Florida Virtual School paves the way to success with SAS^® Curriculum Pathways

When Julie Young directed the launch of Florida Virtual School (FLVS) in 1997, she was breaking entirely new ground. It was the country's first state-wide, Internet-based public high school. There was no blueprint for her to follow, but as the school's President and CEO, she had a vision to transform education and a firm belief in engaging, student-centered instruction.

Today, FLVS has grown from nine staff members to a team of more than 700 teachers, courseware developers, IT experts and customer service representatives who provide flexible learning options for tens of thousands of students throughout the US.

Goodbye text books, hello interactive learning
One of the keys to the program's success was delivering high-quality courses with engaging digital content. While FLVS develops its own courses, the program uses external resources like SAS Curriculum Pathways to supplement and fill the gaps. Providing interactive, standards-based resources in English, science, math, social studies, and Spanish for grades 8-12, SAS Curriculum Pathways focuses on topics where seeing, doing and listening provide information and encourage insights in a way that conventional methods and textbooks cannot.

"SAS Curriculum Pathways is a powerful and cost-efficient way to infuse audiovisuals and multimedia into our courses," said Young. "The first time I saw the tool, I was blown away by depth of the content and how the interactive content can easily be customized to meet student needs."

SAS Curriculum Pathways engages students with high-quality content that can be adjusted to meet their varied needs and provides learner-centered activities with measurable outcomes. Interactive materials target higher-order thinking skills and all materials are linked to state standards. In addition, schools can adapt the content to match their technological capabilities. The latest release of SAS Curriculum Pathways focuses on concepts and skills vital to success in core classes. All new materials are designed to engage students who sometimes struggle with these fundamentals.

Multiple benefits, real results
Successes like those at Florida Virtual School are fueling explosive growth in the virtual learning industry and it’s increasingly difficult for schools to develop content quickly enough to keep up – especially the media-rich content demanded by today’s students.  SAS Curriculum Pathways fills that gap.

Young reports that students are more engaged in courses and attributes it to the student-centered learning the school strives to provide. "SAS Curriculum Pathways is a highly engaging application and we feel like it has certainly contributed to our success," says Young.

"SAS Curriculum Pathways is full of the engaging, media-rich content that students expect today, because they're getting it through their games, their handhelds and TV," said Young. "These resources are going to be critical to the success of the virtual schools industry."

In addition, it's cost effective. "If you think about the content that it provides, the audiovisuals, multimedia and the primary source documents – all the copyrighted materials – it would be extremely expensive for us to duplicate that kind of resource," said Young. "SAS Curriculum Pathways allows us to take advantage of an application that already exists, so it's cost-efficient for us. SAS even keeps up with the many Web resources and links in the tool, so it saves us maintenance time."

SAS Curriculum Pathways allows students to link directly to lessons, interactivities, and other resources within without having to remember passwords.

An added benefit is that SAS Curriculum Pathways works well in a classroom or virtual setting. "It can be used as primary content or as supportive content and provides high-quality media and InterActivities that engage many different learning styles and senses," says Young. "It's difficult to put all that in one package in the virtual world, but SAS Curriculum Pathways does it for us."

Sharing the wealth of knowledge
Florida Virtual School licenses their courses to other online programs around the country, so the benefits of SAS Curriculum Pathways are being enjoyed all over the US. Schools can easily adapt SAS Curriculum Pathways to meet their needs, whether they’re a traditional, virtual or hybrid school, and the product is designed to meet a broad range of student needs – it can be used as a resource for advancement, remediation or simply engaging teaching. 

As one school administrator told Young, "SAS is developing the kind of resources I'd develop if I had more time, more funding and unlimited access to certain technologies."

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