Alabama Connecting Classrooms Educators and Students Statewide - ACCESS - is a large-scale (USD10m) online education experiment begun in 2005, and using Moodle, to overcome the relative scarcity of specialised teachers in Alabama's numerous small rural schools. The 18 July 2009 Economist reports on the success of ACCESS, which will now be extended to all of the state's schools. Excerpt:
"There were sceptics. The pilot programme cost $10m, not pocket change in a poor state. Teachers worried about how they would connect to their virtual students. But ACCESS quickly became a hit. In 2006 students took more than 4,000 courses at 24 schools. In 2008, with ACCESS now in more schools, the number exceeded 22,000. [...] Mark Dixon, the governor’s adviser for education, says that several years ago fewer than half of Alabama’s public high schools offered any college-level Advanced Placement (AP) courses. As of this summer, they all will; ACCESS is being extended to all the state’s schools. Joe Morton, the state superintendent of schools, points to the number of black students taking AP courses. In 2003, according to the College Board, just 4.5% of Alabama’s successful AP students (those who passed the subject exam) were black. In 2008 the number was up to 7.1%. There is still a staggering gap—almost a third of the state’s students are black—but the improvement in Alabama was the largest in the country over that period."
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