Challenge

When the global pandemic began, educators in Clover School District (CSD) sought state-aligned, flexible curriculum to meet the diverse needs of their student body in all learning conditions. They wanted to offer a variety of courses for the district’s graduation pathways, fit those courses into student schedules while addressing extenuating student circumstances, and deliver this curriculum using their learning management system (LMS), Canvas.

Beth Goff, Innovation Specialist at Clover School District explains, “We feel Courseware delivers the content that is the best match digitally to what we would give them in a more traditional classroom in our district.”

Edmentum Courseware became the chosen curriculum to meet these specific digital curriculum needs. It is used for first-time credit and for credit recovery courses in Clover High School’s iSchool. Maximizing use of integration and customization capabilities, Clover educators are now able to provide exacting courses and ease of access to promote student growth.

Solution

Courseware Integration

Courseware integrates seamlessly into the fabric of the CSD technology ecosystem through their LMS to support easy access to custom built courses and units. All learning is centralized so that teachers, students, and families use the same, consistent platform to communicate and access assignments and resources. This allows Clover educators to bring in different types of assessments and projects and give students feedback in multiple ways that both teachers and students are already familiar with. Implementation was supported by training, and now Clover educators are moving quickly with Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) integration through the LMS.

Courseware Customization

Courseware customization allows the educator to pick only the standards and lessons they need or want to include, or to build a course with pieces from multiple established courses. Teachers can assign specific activities and tutorials from Courseware in their Canvas courses. Students never leave Canvas to complete the content, so grades are in Canvas and pass to PowerSchool Pro (PTP), the online gradebook software that is part of Clover SD’s School Information System (SIS), PowerSchool SIS.

Result

Clover Virtual Academy

Clover Virtual Academy was created in June 2020 in response to pandemic need for at-home learning. Ms. Goff said they used the Edmentum platform because they had to be able to share the “what comes next, what comes next, what comes next” with students and families. Courseware through Canvas enabled quick delivery of content when students were learning from home.

“The courses were already designed by teachers that came together and said, ‘These are the things out of these [Courseware] courses that we feel are necessary to do it the Clover way,’ and they've built the courses and then teachers can build that out in modules for their students.” Ms. Goff explained.

Initial Credit

Clover School District offers Edmentum Courseware for initial credit, but with a truly custom course experience.

Mrs. Goff relayed, “The beauty of Courseware from Edmentum is we could pick and pull from modules from both [semesters] of those courses and build our own custom course and then map that to our PowerSchool sections.”

Mrs. Goff further noted, “Once we’ve assigned it in PowerSchool, the magic happens in the background. So, it was very seamless for that, and now it's just rinse and repeat every year because we've built that content.”

Students can take courses in the summer or in addition to their four scheduled blocks to earn credit. Reasons students take initial credit through Edmentum’s Courseware include situations like a student taking fine arts who doesn’t have time for one of the other electives, a student needing to take a level of class to be able to get into the next level, a student transferred in who was not in on a traditional path to get there, or a student who got a little behind.

“Initial credit classes let them do it in their own time and get full credit. They get the full learning experience in some vetted content using those courses from Edmentum,” said Ms. Goff.

Mrs. Goff explained, “All the content is in the platform, and the teacher is responsible for checking in on learner progress, making sure not just that they're working, but that they're succeeding, and if they're getting stuck in places that they can provide some additional academic support.”

Credit Recovery

Clover School District offers Edmentum Courseware for students who need to recover credit to continue moving forward. The teacher team collaborates to decide what activities need to be completed to receive credit. Content selected is based on the power standards Clover educators feel students have to get within a course, the absolute things they have to walk away with. When using these custom courses, students still have access to the guided notes and everything that is available within the full courses.  

“It really let us create a little pathway for them to not just recover the credit, but to have the learning necessary for moving forward,” said Ms. Goff.

The key to the success of initial and recovery credit using Courseware, says Ms. Goff, is the educators. They have procedural guides for each role, understand the steps to get to the finish line, and hold the students accountable.

Download the Story

We feel Courseware delivers the content that is the best match digitally to what we would give them in a more traditional classroom in our district.

Beth Goff

Innovation Specialist