Building Online Courses from the Ground Up

When creating online curriculum for students, Florida Virtual School (FLVS) strives to design courses that provide an engaging experience and challenge Kindergarten-12th grade students to master key concepts. The FLVS Curriculum Development Team is paving the path of excellence in online learning through high-quality content, including videos, recordings, and interactive activities.

Creating a Foundation for Learning  

Collaboration and communication are essential part of our culture at FLVS. The Curriculum Development Team is made up of a range of experts, from curriculum specialist to web developers, who work together to bring courses to life. Andrea Hutchison, FLVS Art Director, explains that creating a new course involves topic research by everyone involved to ensure that the design and interactives are complimentary to the course content.

This year the team integrated a new Course Builder Tool, which allows writers and designers to collaborate on course development in one application! With this tool the team saves time and effort updating content and completing lessons.

The second course developed within the Course Builder Tool was AP English Literature and Composition, which Monica Judd, FLVS Instructional Designer, says “was extra exciting to take from words to WOW!” Andrea Hutchison was also on the AP English Literature and Composition team, sharing that the course was fun to conceptualize. Teamwork and communication made for a great result!

Designing Engaging Activities 

The Curriculum Development Team continues to stretch the boundaries of technology and innovation to incorporate interactive activities throughout FLVS courses. By creating more dimensional courses, FLVS Web Developer, Hope Dady, explained that students get a more immersive online learning experience.

“There was some fantastic development done in Agriscience Foundations 1 for a series of labs for the students to get hands on experience. Labs are always a challenge to build digitally, but our Web Development team used a combination of existing library interactives and some custom code to expand the functionality which lead to the creation of some engaging and fun experiences for our students.”

Hope shared that she enjoyed working on Personal Financial Literacy most, explaining that “We added a lot of fun, whimsical elements that connected the material to the concepts.” FLVS continues to break the through the stereotypes of online learning with each new course by improving students’ learning experience and ensuring content mastery through interactive and engaging online courses!