Academica West is Utah’s oldest and largest charter services organization, handling all non-instructional and non-technical aspects of the school’s operation. Academica West provides a comprehensive set of management services to OHSU, including legal, financial, auditing, recruiting, and hiring services. Through the partnership with Academica West, OHSU ensures that it meets the requirements of the school’s contracts, local ordinances, and state and federal laws.
The Open High School of Utah’s online learning system is produced, hosted, and managed by Agilix, and includes a number of capabilities. First, the teacher dashboards in the system visually highlight and flag students who need individual attention, allowing OHSU teachers to wake up in the morning and say “who needs a phone call for some one-on-one help today?” and have that data immediately at their fingertips.
Second, the system supports alignment of both content and assessments with state and other standards. This allows OHSU curriculum designers to design pre-assessments that can be used to determine students’ paths through the courses. For example, if a student can demonstrate mastery of the assessments associated with a certain state standard, the instructional content associated with that standard can be automatically removed from the student’s personalized learning path. This alignment of content and assessment with standards also makes possible OHSU’s data-driven curriculum revision process.
Third, the Agilix system has an offline client. This means that all course content can be downloaded to OHSU laptops as part of a custom image before they are distributed to students. Students have, in effect, the whole learning system running on their local machine, and can do their course work at the virtual high school without being connected to the Internet. Whenever the laptop is next connected to the Internet, it uploads all the student’s previous activity and downloads any new content, including announcements. This feature is critically useful for students in rural and remote areas whose primary point of Internet access may be a public library or cafe.
Finally, the Agilix system is a hosted service, leaving our teachers and administrators free to focus on supporting and improving student learning.
