As curriculum developers at FlexPoint, we’re often asked, “What do quality digital courses look like?” To us, a comprehensive digital curriculum always starts with the end in mind.

By starting with the student learning outcomes of a lesson or course, we’re able to design the path students must take to achieve those goals in an intentional and deliberate manner. Our objective is to develop rigorous digital courses that allow students to engage with their lessons and show content mastery.

Throughout our careers, we’ve learned what high-quality digital courses look like. If you’re a school or district leader contemplating whether digital curricula is right for your students, we share our top lessons learned below.

Five Key Pillars for Quality Digital Courses

Rooted in Standards

We begin with student outcomes first, ensuring they align to academic standards. When digital courses are aligned to standards with thoughtfully designed sequences, it ensures that students and educators are accountable for achieving the learning goals.

In addition to aligning our FlexPoint courses with state and national standards, our curriculum team works with schools individually to learn what they need to garner high student performance outcomes. Our courses undergo thorough review and testing, both during development and after completion.

Designed with the Student in Mind

It’s imperative that digital curriculum is developed with an understanding of how students and teachers will interact with it. We do this by asking our students, families, and teachers questions such as:

• What kind of support do students have at home?
• How do students learn best?
• How can we support instructional teams and maximize student learning?

Once we have the answers to these questions, we develop the course design strategy. For example, some students learn better with video lessons, and others want to read the material. Having different interactive elements throughout each course ensures every student can engage with and understand the information.

Data-Driven

Strong curriculum pedagogy is data-driven. It enables educators to monitor student progress and constantly improve processes in response to the data received. For example, is there a quiz or assignment that all students struggle with? If so, why? Digital curriculum should be easy to refine and tweak if something in the course isn’t resonating or hitting the mark with your students.

Accessible

High-quality digital curriculum should be accessible to all learners, regardless of their ability. For the online learning community, it’s critical that web accessibility is a priority to ensure all students have equal access to information and functionality. Digital courses must have built-in accessibility features such as closed captioning, audio descriptions, and more.

An inclusive design approach to developing digital curriculum benefits everyone. For example, some students must use text-to-speech tools to gather information, and there are those who prefer to use text-to-speech to obtain information based on a circumstance.

Continuously Refine

Digital curriculum is agile and easily adjustable. Our curriculum team utilizes a continuous improvement model that gathers key insights from our students, families, and teachers, which allows us to refine and maintain our digital courses. As students and teachers begin to interact with our courses, they provide feedback on any issues that arise, lessons that need to be tweaked, and what is most engaging to them.

Make Your List of Non-Negotiables

When you are ready to explore digital course licensing options with a third-party provider, we recommend keeping these five key pillars in mind. We like to compare licensing digital curriculum to buying a house. When you buy a house, you make a list of features that your house must have. For example, perhaps you need at least two bathrooms, a backyard, and an open floor plan. You should also have a list of items that you are willing to compromise on, like having a pool, fireplace, or office. It’s important to know your priorities and stick to them because with many options available, you want to ensure you’re choosing the best curriculum for your students and teachers.

If you’re a school or district leader contemplating whether digital curriculum is right for your students, we’ve created a free guide that will provide you with worksheets and templates to outline your school’s or district's needs, as well as a list of questions to ask curriculum providers. To download the guide, visit www.FlexPointEducation.com/CurriculumGuide.