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A positive, responsive, and respectful online school culture does not happen in isolation but arises as all teaching and adminsitrative staff focus on achieving goals in a thoughtful and meaningful manner. As a school, we have identified two goals for the 2008-2009 school year:
3.1 Continue Reaching out to International Students
International students often come to Canada from another country to pursue their secondary school needs. They often come to Ontario because the Ontario school system provides a world-class education. We need to focus on providing a positive educational experience for our international students seeking online courses at VHS so that many will consider Ontario as a potential destination as legal Canadian citizens for their future education. Actions to be taken are:
- ensure the learning activities in the VHS courses provide a high quality learning experience for international students;
- focus on the specific needs of international students and provide direct intervention for these needs in meaningful ways, unique to our online courses;
- develop strong learning skills in the international student through effective online teaching.
3.2 To Be More Responsive to the Needs of Our Students
The VHS philosophy of education has always been to provide a student-centred education. While our positive growth in both numbers of students and successful completion rates within the courses affirms that VHS is indeed focused on the needs of the student, VHS needs to ensure that this priority remains in focus as we broaden our reach for a wider number of students. Actions to be taken are:
- continue with the practice that students can start their courses on any day, move through at their own pace and write their final exam on any day;
- continue to make all school admin staff accessible to current and potential students by displaying their contact information information in a public forum;
- continue to encourage teaching staff to make initial communication with the student and to continue to provide personalized and detailed feedback on all student assessments and evaluations;
- monitor the effectiveness of the initial student communications, course introduction units, News items and main school website as a means of communicating items of interest and use to the student in order, to evaluate their effectiveness;
- share best practices of teacher-student interactions among all VHS teachers;
- seek feedback evidence from students concerning student satisfaction to determine the extent to which students needs are being met.
