Press Releases

Florida Virtual School and Academic ADL Co-Lab Announce Partnership to Create Next Generation Online Learning

New Courses Will Offer More Interactivity to Enhance Individual Learning

ORLANDO, FL, March 23, 2006 – Today, Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a leading statewide public virtual school, and Academic Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Co-Lab, an international initiative designed to support the education community by delivering innovative, effective, high quality education anytime and anywhere, announced a new partnership to create the next generation of online courses.

Over the next three years, the two organizations will collaborate on the development of innovative K-12 online learning courses that leverage new tools and technologies in an effort to offer students a deeper level of individualized learning to meet their ever-changing needs.

“Technology stimulates today’s students every time they go to the mall, visit the movies or just hang-out with friends. By collaborating with Academic ADL Co-Lab, we will borrow interactive technologies, similar to those used in today’s gaming industry, and weave them into our offerings to create a new line of FLVS courses,” explained Julie Young. “Not only will the courses be more interactive and engaging for students, but academically they will allow teachers to break-down student progress to an individual lesson or concept.”

“We look forward to working with FLVS in building dynamic e-learning courses for students that pull the best of today’s and tomorrow’s available technologies,” said Judy Brown, Founder of the Academic ADL Co-Lab. Dr. Ed Meachen, Chair of the Academic ADL Co-Lab governance group added, “We are extremely pleased to be working with the preeminent K-12 online organization in the country because we feel strongly changes in the educational delivery system need to begin in primary and secondary schools.”

FLVS and Academic ADL Co-Lab will infuse FLVS courses with technologies that will help bring learning to life through realism-based simulations, such as virtual microscope labs, simulation games and spreadsheet games, blogging, podcasting, as well as mobile technologies. To achieve their goal, FLVS and Academic ADL Co-Lab will leverage ADL’s Sharable Content Object Reference Model, the SCORM® approach to integrate additional technology into existing courses. The SCORM open model, as its name indicates, is a collection of specifications adapted from multiple sources to provide a comprehensive suite of e-learning capabilities that enable interoperability, accessibility and reusability of Web-based learning content.

Once completed, the new FLVS courses will provide teachers with additional tools to supplement the individualized instruction students currently receive when taking courses with FLVS. Once the new technologies are integrated, teachers should be able to track student progress more definitively and further customize lessons to build upon a student’s performance on assessments and completed course work. Ultimately, the new FLVS courses will be searchable by topic or lesson modules making it easier for students to access material, look-up specific lessons for review or further study, and provide teachers with new tools to drill down on skill gaps or lesson concepts.

Beyond collaborating on course enhancement, Academic ADL Co-Lab and FLVS will jointly present the results of their collaborations at national conferences. They have further agreed to work together to ensure the new courses can function within FLVS’ learning management system (LMS) run by Ucompass and to provide adequate training for technical experts. The newly designed courses will be delivered to students via the FLVS network.

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About Florida Virtual School
Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is an established leader in developing and providing virtual K-12 education solutions to students throughout the country. A nationally recognized e-Learning model, FLVS founded in 1997 was the country’s first, state-wide Internet-based public high school. Today, FLVS serves middle and high school students with more than 80 courses. FLVS is governed by an independent educational entity with a gubernatorial appointed board and is the only public school where funding is tied directly to student performance. Additional information can be found at www.flvs.net.

About the Academic ADL Co-Lab
The Academic ADL Co-Lab is a structured collaborative of educational organizations and consortia representing more than 1,000 academic institutions, including virtual universities, worldwide. Established in 2000 in Madison, Wisconsin, through an agreement between the U.S. Department of Defense, the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Technical College System, the Co-Lab specializes in next generation academic projects. It works in partnership with three other ADL Co-Labs, each with a distinct responsibility for military, corporate, or workforce research related to the development, implementation and assessment of ADL technologies and related products.  In addition to standards, the Academic ADL Co-Lab operates a Mobile Learning Technology Center showcasing the latest in mobile learning technologies; tests proposed solutions in a controlled environment on a range of vendor platforms; and supports Games and Professional Practice Simulations (GAPPS) Center for research on game-based learning.

For more information visit www.academiccolab.org.

About the ADL Initiative
The ADL Initiative is a collaborative effort between government, industry and academia to establish a new distributed learning environment that permits the interoperability of learning tools and course content on a global scale. As a result of a unique partnership between the US Departments of Defense and Labor, and the National Guard Bureau, the ADL Initiative has been established to serve as a public and private sector forum for cooperative research, development and assessment of new learning technology prototypes, guidelines and specifications.

Media Contacts          
Jodie Pozo-Olano
Sequoia PR for FLVS
540-720-9811 (O); 804-986-6911 (M)
Jodie@sequoiapr.com