| State: Florida | Number of Students: 7,705 |
| School Type: Public School District | Free and Reduced Lunch: N/A |
| Grade Level: K-12 | English Language Learners: 1.1% |
School Context
Innovation: Florida Virtual School believes that innovation is critical to the success of the district.
College and Career Ready: FLVS aims to improve college and career readiness for all students.
Going Global: The district is working on expanding its global reach through FLVS Global, an online school communityserving students in all 50 states and over 65 countries.
Improving Operations: Efficiency, quality of instruction and financial management are all critical to the district and itconsistently works to improve all of these areas.
State of Technology
How it Works: Students from Florida can access courses for free, andthe school offers a tuition-based program for students worldwide calledFLVS Global. There are various opportunities at Florida Virtual Schoolincluding the fully online school, the flexible part-time program whichallows students to take a course or two while also attending traditionalschool, and the option to enroll as a homeschool student.
FLVS has a franchise model, which allows them to partner with otherdistricts to provide curriculum, administrative and technical support.Districts that partner with FLVS can use their own teachers, butprovide curriculum and support through FLVS. It also allows districtsto provide students with the flexibility of a 365 day school year.
Florida Virtual Schools offers other districts the opportunity to startVirtual Learning Labs (VLLs) and Blended Learning Communities(BLCs) at their schools. Both of these learning environments offersolutions for problems with scheduling, and can give students anopportunity to earn credits. In a VLL, there is less instructionalsupport, with instructional visits optional. In a BLC, instructional visitshappen so that direct instruction can be provided in addition to theonline learning.
Professional Development courses are also offered through FLVS forteachers in other districts.
Partnering With Knewton: FLVS selected Knewton through an RFPto help further the district’s personalized learning efforts. Knewtonwill provide an analytics engine to build and power adaptive learningcourses. Individual students will receive real-time recommendationsbased on how they learn, what skills they have mastered and goals thathave been set with their teacher. The hope is that FLVS will be able toprovide stronger content recommendations and predictive analyses.This work will be piloted in spring 2016 for geometry, primarily ingrades nine and ten with plans to expand to reach 200K students ingrades K-12 over the next few years.