The benefits of Nixty align with the needs of charter schools on several levels. Some of the major issues surrounding charter schools are funding, parental involvement, facilities, and hiring capacity.

Funding

Because Nixty is such a low-cost provider of learning management systems compared to competitors, using Nixty can contribute straight to the bottom line of a charter school where funding is limited and sometimes difficult to secure.

Parental Involvement

Using Nixty can encourage parents’ involvement in education by allowing parental access to a student’s learning management system account. Parents can track lesson progress, view test scores and communicate with the teacher through the learning management system.

Facilities

Using virtual space like a Nixty learning management system means less physical space is needed for materials like textbooks and workbooks, as well as supplies like binders and notebooks. This translates to fewer yearly costs for replenishing those materials and supplies…and more efficient allocation of funding.

Hiring Capacity

Creating a lesson rich with video and reading assignments, interactive discussions, and quizzes & tests in a Nixty learning management system means that students can spend more time learning on their own, in an environment carefully structured by their teacher. And open courseware can provide supplemental lessons for instructors who may be filling in subject gaps in the curriculum.

Charter schools can use Nixty to:

• Easily create online courses
• Support residential courses with Web-based tools
• Create a digital repository for course materials
• Communicate via an email/internal messaging system
• Facilitate discussion through chat rooms and message boards
• Automate the design, administration, and scoring of tests
• Exchange assignments via a digital drop-box
• Streamline the enrollment process with batch imports for students, faculty, and courses
• Provide students with their own Website to organize, store, and submit their work

Many professions in the developed world measure competency through a degree program from an accredited university and some sort of licensing exam. If a person successfully graduates from college and/or graduate school and passes the exam, then they are competent to practice in their field. This basic process covers a range of professions from engineering to medicine.

Many in these professions would admit that this isn’t the best way to measure competency. Accredited degrees are really limited by the student’s effort. Some students learn a lot and others just skate through. A similar thing can be said about licensing exams. Many students use the exam as an opportunity to consolidate what they’ve learned. Others, however, just learn to  *take* the test. They are less concerned with internalizing the material and are more concerned with passing the test.

I’m wondering what kind of new ways of measuring competency might arise in the late-developing world where the degree/licensing exam model hasn’t yet crystallized. I think assessment has to be a key part of this; however, I’m not sure that accredited degree programs have to play such a central role. Many countries simply do not have the educational resources or accrediting bodies that other countries have. There is a lot of room here for people to innovate and proactively define competency for their fields.