It all started four years ago, when a group of Bigfork High School staff members started meeting and brainstorming ideas of how to better serve students.
At the top of the list: offering a platform for students to explore the rapidly expanding realm of online education.
“We felt that it was important for us to be able to have that experience available to our students,” said Bigfork High School principal Matt Porrovecchio. “They’re likely going to have some form of online learning in college, so really, experiencing an online classroom is just as important as the actual content because it’s a skill in itself.”
In 2008, the school began offering electives through Virtual High School (VHS), a national program that offers a variety of courses on topics such as video game design, criminology and world religions. The school also offers a selection of Advanced Placement (AP) classes in more traditional subjects.
“We set out to find what we felt was the best program available, and that was VHS,” Porrovecchio said. “There are a lot of online programs out there that are more in the category of correspondence classes, and that’s not what we were shooting for. We wanted a platform that was as close to a traditional classroom as possible, where students were required to communicate with their instructors and their classmates on a regular basis.”
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