Smart Horizons provides online training and curriculum development services. It is a division of Advanced Systems Technology, which has over 400 professionals. Smart Horizons develops customized online courses for topics like independent living skills, and offers its NexPort learning management system to host the courses. The company works with organizations serving foster youth to address needs around education, employment and homelessness.
4. The Crisis 08/04/11 www.smarthorizons.org Kids in Foster care On average, 45% will drop out of high school. 51% will be unemployed. 50% will be homeless. 25% will be incarcerated.
18. 08/04/11 www.smarthorizons.org Smart Horizons Independent Living Skills Course Options for Enrollment Package Choice Number of Lessons Offered Per Student Cost Cost per Lesson 1. Enterprise with all 5 Catalogs 139 $300 $2.15 Best Value 2. Individual Catalogs Health/Leisure Financial Management Relationships Life Skills Approx 30 lessons per catalog $125 $4.16 3. Career Catalog 18 $100 $5.55
Hinweis der Redaktion
Doug Peterson: Director, Smart Horizons Tambri McKinney: Director of Operations Gabe Smith: Director, Sales and Marketing Emily Atchison: Director, Product Support Services Angel Morgan: Product Development Manager; Senior Instructional Designer Cheryl Samaha: Product Manager; Instructional Designer
Smart Horizons, a division of Advanced Systems Technology (AST), is an online training provider that offers courseware development by experienced Instructional Designers, Learning Management services and superior media design. Smart Horizons can offer CEUs to programs that qualify under IACET guidelines and provides a wide range of training services, including content development and hosting, product delivery, and student enrollment, support, and record keeping.
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Our curriculum development is guided by the long established, widely used PADDIE instructional systems design process that includes the Plan, Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate phases. Each phase is accomplished by a proven sequence of actions that result in tangible deliverables that are inputs for the subsequent phase. Each phase culminates in a review that determines readiness to proceed to the next phase. The requirement was to develop curriculum to support youth ages 13-19 in passing an Independent Living Skills assessment. During the Plan phase, we determined basic project parameters such as scope, milestones and resource requirements, and produced the Project Management Plan used to guide and manage our courseware production efforts. In the Analyze Phase, we analyzed existing assessment requirements and goals, defined broad performance standards based terminal objectives and specific measurable task based enabling objectives. We then aligned the combined objectives to provide a logical flow and produce a draft Curriculum Structure. During the Design Phase, we took the draft curriculum structure and defined catalogs with categories and organized lessons into the appropriate categories within the catalogs. We then established the instructional design strategy including the Graphical User Interface (GUI) functional elements, lesson structure, instruction presentation, student activities, and assessment items strategy and mastery score as 70%. These were codified in the Design Document. In the Develop Phase, we reorganized existing content into 30-minute (or less) lessons, drafted content outlines based on the established learning objectives and instructional design strategy. The content outlines defined text, media (to include visuals and in most cases audio), and assessment items. The content outlines were then compiled to produce a web-based version of each lesson that was reviewed to ensure the lessons functioned as designed. The Implement phase involved uploading the lessons into the defined categories and catalogs on the Learning Management System (LMS) and performing run-time Quality Assurance checks to ensure the lessons and tests functioned as designed and appropriately interacted with the LMS. Interactions include bookmarking, test scores, status (in progress, not started, finished) and results (passed, failing, not graded). We also verified that the completion certificates were made available. Once the testing is completed, the courseware is released. As indicated by the solid block on the right of the screen, Evaluation is more of a continuing process than a discreet phase. Everyone involved in curriculum development performs formative evaluations of their own work. In addition to established Quality Assurance checks and procedures, evaluations of student feedback are conducted to identify any shortfalls or systemic problems.
The curriculum was organized into 5 catalogs: Health/Leisure Financial Management Relationships Life Skills Career/School Each catalog was divided further into categories. The current organization ranges from 5 to 7 categories per catalog. Those categories are listed to the right of the slide. The identification of catalog and categories came from analyzing Independent Living Skills assessment tools. Next, lesson titles were placed into an appropriate category of a particular catalog. Currently, the lessons within a category range from one to 11 lessons per category, and there are 139 lessons within the curriculum. The design of the curriculum allows for expansion as needed.
This chart identifies one example lesson taken from a category of each catalog. (The lesson title and objectives are listed on the right.) All lessons within the curriculum contain objectives for student achievement. Those objectives are covered in the content provided and tested through assessment items given in an end of lesson test. Most tests have 5 questions. Lessons are approximately 30 minutes in length. Most contain audio within the lesson to support different learning styles. Also the format of the curriculum varies; the curriculum contains interactive courses, power points, videos, and pdfs. A student must achieve a minimum score of 70% on a test to receive credit for a lesson and be awarded a certificate of completion.
Administrators and students can update and share documents.
Reporting Permissions are granted to Organizational Administers to monitor student’s progress Subscription Reports-Allows administrators to view and filter all active and inactive subscriptions within an organization Enrollment Reports-Allows administrators to view and filter student progress, student scores, student activity, as well as dates and other information pertaining to enrollments within the organization Customize and save report parameters Filter on groups (caseworkers) within a organization Narrow search down to specific titles; phases (in progress, not started, finished); results (passed, failing, not graded) Generated reports can be downloaded into a spreadsheet format