I had the chance to review the recording from our last online faculty meeting from the Illinois Virtual High School (IVHS). As I think I’ve mentioned before in the past, the IVHS will cease to exist on 30 June 2009. The following day the Peoria Regional Office of Education will begin the operation of the Illinois Virtual School (IVS). During this final online meeting, the IVHS Director went over some of the statistics for the time that the IVHS was in existence.
From Spring 2001 to Fall 2008
- 17,995 semester course enrollments
- 17,854 enrollments taken for credit (141 taken for enrichment)
- 13,620 credit courses completed with passing grade
- 4,217 credit courses not completed
- 17 grades were still pending
- Current Completion Rate: 76.4%
The Growth of the IVHS
- Pilot (Spring 2001): 12 courses / 33 schools /97 students
- 2001-02: 58 courses / 76 schools /412 students
- 2002-03: 90 courses / 162 schools /1232 students
- 2003-04: 98 courses / 195 schools / 1960 students
- 2004-05: 94 courses /227 schools /3249 students
- 2005-06: 95 courses / 217 schools /2739 students
- 2006-07: 99 courses / 226 schools /2935 students
- 2007-08: 106 courses / 227 schools /4314 students
- 2008-09 (only Fall & Spring): 115 courses / 221 schools / 3024 students
As the IVHS will continue to manage the Spring 2009 semester on behalf of the Peoria Regional Office of Education, there are an additional 1700+ enrollments for the Spring 2009. Over the years there have been 516 unique public and private schools served by the IVHS, homschooled students from 27 counties, and adult students from 2 counties. This represents enrollment from 85% of the counties in Illinois.
When you look at this record over the time the IVHS has been in existence, it is quite an impressive eight years of work. I can recall back in the Fall 1999 when I first met Jim Kinsella, the IVHS Co-ordinator of Instructors, when we were both just teaching European History – him in a face-to-face fashion at U High and me in an online format with the Vista School District. Jim was asked to be involved with the initial IVHS pilot, and shortly after that we were tasked with building IVHS‘s first owned course (i.e., our European History course that we had been developing online through out earlier work together). Since those early days and that first course, I’ve co-taught that course with Jim (and others with other IVHS teachers), I’ve conducted research and evaluations with IVHS, I’ve done course reviews for IVHS, and I’ve delivered professional development to IVHS teachers and taken other sessions with my colleagues. More recently, I’ve started to write with administrators at the IVHS (see eCollege and IVHS: Preparing virtual school teachers and a second manuscript that will be coming out in a special issue of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education later this year). It has been a great eight years!!!
Anyway, the Illinois Virtual School will begin operations during the Spring 2009 semester and will assume independent operations in Fall 2009. I hope that my involvement with this new group will be just as fulfilling (and mutually valuable). For those interested, the temporary website for the new Illinois Virtual School is available at:
http://www.lth3.k12.il.us/news.html
I received this note about a week ago about the final semester of Illinois Virtual High School (IVHS) – which was actually the first semester of Illinois Virtual School, run under contract by the former IVHS administration…
