...do you think maybe CTY is 'shifting its business model' or something like by trying to appeal to a wider (i.e, not so HG, etc.) audience? That would be disappointing.
I'm afraid that they're either doing this or that they're using the canned courses because the profit margins are higher.
In fact, many educational e-curriculum houses rely upon virtual sweatshop labor gleaned from contract technical writers. These aren't subject experts-- in any way, shape, or form. They are writers who will bid low because they are fairly desperate. (We're talking, 'here, write this accounting module for us in a week. For $500. Here's what we need covered.')
Sometimes even the bigger providers get sucked into this because they have pressure to meet profitability goals, and contract out a course that they don't have, or purchase it from a smaller provider.
Unfortunately, this is one instance in which mass production (if one will) does NOT indicate either coherence in design process or high quality.
CAN such things be high quality? Of course. We've seen that with some of the offerings of our national charter school-- they use Virtual Sage (which is dreadful), Aventa (similarly dreadful offerings), some in-house offerings (also not generally very good-- because they aren't devised by TEACHERS, but by administrators), and Florida Virtual School offerings, which are generally developed by teachers and faculty at CFU's incubator for virtual secondary education.
There's a huge quality variance-- what we've noticed is that TEACHERS have to be involved in the curriculum design team or it pretty much
will suck. Period.
Administrators may have all the right qualifications and may THINK that they know what students need, but because they aren't in direct contact with students using the curriculum... they usually don't know what will/won't work.
