Dear Homeschool Community,
It’s been another wonderful and eventful year. Thank you for all your amazing support.
We just now finalized the updates to our 11 Conceptual Academy self-study courses. A lot of under the hood updates from our developer providing added stability to the platform as well as some important ADA accessibility tools. But perhaps the biggest update has to do with the many new video lessons we have recently posted: about 100 of them, mostly in the physics chapters.
Why is this significant? It’s been our long term goal to have a video lesson for every chapter section of every one of our conceptual textbook titles. To get there, we’ll need about 900 videos lessons, each of them integrating closely with and complementing (not replacing) the textbook paragraphs. As of this writing, we stand at about 650. So, only 250 more to go!
Keep in mind, what we’re doing here is akin to building a pyramid. It’s not something that gets built in a day. Rather, it’s a life-long career endeavor for each of us co-authors. Our production rate is getting faster and it’s exciting to know we’re on target for getting to the top within a couple years. And when that happens, we’ll will finally have our Conceptual Biology course in place. Yahoo! Thank you for your patience. And thank you for helping to pay it forward along the way.
Aside from being populated with new content, the 2019-2020 Conceptual Academy grade book now also tracks student scores by unit. For the homeschool, this will help you in having more regular assessments. Please read your course teacher’s manual to learn more about working with the Conceptual Academy point system. And that manual now also includes a log sheet to help you keep track of your student’s progress.
And thanks to an enthusiastic homeschooler for recently suggesting that we include flash cards as a student tool for practicing science vocabulary. We managed to build those for all of our chemistry courses. And they’re really fun. You can see them in our sample chemistry course. Navigate to the last video of a chapter, et. voila. We hope to have them for Conceptual Physics next, followed by the other courses. Again, these things take time. 🙂
And it would be negligent of me not to mention the new Conceptual Academy Big Picture Podcast series. A podcast for learning science?? Absolutely, and how! Again, chemistry is getting favored as our first series. This series follows the chapters of Conceptual Chemistry, but also explores chemistry in the community and has an early focus on the science of learning. The show notes are hosted at ConceptualScience.com/podcasts, which is our support site for college, high school, and co-op instructors.
Just so you know, as of this writing, about 40 colleges across the country and beyond are now using Conceptual Academy for their introductory science courses. Plus, about 20 high schools too. Meanwhile, there are about 650 homeschools now onboard within this growing Conceptual Academy community. I think it’s fair to say that homeschools lead the way in may respects. Our great thanks and appreciation to you.
Except, I need to mention an interaction we had with one homeschool dad. He was so very mad at us. Why was he so mad at us? He was mad because of how difficult it was for him to find us. Then, the more he learned about us, the madder he got! In his words:
“When it comes to real and substantial science courses for high school homeschools, there is a vast ocean of nothing. Please do what you can to become more visible. You are an island of treasure within that vast ocean. Hard to find. A few light houses pointing the way would be greatly appreciated.”
We’re trying, we really are. At issue is that we’re teachers and not marketing people. That said, we have made some important recent connections, and, yes, we just paid a hefty bill to a marketing firm for some serious help. But the truth is, these things take time. Our pyramid is getting taller and hopefully more visible. Thank you for also helping to let others know exactly where we are.
Good chemistry,
John
P.S. We find the quickest way to describe our work to people is to point them to our recently updated Conceptual Academy YouTube Channel where we post a small portion of our videos for the general public. And some how, our moon video is approaching a million views. 🙂