Online Classes

Story by Taylor Schmidt »

Everyone at EHS has to take the same curriculum to graduate, but occasionally there are students who decide to go down a path that’s a little different. Whether it is anything from getting more elective hours to graduating early, every student who decides to take an online class has a reason. Only a handful of EHS students have taken this path because it’s not as easy as it looks. To get an online class approved, students have to have a clear explanation of why they feel they need to take the class outside of the 7-hour school day.

For Senior Sarah Case, it was a scheduling issue between two classes she wanted to take.

“For my English classes, I had to make a plan of what classes to take because it was a school-schedule issue that Comp I and Band were the same hour,” Case said. “Once we brought up the issue, they were very open to letting me take those classes online.”

Case also took science and math classes online to better prepare her for her career, but she decided she would rather take those classes in a classroom in the future because the content was a little harder to grasp without a teacher.

“There were no lectures in my class, and it was a lot harder content than last year’s Calculus class at Eudora because it didn’t have to follow the same requirements as JCCC,” Case said, “In my experience, if you have a clear plan for classes to serve a certain purpose in your future and work hard to have good grades in school, the school is willing to work with you to help you accomplish those goals.”

Junior Jayden Pierce, who also took online classes, agrees that students should be able to take online classes – with good reason.

“I think it’s unfair that it’s a lot harder for people who aren’t in EL to get online classes approved. They should be able to take them,” Pierce said, “I think people in the past have ruined it for not following through with their commitment.”

Pierce says that the online classes are relatively similar to EHS classes, minus the face-to-face aspect of having a teacher there to guide you.

“You don’t get the personal touch with online classes,” Pierce said.

For Junior Bobby Lounsbury the hardest part about online classes was also the fact that there isn’t a teacher in front of you.

“There’s obviously less face to face time with actual teachers, but the lessons are a person speaking so it’s still not as cut and dry as reading a textbook,” Lounsbury said.

What does it take to get an online class approved? Mr. Misse, EHS guidance counselor, is one of the first people that a student would need to speak to.

“The general rule of thumb for taking classes is that if we offer a class here, that’s supposed to be the number-one option,” Misse said, “It’s usually for things that go beyond the curriculum that we offer.”

It gets a bit more complicated when students want to take a class that is already offered at EHS. The administration has to give the student approval before they can receive credit for taking the class. According to Misse, there are upsides and downsides to taking online classes.

“I think the most successful experience for students taking classes online is when more than one person is taking the same exact class because they can use each other for help, especially without a teacher there to ask questions,” Misse said, “On the downside of that, you have to have a lot of self-motivation and there aren’t really the same deadlines as normal classes so it’s easier to put things off.”

Misse says that there’s a side to online classes that students often don’t realize amid the buzz of trying to take classes that are already offered at EHS.

“One thing I would say is that there are plenty of other online options besides JCCC, as in other colleges,” Misse said, “Students can also go and get an early start on their college transcript with classes that they might not necessarily need to graduate high school on their own. If you know what your career is going to be, sometimes it can be beneficial to get some of those classes out of the way early.”