Calls to Hillsdale’s contact center about online educational resources have increased in the past months, as more American parents consider homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Especially with COVID, a lot of people were calling because their public school systems were planning or had already decided to do virtual schooling for this fall,” Contact Center Team Leader and Hillsdale College Senior Callahan Stoub said. “There were some people who were planning on taking a year off to homeschool and then go back.”
Though the pandemic has sparked a greater interest in homeschooling nationwide, Hillsdale was already receiving calls from parents who wanted to enrich their children’s homeschooling experience.
According to Contact Center Assistant Director Elizabeth Turner, many homeschooling parents call the contact center to ask for a curriculum.
“They usually ask if we have some sort of online curriculum or if we have a curriculum that we could recommend for them to use to homeschool their children,” Turner said. “We usually reference our online resources, because those are a great supplement.”
One of those online resources is a website — k12athome.hillsdale.edu — that was designed by the Barney Charter School Initiative in part as a response to the growing need for online schooling resources.
Director of Online Learning Kyle Murnen said the Barney Charter School Initiative had already planned to create the website even before the pandemic.
“A lot of their stuff is designed specifically for people who are learning at home,” Murnen said. “They did a lot when the shutdown happened. They said, ‘OK, what do we do for people that are being forced into homeschooling? How can we take what we do to help our classical charter schools and help people who are stuck at home?’”
According to Murnen, Hillsdale also began to offer study sessions for homeschool students as a part of its response to COVID-19. The study sessions included an essay contest with cash prizes for high school students, which saw 125 participants.
“The idea is, ‘You’re stuck at home? We’ll send you a syllabus to work through either Constitution 101 or the Great American Story and in four to five weeks we’ll have regular communication with you about the course content,’” Murnen said.
Murnen said Hillsdale also offers 27 online courses that high school home-schoolers regularly use.
“On any given day we have about 5,000 people taking our classes in some way or another,” he said. “It really is designed for anyone who wants to learn from our professors and get a taste for what a Hillsdale education is.”
According to Turner, the online courses can be a great addition for a high school student’s homeschool education.
“They are awesome in that a lot of parents use them as a supplemental resource to help their children,” Turner said. “They’re made so that they’re advanced enough for a Hillsdale College student to understand and learn something, but at the same time, they’re easy enough for a high school student to watch it and be able to follow it.”
Stoub said that as Hillsdale develops more online resources, she has enjoyed learning how to relay those resources to parents who call the contact center.
“It’s been cool to see that as people are calling because of COVID and the changing political environment, we’ve also been able to develop as a school and figure out how to best answer their questions,” Stoub said. “It’s been a changing trend on how people see Hillsdale but it’s also been changing how we provide that information.”
