GREENSBORO – Former Western Guilford football players Brock and Clayton Stadnik, who graduated from high school early and have enrolled at South Carolina, are just two in an army of students who have or will take online classes this school year through the N.C. Virtual Public School.
“We just passed 50,000 enrollments for this school year (Thursday),” said Ross White, the executive director of the school. “We’re a big school all of a sudden.”
More than 32,000 students took N.C. Virtual Public School courses last school year, according to the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, making it the second-largest virtual school by enrollment in the country. The N.C. Virtual Public School was indirectly established by the General Assembly and first offered online courses in June 2007.
It provides a greater array of course work than many traditional high schools, including advanced placement and special-needs classes, in addition to opportunities for students to catch up with their classmates or work ahead. Virtual school teachers must meet the same licensing requirements and the course work and students are held to the same standards as those in traditional high schools, state superintendent June Atkinson said.
The technologies used by the virtual school include:
l Video.
l Blogs.
l Wikis, which are web pages that can be modified by several members of a group.
l Active worlds, which allow users to explore 3D virtual reality environments, as in video games.
l Online discussion tools.
For the rest of the article, go to EARLY GRADUATION: Real learning in virtual school

