Kaplan University High School
National University Virtual High School
Oregon State University K-12 Online
Oklahoma State University K-12 Distance Learning Academy
Portland State University Independent Study
Texas Tech University High School
University of Oklahoma High School
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Independent Study High School
University of Texas High School