Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Maine Virtual Learning Consortium




     I  am extremely excited to announce the launch of a Maine-based online learning consortium that will offer high quality, customized, and affordable online learning opportunities for Maine high school students starting in September 2012. The idea of creating this consortium was supported by numerous Maine schools and districts at a meeting hosted by the Maine International Center for Digital Learning (MICDL) in October. After exploring various approaches, the Maine Virtual Learning Consortium was created in January.

I hope Maine schools and districts will look into becoming one of the initial Partner Schools that will offer courses during the 2012-2013 school year. Alternatively, they may simply want to learn how your students can take courses without joining the Consortium as a full member. While Consortium courses will be comparable in many ways to the courses offered by current providers, I think Consortium courses will offer superior value due to an emphasis on the following 

Five Key Features:


1. Frequent opportunities for high levels of Interactivity between and among students and teachers,  
such as small-group real-time video discussions.

2. Strong connections to Community (the online learning community created for each course, each 
student’s local community, and the broader global community.)
3. Continuous development of a Digital Portfolio for each student.
4. Extensive use of familiar open education resources (OER), such as the Google tool set.
5. A curriculum-embedded approach to teaching Media Literacy (reading, writing, speaking, 
listening, info graphics, audio/video, Internet research, media analysis, and media ethics).


For more information, please visit www.MEVLC.org or contact me if you're interested or have questions.

Kern Kelley
kkelley@mevlc.org

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