Md. School Joins Test of Online Courses Tailored to Girls
When the Online School for Girls flickers to life this fall on computer screens across the country, students will take part in an unusual experiment that joins two trends: girls-only schooling and online teaching.
A consortium that includes the 108-year-old Holton-Arms School in Bethesda is driving the project, in the belief that girls can benefit from an Internet curriculum tailored just to them.
“There’s been a lot of research done on how girls learn differently with technology than boys,” said Brad Rathgeber, Holton-Arms’s director of technology. “Part of this is a little bit of theory that we’re trying to put in practice to see if it really does play out.”
For now, the online collaboration will allow the four participating schools — Holton-Arms, Harpeth Hall in Nashville, Westover School in Middlebury, Conn., and Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio — to offer classes that would not have generated enough student interest or teacher support in any one school. When the classes open to the public a year later, the educators hope that students around the world — including homeschoolers and girls at coed schools — will be able to take part in a version of the girls’ school experience. And they want to prove that single-sex online education works. They can’t find anyone who has done anything similar.
