Cyber High curriculum is being used effectively in hundreds of schools to support students needing an alternative to the traditional classroom setting. Through our commitment to integrity and excellence, thousands of students who have used Cyber High have been able to graduate on time, including students that have gone on to prestigious universities. Core courses offer university-bound students a non-traditional means to earn UC a-g approved high school credit. In addition, Cyber High is also used in summer schools, after school programs, and literacy programs, as well as for remediation, English Language Development, and credit recovery. We also have proudly partnered with the California Department of Corrections to provide curriculum for their High School Diploma Program.
Courses are designed to be self-paced, and students can work with a teacher providing additional daily direct instruction, or students can work autonomously. It is important to point out that students CANNOT complete a Cyber High course without teacher engagement. We pride ourselves in effective, worthwhile partnerships with our clients, and we are not focused on being a credit mill.
Cyber High delivers curricular content that draws on a variety of educational theories and methods. Courses are structured using pedagogical practices that create rigorous and meaningful content that not only meets required California State, Common Core Standards, and NGSS Standards, but also emphasizes cultural validation and exploration to promote student empowerment and confidence. Our curriculum is designed to:
- prepare students for the rigors of college work as well as build career and real-world readiness;
- build career and real-world skills, which helps prepare students for success in their future academic pursuits as well as entry into a globalized, competitive workforce.
- be engaging, self-paced curriculum supporting experiential, individualized, and social and emotional learning;
- promote digital literacy, critical thinking, problem-solving, modeling, and practical application of concepts in real world scenarios, like Performance-Based Learning Projects.
- use various types of activities that focus on critical thinking and performance-based demonstration;
- provide tiered assessments that follow a competency-based structure to ensure demonstration of subject and standard mastery.
Some features that enhance our content and address a variety of learning modalities, academic levels, and student need include:
- Academic Plus Cyber High includes a scaffolding feature, currently available in A-G Mathematics and English courses, that offers students foundational support for concepts with which they might be unfamiliar. Academic Plus provides them with additional material related to the topic they are studying. It might be additional content, material pulled from a lower-level Cyber High course, an instructional video, etc. Note: Academic plus is in addition to the original content, not a replacement of the original content.
- Instructional Videos Cyber High also includes a database of over 1,300 videos which appear for students throughout all courses. These videos are designed to further explain the material and to present it in an alternative and potentially more engaging format, particularly for visual learners. This database of videos is independently searchable to support independent learning.
- Manipulative Templates For students who are more tactile learners, we developed a series of elements that allow a student to learn through application; for example, a student might have to drag layers of the atmosphere into the correct place, order events chronologically on a timeline or map, correlate an artwork with an artist, create a sentence using ASL syntax correctly, etc.
- Project-Based Learning Students are given projects that (when possible) students work in a collaborative environment using 21st century web tools and multimedia. Students are given access to tools that help them create websites, digital presentations, blogs, wikis, videos, podcasts, etc., and they can respond to feedback and comments left by peers online/within special forums set up for them and contained solely within our delivery system.
- Text-To-Speech Many Cyber High courses, particularly the most text-heavy like US History, has an audio component that will allow students to listen to the text as they read. This feature is being added to courses as it becomes available.
- Knowledge Base The Knowledge Base is another feature that students can use to help them better understand instructional material in Cyber High courses. Students looking for more information about a particular subject can use the searchable database of concepts organized by subject area to find additional material that can supplement their learning.
- Dynamic Review Gateways As students progress through A-G level courses, their performance is monitored relative to the required concepts and standards. If a student demonstrates a lack of understanding of a particular concept during an Activity or an Assessment, they will be provided with a customized hyperlink that will take the student back into the Unit to learn what wasn’t initially grasped to ensure that they have mastered all content prior to accessing the Final Unit Exam.