Private Online HS Teams with Minerva on Baccalaureate Program
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 08/25/20
A
private online high school has announced a new baccalaureate
program
for beginning ninth graders, developed in partnership with a company
that built the technology for an innovative classroom- and
campus-free university. Laurel
Springs School
is working with Minerva
Project,
a for-profit operation that provides technology, infrastructure and
support services for the Minerva
Schools at KGI.
Minerva
Schools runs undergraduate and graduate programs where students
attend online sessions while living together in residential buildings
around the globe. Every now and then the students move to a different
city somewhere else in the world that becomes their new center of
operations for online learning.
The
new four-year program for Laurel Springs will incorporate courses
from its Academy
program along with two, real-time online classes that are intended to
challenge students "to interconnect their learning and develop
skills in complex critical thinking, advanced problem solving and
strategic decision-making."
Classroom
sessions will be delivered on Forum,
Minerva's online learning environment. The baccalaureate program will
condense the curriculum of Laurel Springs' Academy into three years
and direct the fourth year on college-level courses and a capstone
project. Graduates will receive a high school diploma and 32 hours of
college credit.
According
to the Laurel
Springs website,
the Academy program is $13,000 per year; no tuition is specified for
the baccalaureate program specifically.
The
baccalaureate approach "is ideal for teaching and engaging
students in the real-world application of knowledge, and allows
learning to transcend subject matter in a way that will produce a
more advanced level of understanding and engagement," said Peter
Robertson, Laurel Springs president, in a statement.
This
is the first partnership for Minerva with a secondary school.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.