Instructional Design

Customized Learning

Students have the opportunity for richer and more engaging educational experiences that are personalized to their learning style and level.

Our digital curriculum allows teachers to:

• adapt to student performance
• use the right formative assessment tools
• determine the most helpful learning materials for individual students at the optimal time
• create customized lessons
• continue in a lesson until a student masters the skills
• track student interactions with digital content
• provide performance information in real time to administrators and parents
• analyze rich data on the effectiveness of content

Thorough Analysis

How do you judge the quality and effectiveness of your districts’ course material? We are able to rely on more than just trial-and-error and subjective analysis. With our data-driven “two-way learning” system, you get a real, thorough, and accurate assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, and appropriateness of our content. Courses are carefully reviewed on a regular rotating basis and modified to meet current standards and the changing needs of students and society.

Design Standards

Each course follows these design standards:

• Readability Levels

Our target is to provide all reading, internal or external, within two grade levels of the target grade for each course. For example: A course intended for 9th grade students would have an acceptable readability range or span from 7th grade to 11th grade, however, the target is grade level 9 overall. We use the Fleish-Kincaid as one tool to guage readability levels.

• Discussion-Based Assessments

All courses include discussion-based assessments for two main reasons. 1) They provide another measure of academic integrity. 2) They provide yet another opportunity for teachers to speak with students and to ascertain their understanding of the content. Discussion-based assessments are particularly valuable for students whose strengths lie in verbal versus written feedback.

Test Banks

Assessments pull questions from test banks so that no two students receive the identical questions on assessments. Another academic integrity measure that has been proven successful.

• Higher Order Thinking

The goal is for 60% of each module to address the higher levels (Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation) of Bloom’s Taxonomy).

• Pace Guides

Every course includes a “pace guide” and an Individualized Pace Planner designed to guide students through the course. The guides, along with introductory course information, give students the “big picture” of the course and help them to break down that big picture into daily, manageable bites.

• Choice

We provide learning and assessment options so that students can respond to assessments using their strongest learning modality.

Our courses use interactive components to enhance, teach, and provide opportunities for practice and self-assessment. As courses are refreshed, concepts that have proven difficult are enhanced with interactivities to aid instruction. The courses contain components that guide students through concepts using visual, kinesthetic, and auditory methods.