Coursera Courses Are Revolutionizing and Shaping the Way Homeschoolers Learn
Although homeschool students make up a small fraction of the 23 million people around the world taking courses through Coursera, they are also among the users who benefit the most.
Homeschooling is never easy for a parent, but as children work their way through higher grades, it usually becomes more difficult for one parent to teach every subject.
Online learning has revolutionized education and homeschooling. Specifically, over the past few years Coursera has revolutionized learning for many homeschool high school students and their parents.
Homeschools are most commonly using Coursera for the more difficult to teach and advanced subjects. According to one homeschool family,
“We're 3 for 3 now in having positive outcomes from Coursera Calculus One. We think the best strategy is to have students do a warm up in this course, before the high stakes dual enrollment Calc 1 through a college. Why high stakes? Because the grade in an accredited college course will always be on their college transcript, and a bad grade may also hurt their chances at college admissions and scholarships.”
Almost universally, homeschools cherish freedom, time, flexibility, and individuality of learning – all things that homeschooling can provide as an alternative schooling option. Coursera allows for anyone to take the world’s best courses, online. With Coursera, facilitating learning and pursuing knowledge has never been easier or more accessible.
“We were thrilled when we learned that Coursera was offering over 1,700 online courses, many with self-paced content. Any online course is already pretty flexible, but this allowed us to use Coursera fully on our own time and on our own schedule,” reported Luke Denman, a homeschool alumni.
When public school students begin to excel in sports, music, or other extracurricular activities, they often realize they need a more flexible learning environment than the public schools can provide. Some of these students enroll in online high schools. Others piece together eclectic curricula that frequently includes, to name a few, Coursera courses, Khan Academy videos, and The Great Courses lectures.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, the number of home educators doubled from 1999 to 2012. The 2012 data estimated that 3.4 percent (1.8 million) of the overall school-age population was homeschooled.
Homeschoolers are a remarkably diverse bunch – the geographic distribution is evenly split, with about one-third each in rural, urban and suburban areas. What 9 in 10 homeschool families did agree on was their general concern about the public school environment and one of the reasons they chose to homeschool their children.
2017 will mark a new year and a new administration. The New York Times reported that,
“Ms. DeVos will probably be a boon to the relatively small, growing population of families that home-school their children.”
With the potential for more options for K-12 education, the already growing population of homeschool families could skyrocket – funneling even more students into Coursera and other online classes.
It is no surprise that Coursera was nominated by multiple homeschooling families as one of the best educational websites for 2017. Thanks to such positive direct and social feedback from educators and homeschoolers, Coursera was named a TOP 10 Educational Website and received Homeschool Base’s Purple Stamp of Approval. This stamp of approval is a brand endorsement by Homeschool Base to honor exemplary websites and companies that offer quality, innovative, unique, cost-effective, and/or significant value to teachers and homeschooling families.
