Take 5 with Blended!

Blended Learning Take Five

1)  Let’s Get Blended Workshop

Are you or someone in your district interested in developing your blended learning skills?

Join the RVA District Connect Crew for a lively morning of learning and discussion at no cost to you or your district. Access this workshop from any location - it's fully virtual!

Read more and register

2)  Course Enrollments are Getting a Makeover

We are making a few changes to the way our district partners submit enrollment requests.

  • With a new enrollment process

Our hope is that this will provide you with more information and less processing time from submission to enrollment. Do you have any thoughts on the current enrollment form? Things you like? Things you wish we could change? Send me an email at alli.ranum@ruralvirtual.org with your feedback!

  • Enrollment requests for 2019-2020

We will have information available to you by late spring to get students enrolled for the 2019-2020 school year. We are hoping to get enrollments submitted by June 30. If we can work together on this, the fall bottleneck for enrollments will be much more manageable.

3)  Vocabulary Review: Coach vs Teacher – What’s the difference?

You probably hear us talk about local coaches, local teachers and network teachers. To further complicate the matter, you may have worked with other online content providers who also had different names.

Local Teacher

A local teacher is in the student’s home district. As a local teacher, responsibilities include:

  • Monitoring student progress

  • Grading student assignments

  • Modifying course content as needed

Local Coach

A local coach is in the student’s home district. As a local coach, responsibilities include:

  • Monitoring student progress

  • Providing support for student locally

  • Acting as a bridge to help student, if needed, to contact network teacher

Network Teacher

A network teacher is located in one of the many WeN partner districts across the state. If a student is assigned a network teacher, they MUST have a local coach. Network teachers are expected to:

  • Monitor student progress

  • Grade student assignments

  • Modify course content as needed

If you have questions or concerns about a network teacher that the local coach is unable to resolve, please let us know!

4)  Quick Tip: 30 Day Drop Window

If you realize you need to drop a student’s course enrollment, it is very important for us to know as soon as possible since the 30 day drop window is strictly enforced by our content provider. Many of the drops we see are students realizing early on that they don’t have time to complete the course. To assure the course is dropped in time, we suggest checking in with your students in the first 10 days of a new course. Quite often, this is early enough to tell what the future course progress will be.

5)  How can we help? What are the burning questions you have about blended and online learning?

It has been a pleasure getting to know our consortium partners over the past few months, as we look toward the next year, we want to hear from you! We are planning to expand our professional development opportunities - what topics are you looking for? Send me an email at alli.ranum@ruralvirtual.org with your thoughts!

Athena Podolak