Lori,
We found that online classes that had live components (such as mandatory twice-a-week live chat sessions with the teacher and other students) and that had frequent assignments with deadlines helped give my son good exposure to classroom interaction and to the kinds of organizational demands he will face later without making his need for accommodations obvious to the other students in the class. It was a good place for us to start. We'll certainly use classes with that kind of a format again as he moves through high school. But I think that it is also important for my son to have an opportunity to find out where his physical and sensory limits really are and to be able to try out and practice different coping strategies and accommodations to find out what actually works for him in a classroom setting, as it is unlikely that he will be able to take all of his college classes online.
So, our strategy for now is to have him practice and try out those types of skills first in settings where the course is not necessarily going to go on transcripts kept by other people, and we have the option to count it for our purposes as either elective credit or as an extracurricular. I'm unwilling at this point to risk him missing out on core content learning because he couldn't sit through the whole class without needing to move around or because he was having trouble taking lecture notes.
These are tough decisions. I know that I feel that, on the one hand, I want to make sure my child has all the support and accommodations he needs to achieve all I know he is capable of, but on the other hand, I don't want to inadvertently limit or stunt his development by being overprotective, and the location of the fine line between the two is almost impossible to see from this side of it.
