Questions You should be Asking

1. Is the school web-based or client-server based?

NorthStar Academy (NSA) is client-server based. To illustrate the difference between a web-based approach and a client-server approach, let's consider the following scenario. Your section of the city has been affected by a major power outage, and the entire section of the city must be evacuated and sheltered for 5 days and nights while the city's electrical department can correct the problem. Thousands of people will be homeless for these 5 days, so to where do you relocate them? You have the choice between area high school gymnasiums and the local Hilton and Marriot hotels. In which would you rather stay, the gym or the Hilton hotel room? My guess is that you would choose the Hilton, not only for yourself, but for as many people as possible. Why? Because the hotel is built for such an environment that needs to house, service, feed, etc. hundreds of people simultaneously. Would the local gym work? Sure, it would "work", but with the gym, you have a general purpose resource that was never built to act as a facility to house, service, feed, etc. hundreds of people simultaneously. The gym offers you a bare-bone minimal accommodation that leaves the people with the lingering thought, "When can we get outta' this place?!?"

Now bring this analogy over to the issue of web-based or client-server based approaches. With a client-server based approach, you will be enjoying a digital environment that has been uniquely created for a rich, multi-user, and highly graphical and structured communications environment. With a web-based approach, you will likely be using a software interface known as a web browser (like MS Explorer or Netscape) or a simple email program like Outlook or Eudora that was never built to accommodate the communication and interactive needs of a school; it was built for, as its name plainly states, to browse web pages. In the case of using Outlook or Eudora, these applications were created mainly for a single user's personal email. A web browser does a great job at allowing some one to browse web pages, but it does not do such a good job acting as the host to a multi-user communications and interactive environment like a school. Can a web browser and simple email programs work? Sure they can "work", but let's remember our gym vs. Hilton scenario. Which would you rather have, something that only "works" or something that really "rocks"?

NSA uses the client-server software called FirstClass Intranet Client which is owned by OpenText. Their website is http://www.firstclass.com/

2. Are the teachers fully assigned to the online program or do they split their time between a real-time classroom and the online classroom?

Only 2 of our 28 NorthStar Academy teachers are also teaching in a day school classroom while the other 26 teachers do not split their time between NorthStar Academy and a day school program.

3. What is the price per course?

Please visit "Costs and Fees".

4. What does the price include or not include?

This question must be asked together with the preceding one, otherwise, you can easily get a false sense of the course costs. Students will purchase the needed class resources, such as books and workbooks, from either our online bookstore or a vendor of their own choosing. To see the details for each course, please review the "Course Descriptions" section of this catalogue. The student pays for the orientation and resource DVD’s and the cost to ship them. The student must also provide for his/her own copy of Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel; version 97 or newer). The tuition price includes daily interaction with the teachers and students, access to the lessons, assignments, tests, teacher marking, assessing, and grading all student assignments and tests, and parental daily access to the teachers.

5. Do the online instructors create their own lesson and assignment resources, or do the teachers use "off the shelf" previously made items which were created by third party software companies or even another online school?

We teachers at NSA create our own lessons, assignments, and tests; we do not use pre-packaged and pre-written lessons which were written by a commercial software company. Our lessons and assignments have a very personal "flavor" to them, and they convey the respective teacher's personality, style, and expertise, all of which would be absent in a pre-packaged lesson box.

6. How often can the students interact with the teachers, and howsoon will the teachers respond to student questions?

In NSA, students can, and are encouraged to, interact with the teachers on a daily basis. There is no quota or other limit to the frequency that students can ask questions, seek tutorials, or otherwise interact with their teachers. Parents also have this direct and daily access to the teachers because they, along with the students, have an account in NSA. Regarding teacher response time, our policy is that a teacher will respond to a student's question within 24 hours of the question being received, excluding holidays and weekends, of course. Often, the response time is measured in just a couple of hours, if not minutes if the teacher is online at the time that the question is asked. Students and teachers may also initiate real-time text chats within NSA to discuss topics of interest, but most interaction is done via email messages.

7. How easily can the students interact with the teachers?

Students can interact with their teachers by simply emailing them a message. Teachers are online throughout the day.

8. What do the lessons look like...of what quality are the lessons and instructional resources?

Here is an area where you will find a WIDE range of results. In our research, we have found online lessons from other programs which were nothing more than a single web page with "do/read this and answer this question", and we have found other online programs that use commercially pre-made lessons that students must purchase as part of the program. To see examples of our NSA lessons, please visit our Sample Lessons page.

9. How flexible is the online program in terms of due-dates, start-dates and course- completion dates?

Please see the subsection, School & Course Completion Dates.

10. Must students be online to have access to the lesson resources, or can the students download the lesson resources for off-line viewing and work?

With NSA's client-server approach, students may download all of their "lesson bundles" and then view all of their lesson resources offline. Students may also configure their account to work offline, thus saving them valuable and often expensive (if overseas) online time. Students do not need to be online for much of their academic studies because their lessons are not web pages but are rich and interactive documents created in Word, PowerPoint, Geometer's Sketchpad, Adobe Acrobat, QuickTime audio/video, etc. Students will usually go online to ask questions of their teachers, participate in group discussions, and participate in social activities in the Student Café.

We have students who live in very remote areas who have extremely limited access to the internet. For these students, having the ability to download their lesson bundles to their laptop's hard disk allows them to then return to their remote location and complete their work. Now granted, this is not the ideal situation because the student does not have daily access to NSA, but it illustrates the point that students don't have to be online to view our lessons and that students have greater flexibility in using our program because of this. Also, as a minimum, students spend on average 30 minutes per day online in NSA doing academic work. That time amount can be lower, and it can be greatly higher, but that is the average that we've heard from our parents and students when we have asked them about this issue.

11. How does the online program make available the textbooks and other materials to the student either for purchase or on loan?

Students and parents may find and purchase all of the class resources for each NorthStar class from our custom-created online bookstore (Click here to go to the bookstore), or they may choose to buy the needed class materials on their own from vendors of their own choosing by using the information found on our online bookstore, which shows all of the needed class materials organized by class name. Please see our "Registering and Getting Started" section in our "Introduction" page for additional information.

12. Are the teachers teaching their respective courses from a Bible-based world view, or do the teachers present the courses from a humanistic and "secular" world view?

NSA teachers instruct their courses from a traditional Protestant Biblical worldview which does not avoid or attack controversial topics or authors, but rather they confront these issues and topics with critical analysis from a Christian perspective.

13. Which types of resources do the school and its teachers use to in teaching the online classes?

A. traditional hard copy (e.g. textbooks) resources only,
B. web-based resources only (i.e. no hard copy materials or special software resources)
C. a combination of hard copy resources, educational software resources, and web-based resources

14. Is there a registration fee and are there other fees involved in the TOTAL cost for the course(s)?

The fees include those for registration, shipping, and transcripts. Please see the costs webpage for detailed fees and costs information.

15. May students email their work and questions to their teachers and fellow students, or must they use snail-mail or fax methods to send in their work?

NSA students use the internet (the FirstClass Intranet Client software) to send teachers their work, receive their lessons and assignments, and participate in the online environment. Fax and snail mail are not allowed for the "normal" day-to-day communications within the school, but we never say never as we want to always allow for limited exceptions. But email is the rule and norm for all NSA communications among teachers, parents, supervisors, and students.

16. Does the school use an "open-standards" or "strict-standards" approach in terms of the productivity software used by teachers and students to create and complete assignments, test, or projects?

NSA practices "strict standards" when it comes to our productivity and communications software. NSA students and teachers all use the software applications Word, PowerPoint, and Excel which are all part of Microsoft Office. By requiring students and teachers to create all of their work within these applications, we set the foundation for a highly creative, powerful, and compatible learning environment. Within our "strict standards" environment, our students may create multi-media and visually creative projects because we are all using the same software; we do not handicap our program by following the "open standards" approach which relegates all student work to the lowest common denominator which is usually a plain text format for their work since plain text is the lowest common denominator that all word processors can handle. We also follow "strict standards" concerning our communications software by using FirstClass Intranet Client as the "host" of our school for the reasons stated in question #1 of this list.

17. How often are students and parents made aware of the student's progress and status in each of the student's courses?

In NorthStar Academy, teachers communicate with both the student and the student’s parent/supervisor via personal emails and via emailed individualized progress reports which the teacher’s grade management software, InteGrade Pro, sends to each student either weekly or bi-weekly. Students and parents/supervisors do not need to ever wonder which assignments are yet to be done because the progress reports provide a list of the assignments and tests which are due for a particular semester while also providing the grades which the student has earned for each assignment and test which the student has sent to his/her teacher.

Teachers are also communicating with the students and parents on a daily and/or weekly basis concerning the student's progress. Teachers provide tutoring, marking of assignments with their own comments and suggestions, etc. on a daily basis.

18. Does the online program support both Windows and/or Macintosh operating systems?

The NSA program runs equally well on either the Windows or the Macintosh (10.X or newer) platforms. “The “Keyboarding” and the two “Electronics” classes are the only 2 classes in NorthStar which do not support the Macintosh operating system. Please refer to the Technical Requirements webpage for more information.

19. What is the school's attendance policy, if any?

NSA does not require the student to be online at any particular time of the day/night, nor does NSA require the student to be online for any minimum number of hours per day/week.

20. Does the school have a "residence requirement"?

We at NSA do not have a "residency requirement" because NSA does not operate a physical school campus.

21. Are the students required to be online at specific times during each school day and school week?

No, students are free to take advantage of the "anywhere, anytime" learning environment of NSA. Now, with that said, students are free to schedule real-time meetings with their teachers, and teachers can schedule real-time audio or text chat sessions with their students, but here, these sessions are voluntary and are for enrichment purposes.

22. Are the students allowed to log into the school at any time from any location to do their online work?

Yes, the NSA server is running 24 hours a day (except for routine maintenance and the occasional bug), and because we use a client-based communications software, the student can log into the school from any computer that has the FirstClass Intranet Client or a web browser installed on the hard drive. This ability to log into the school and into your personal account is due to the client-server's "single instance storage" feature which, simply stated, means that all of your email messages and all of the school's messages are stored in a single location: the server. The messages are not downloaded to your computer's hard drive but are made available to you from the server from wherever you log into the school. With single instance storage, the NSA client-server software does not tie you down to having to use the same computer from which you access your NSA account. The client software is also free (the licenses cost the money), so students or supervisors can install the client on as many computers as they need to do so.

23. Are the teachers available each day throughout the morning, day, and evening, or do the teachers offer set hours on set days during which time students may communicate with them?

NSA teachers work exclusively with their online courses, so they are free to interact with the students, parents, and supervisors throughout the day, everyday. Students and teachers may initiate special meeting times online if they wish to, but because teachers are online for most of the day, each day, such specially timed meetings are rarely needed.

24. Is the online program accredited?

Yes, NSA is an accredited member of CITA and of NCA (North Central Association). NorthStar Academy’s CEEB School Code Number is 060-328.

25. May students work toward earning a high school diploma?

Yes, all NSA students may work toward earning a high school diploma. The requirements for graduation are stated in the "General Information" section. Because NSA is accredited by both CITA and NCA, students will have their NorthStar diploma recognized by virtually every university and college in the USA and Canada.

26. May students be enrolled as either full-time or part-time students?

Yes, students may enroll as a part-time student in one course for just one semester, or they may enroll as a full-time program taking a full 6.0 credit course load.

27. Which grade levels does the online program offer?

NorthStar Academy offers full programs in grades 7-12.

28. What is the school's CEEB code number?

NorthStar Academy's CEEB code number is 060-328.