A Small Improvement for the Virtual Instruction Program

The Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP) is offering additional courses at the high school level through the National Repository of Online Courses Network. When I first saw the news, I was thrilled because I’ve long thought that the online school covered too few subjects. Then I read through the press release and noticed that the new courses were already available to anyone for free at hippocampus.org.

MoVIP is not bringing students any content they didn’t have access to before. This move is comparable to including a free online dictionary in a virtual English course. There is a potential benefit: MoVIP will direct some students to resources that were out there on the Internet, but that they wouldn’t have looked for on their own. Still, adding these courses does not represent a substantive innovation, which is perhaps why there’s no mention of the news on the MoVIP website.