Credit recovery is something that most students don’t need to fall back on. But for some, it can be the difference between walking the stage and not getting their diploma at all.
“I think it’s important for our students to be able to recover from making mistakes and find some hope if they’re motivated,” Assistant Principal Andrew Pinkall said. “And so the biggest benefit is that our credit recovery program has created on-time high school graduates of some students that wouldn’t have graduated on time,” he said.
Previously, students were using a program called Odysseyware. Odysseyware is noted as a multi-award-winning credit recovery program for grades 3-12. This program is being phased out district-wide now, though.
“[The] program that’s replacing Odysseyware is EdgeEx, also known as Ingenuity. It is the parent company now of Odysseyware,” social studies and credit recovery teacher Jeffrey Story said. “They bought Odysseyware and are phasing it out.”
Transitioning to EdgeEx was supposed to be a gradual process, but the administration team was notified of a change in those plans very last minute.
“We hung on to Odysseyware for about as long as we could,” Pinkall said. “They just informed us that at the end of this year they will no longer be providing support for that system.”
Though challenging, the transition to EdgeEx will be beneficial for our students doing credit recovery. As we find out more about the new program, the benefits are apparent.
“It does a better job of teaching what you need to know before you get to an assessment,” Story said. “It does a pre-test and allows you to test out of a section if you do well enough on the pre-test,” he said.
This pre test feature has proven to be popular, helping students get their credit recovery done faster, some completing a course in a few short weeks. On the other hand, though, a concern of some students and educators is the use of AI in grading short responses.
“The AI is just something that we’ll have to check over because there’s inaccuracies with AI yet, and the use of it,” Story said. “I think that’s fine for short answers or for limited responses,” he said, “but it’s still something where the teacher off record will have to check over simply because we know AI, in a lot of cases, does make mistakes.”
The use of AI is controversial at best, but with credit recovery, it doesn’t cause concern to our administration team. The “pros” definitely outweigh the “cons.”
“[It] also provides the adequate support that the student needs to perform at their best,” says Mr. Story.
This program, in the educator’s eyes, is a step up as they continue to find out more about the program.
“I think we’ll learn as we go,” Pinkall said. “It’s more robust. It’ll be better than what we have now, because it has more capabilities than the one the kids are using right now.”
