The Discussion Seminar
All OHS classes have both asynchronous and synchronous components, which vary slightly from course to course to accommodate the teaching of different disciplines. Course lectures, which convey fundamental course material and set the stage for class discussions and assignments, are pre-recorded and made available to students asynchronously. Also, a class web page that provides basic course information and course materials, such as a syllabus, a schedule of readings and assignments, downloadable lecture outlines, and class announcements, is available to students at all times. Students also use the class web page to submit their work and to receive assessed assignments.
Instruction at the OHS is structured around the live discussion seminar, where students participate in fast-moving conversations; stake out, defend, and critique positions on their feet; and participate in the instructor's modeling of inquiry in a discipline.
- Dr. Jeffrey Scarborough
Headmaster
Central to coursework at OHS are synchronous discussions held in the online classroom. These mandatory sessions are conducted in a real-time video-conferencing environment through Saba Centra software, which provides space for instructional slides, a whiteboard that both instructor and students use, application sharing capabilities for group use of subject-appropriate software, as well as a text chat. Centra has functions that allow students to mark up slides, write on the whiteboard, respond to questions, and raise their hands to be acknowledged to speak by the instructor. In the virtual classroom, discussions regularly consist of multiple strands and layers as students can concurrently listen to or participate in an exchange among the instructor and other students, make a point of clarification in a text message, and simultaneously engage in a text chat debate about an issue being discussed. The various modes of communication possible in the online classroom facilitate engaging and intense class discussions.
Centra is also used for instructor office hours, student tutorials, homeroom sessions, student club meetings, and parent-teacher conferences.
When I'm in Centra, I feel like I'm right there... Amazingly enough, I've had more classroom interaction over Centra than in a regular classroom.
-Bryan, Class of 2011
