Virtual High School

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Virtual High School, Inc.
‎
Founder(s)	Sheldon H. Berman and Robert Tinker
Founded	1996
Headquarters	3 Clock Tower Place, Suite 200 Maynard, MA
Members	300+ schools
Website	govhs.org

Virtual High School, Inc. (VHS) is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1996 by Sheldon H. Berman and Robert Tinker with the support of the U.S. Department of Education. Its mission is to develop and deliver standards-based, student-centered online courses.

VHS claims students from 29 states and 23 countries, averaging nearly 10,000 students per year, and offers over 200 semester and year long courses intended to augment rather than replace a school's curriculum. Some of the courses offered by VHS include 101 Ways to Write a Short Story, AP Biology, AP Economics, AP French, AP Spanish, AP Psychology, Art and the Internet, The Holocaust, and Basic Mandarin Chinese, to name a few.

Each VHS participating school contributes by offering one classroom teacher to teach a VHS online course in his/her discipline as part of that teacher’s daily teaching responsibilities. In exchange, the school receives seats in VHS, which offer students courses not available from their local schools.

Professional development courses are offered for the teachers to learn, practice and master the design and delivery of online courses. Courses are delivered on a weekly calendar schedule where students work together asynchronously. This allows students from around the globe to take courses whenever and wherever they have Internet access.

[edit] Awards

USDLA 2007 21st Century Award for Best Practices in Online Technology and K-12 Education
USDLA 2005 21st Century Award for Best Practices in Online Technology and K-12 Education
USDLA 2005 Award for Online PreK-12 Programming Excellence, Gold Recipient
Magna Award, American School Board Journal
Stockholm Challenge 2001 Award for Global Excellence in Education
Blackboard Course Contest Winner
NCTET Community Builder Award 2004

[edit] External links

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Virtual High School (Ontario)

Virtual High School (Ontario) (VHS) is a private online high school (www.VirtualHighSchool.com). VHS has its headquarters in Bayfield, Ontario, Canada. VHS is a privately held corporation - VIRTUALHIGHSCHOOL.COM INC.

VHS published its first internet course (Biology) in the fall of 1995, for a class of 23 students. In the spring of 1996, its second course, Canadian Literature, was also posted to the internet and won the second place at the 1997 North American Web Conference (NAWEB) Award for online course development. VHS courses adhere strictly to the Ontario Ministry of Education curriculum standards. VHS is inspected every two years to ensure compliance with the standards of the Ontario Ministry of Education. Such compliance, allows VHS the capacity of granting Ontario Secondary School credits which can lead to an Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD).

VHS currently has about 2000 students per year, all of whom pay tuition for the right to take the online courses. There are currently 51 fully online courses. There are no semesters as students may enrol at any point in time, move through their courses at their own pace and graduate from their course at any point in time. All courses run under the Desire2Learn course management system.

Current courses offered by VHS are: