TopicS

Setting goals for your online school
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will lead you there! But if you want to be sure to create the right online school, you need to determine who you are serving, how, and why.

Designing Your Model (Online or Hybrid)
Full-time online, or a mix of online and onsite? There are good arguments for each approach.

Operations and District Policies to Consider
As much as you may feel like you’re “flying the plane while you build it,” a few policies may help you get off the ground. (We’re also considering a new session, “How to mangle a metaphor.”)

Designing Your Online/Hybrid Program (Discussions from Session #1)
Time to kick around ideas with your fellow DLAC Online attendees!

Content Acquisition (Build vs Buy)
The perennial question…

Open educational resources
High or low quality? Money-saving or a total cost of ownership trap? Maybe all of the above?

Course Quality
How to evaluate the quality of your courses? You’re not the first to ask that question!

Hiring, Developing, and Supporting Online Teachers
Online or not, nothing will have a bigger impact on your success than your teachers. Might as well start thinking about how to find the right ones.

Understanding the Technology Tools (LMS, CMS, SIS, Synchronous, etc.)
Yes that’s a lot of acronyms. Yes they are confusing. Yes our presenter will help make sense of them.

Selecting Your Technology Systems
Just because you have the acronyms down doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to choose…but this session will help.

Using Data to Support Learning
If you’re used to getting information about state assessments back a decade or so after your students took the test, you may be amazed by how much help you can get from real-time data.

Recapturing students who have left your district
”This school isn’t gonna pay for itself.” Well, actually it might.

Budgeting and Finance for Online School Leaders
Maybe not the most interesting topic. Maybe as important as any other, if you want the school to survive.

Starting an Online/Hybrid School Leader Tuesday Table Talk
You’ve got questions, we’ve sort of got answers. Why sort of? Because few answers are universal. We’ll gather to discuss these issues as applied to your local context.

Recruiting Students to Your Online/Hybrid School
This isn’t your neighborhood school, which means that you may have to explain the new concept to your students and families. We’ll talk about how.

Supporting Special Student Populations
Addressing Access and Equity in Your Online/Hybrid Program
You want to serve ALL students who may want to attend your online school. How to make sure you can do that well? These two sessions are a start.

Student and Family Support in Online Learning
When students are learning in part from home, student and family support take on new meanings. We will explore.

Revision of "Quality" to ensuring quality learning environments
I’m not sure what this means. Have emailed program chair to ask. Will update when I hear back. Yes I know this page is live.

Program Evaluation
Remember at the start of this long list we had a session to help you set goals? Well eventually you have to figure out if you met those goals.

The How to Start an Online School track will have many experts in the field presenting including:

Chris Harrington, i4TL
Heather Hiebsch, Teach United
Bruce Friend, Pine Springs Prep
Kara Heichelbech, Indiana Online
Dani Pedrotti, NROC
Christine Voelker, Quality Matters
Carrie Madden, GAVS
Bill Fritz, Learn21
Keith Krueger, CoSN
Christine Fox, CoSN
Elizabeth Anderson, Embrace Wisdom
Josh Solomon, Strongmind
Wendy Oliver, Xperience Education
Matt Wicks, Pearson
Cheryl Charlton, IDLA
Ray Rose, Rose-Smith Associates
Maria Hannah, Ohio Connections
Comaneci Brooken, Digital Promise
Judy Perez, iLearn Collaborative
Tom Clark, Tom Clark Consulting