Parent Roles, Responsibilities, and Activities to Support Scholars Online Students

Access to Member Benefits

Parents who are active members at Scholars Online will have access to the public Moodle area, where they can

• take an orientation course in the use of the Moodle
• enter profile information and maintain their email addresses and other contact information
• review the Scholars Online calendars for member events
• enter privately-accessible personal appointments and deadlines whether related to Scholars Online or not
• take part in the public bulletin board topics as well as those set aside for parent-only use
• use the internal Moodle messaging system to contact teachers, other parents, and even their own students!
• access their own students' academic records to review their performance in each course, and after course completion, create personal transcripts
• request formal transcript transmission to other educational institutions

Parent Responsibilities

Scholars Online is not a regular day school projected onto the Internet. It is largely an extension or adjunct to a homeschooling enterprise, and as such entails some very specific obligations for parents of our students. For college-level or older students, these terms do not necessarily obtain, but for minor students we insist on the cooperation of parents or guardians in the following ways.

By signing your children up for classes, you agree to:

1. Advise us at the time of enrollment of any known learning disabilities or issues with your student. This will allow us to tailor our presentations somewhat and accommodate your student to the best of our abilities with the available technology. We will treat this information confidentially.
2. Preserve the security of your parent password and keep it from your student. We need this in order to be able to verify that a given communication comes from a parent, and not a student writing in the parent's name. If the security of your password is inadvertently compromised, you further agree to advise us of the fact and change it immediately from the Moodle site.
3. Check your e-mail at least every other day (ideally daily), and check into the Scholars Online Moodle for school-wide broadcast messages.
4. Attend Parent orientation meetings online to learn about Scholars Online's policies and procedures.
5. Respond in a timely fashion to personally directed e-mail about your students. If we write to you and do not receive some response within a reasonable time, we will have to assume that you are in breach of these agreements and will suspend student participation pending an answer. (The definition of "reasonable" here is deliberately open-ended: we're not looking to be punitive, and hope never to have to explore the question any more thoroughly, but it is imperative to keep parental involvement alive.)
6. Supervise your children appropriately, and keep track of their attendance in class. We are not in a position to enforce attendance; that is your responsibility. The occasional missed session can be made up by reading a log, but it is intrinsically limited: one can't get anything from a log of a discussion in which everyone has decided to opt out and read the log.
7. Track your children's preparation. Make sure that they are covering the requisite materials. If there's a problem in doing that, refer it to the teacher. Often there is something that can be done; nothing will be done, however, if we don't know anything about it.

To become a member, please fill out a Scholars Online membership form.

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Scholars Online is fully accredited through the Middle States Accreditation Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools.