Online Courses for Credit Recovery in High Schools
An examination of promising practices for online credit recovery programs
Released in 2017, "Online courses for credit recovery in high schools: Effectiveness and promising practices" is a report by the institute's Applied Research & Program Evaluation for the Fannie Mae Foundation.
In an era when leaving school without a diploma bears enormous costs, more and more high schools are offering students the opportunity to retake previously failed courses online—an approach known as “online credit recovery.” These online courses are still new enough that their structures have not been fully developed in many schools, and their purpose and mechanisms are not well understood by many school personnel. Meanwhile, the teachers responsible for teaching and administering credit recovery classes are often in the early phases of learning how to do so effectively themselves.
This brief is the second in a series highlighting promising practices for teachers who lead online credit recovery courses. The practices are drawn from a study of 12 Massachusetts high schools that developed online credit recovery programs as part of the MassGrad initiative. A previous brief focused on strategies for motivating and managing students in an online environment. Here, we focus on strategies teachers can use to create a productive learning environment, and the variety of roles credit recovery teachers play within and beyond the classroom.
February 21, 2020
