Scheduling with DE and outsourced online courses

[silver]

Other than DE, I've never outsourced classes for my kids. I'm considering maybe doing that for English or History next year for my oldest (will be a senior). I've noticed that registration for online, live homeschool courses is often early (like Feb/March), but we won't know the fall DE courses until later than that, and we wouldn't even have an idea of spring courses until summer (and won't be able to register for them until Oct/Nov). I think DE has more value for this student, and as such, I wouldn't want to sign up for an online homeschool course and then find it conflicts with the desired DE courses. 

So how do you make sure you don't have schedule conflicts when trying to sign up for courses from multiple sources where you don't even know the class schedule for one until after registration for the other?

[regentrude]

For college classes, you can usually make an educated guess by looking at the schedule from the previous year. 
In a pinch, you could contact the department and ask; they may have a good idea even though the schedule isn't officially published yet.
Our school publishes the full course schedule for the fall semester in January because the incoming first-years begin signing up, even though DE students may have way later enrollment dates.

[Porridge]

The only way to hedge your bets is to secure your seat for the online homeschool class and eat the deposit if you need to cancel later. For most vendors you will lose $50 when/if you cancel the registration.

[BusyMom5]

I switch History to DE in 11th grade.  If your local school doesn't Hage the classes you are interested in, check out ASU Universal Learner or other online options.  Mine have also taken classes like Psychology, Philosophy,  Sociology,  Art History- not necessarily traditional History courses.

[Loowit]

The only class I have outsourced to online for high school is science.  I signed him up for it before he was registered for his college classes.  I just told him that he would have to plan his other classes around it.  So far it hasn't been too hard.  Most of the classes he is taking at the college have had several options for times/days to choose from.  It does help that his online course only meets once a week for an hour and a half.

[Dmmetler]

We scheduled college classes around other classes-honestly, L still does that due to teaching classes, because Athena's puts out their schedule months before registration starts for college classes at all. It usually ends up that Tuesday-Thursday are really, really heavy days, and Monday/Weds/Friday are lighter. 

 

One of the frustrations I have with teaching at the community center is that they don't seem to realize that most people set up their schedule months in advance-they opened registration for classes starting in January on December 15, and they probably won't open for August until about July. It's a big problem when homeschoolers set their schedules in February!

[Clemsondana]

Our community college has sometimes had only one section of a class that my kid needs.  There are plenty of potential 200-level lit classes, but only one section of Physics with Calculus I, for instance.  So, kid has chosen to do asynchronous versions of some classes (both homeschool classes and DE classes). to make it work.  Kid has done asynch DE while taking live classes at our co-op, and kid has done a couple of asynch homeschool classes over the years.  

I would be the first to say that this will not work for every kid in every class, though.  Taking DE Intro to Psych online was fine.  Taking Physics and Calc 3 online was brutal, and if kid wasn't so accustomed to self-teaching it would have been ugly.  But, depending on the class, it might help avoid some potential conflict. 

[cintinative]

OP we will be in the same boat. My son will likely be taking studio classes (Long time frame and in person) and at some point this spring I will need to either schedule online lit or assume we are doing it at home. 

[Farrar]

So, outside of a few specific classes and providers, most providers don't fill right away. My AP World History filled both sections this year but not until just after the course had already started. I think it's the same even with other classes that are doing well. There are some things at WTMA and PAH (and, of course, the Clover Creek Physics course is infamous) that fill fast and close early, but it's just not the norm across most providers.

As well, a number of providers have good refund policies if you withdraw well before the class begins. You might lose a deposit, and depending on your budget that could be a big deal... but losing $50 or so may not be that big of a deal either.

[teachermom2834]

We used to do this. We would look at when courses were historically offered for de and usually that gave us a good starting point and honestly my kids mostly took gen ed courses with multiple sections and the school they used for de gave priority registration for de students so we knew we could get our first choice courses. 

Then we would look at what online courses were really important to us and work around those. 

I did find that for my dc, and i had three go through this process, once the de door opened that was always the preference. De classes were just so much easier for them and less busywork, more bang for the buck than online classes that once we started with the de, we ended up with almost all de. Going back to online high school was a tough sell after in person de. So, we ended up in mostly de once we started that and ended up just filing in gaps around the de. So scheduling de became more important almost all the time.