We asked, Brian Oger, Director to tell us more about StudyForge Digital Curriculum. Here’s what we learned:
Q: What’s one innovation or tool you’ve implemented that has made a significant impact on your students or staff?
A: We have fantastic online courses that are ready out of the box, but many online teachers want to be able to make their courses their own. This increases their sense of ownership over the material and also helps them to ensure that what their students are learning is contextualized. Our platform allows teachers to customize their courses how they want, create their own learning objects, and rearrange lessons or assessments; our QuizBuilder feature allows teachers to create custom questions, move questions around, or delete questions.
Q: What’s a success story from your program that you’re especially proud of?
A: Our flagship course is our AP Calculus online course, with some of the largest online schools in North America using it. What makes us proud is that our data shows that, on average, students who use our AP Calculus course do better on their AP Calculus exams. This course has helped thousands of students.
Q: How has being part of DLAC shaped your approach or inspired your work?
A: Being part of DLAC has allowed us to understand the broader challenges and opportunities schools face. We’ve been able to meet and learn from so many others who are doing similar work.
Q: If you could debunk one myth about digital learning, what would it be?
A: A myth that should be debunked is that online learning automatically means shallow relationships between teachers and students. Yes, it is harder to build relationships remotely, and the class camaraderie is different, but there are ways of setting up courses and teacher touchpoints that can lead to very important mentoring relationships. It takes deliberate effort and reciprocation from the students, but this can happen, even in a fully online space.
Q: What’s something you wish you had known when you started with digital or hybrid learning?
A: When I started teaching hybrid, I wish I had known to use an online course as a starting place to create my hybrid course instead of building my own from scratch. My first year of hybrid teaching was the hardest year of my career since I was a rookie because creating my own online resources for a hybrid course was hard work. Starting from a completed course that met all of the learning standards would have been a huge benefit, but I didn’t have one. So now I build them so that teachers don’t have to go through what I went through.
Q: What’s one thing you hope the future of digital learning will achieve, and how is your program paving the way for that vision?
A: We think personalized, accessible education is the future. We envision a day where students do not all sit in one classroom learning exactly the same thing at exactly the same pace, but are able to move ahead or slow down as needed, accessing resources that are tailored to their unique learning needs. We hope that online resources can open up doors for students who otherwise struggle to learn in a face-to-face classroom, so that every student’s ceiling of potential is raised.
Q: What’s one challenge your program has overcome, and how did you tackle it?
A: We realized early on that teaching math online is hard. We even started out having kids type their math work before we realized how much extra time and brain power it was taking for students to do this. Understanding cognitive load was a big breakthrough for us, because we never want to have students spending extra brain power that they could be using to learn math. We’ve spent 15 years refining what makes an excellent math curriculum.
Q: What’s a unique aspect of your program or approach that sets it apart?
A: Our video pedagogy is the core of what we do. Our instructional videos are meticulously crafted, and the vast majority of our math instruction is delivered through these videos. Even though this approach takes us longer to build, the success our students have shows us that the extra time, money, and effort it takes to make these videos is worth it.