Superintendent Letter

 TTU K-12 Community:

Welcome back to a new school year with TTU K-12. For the last 6-9 months the TTU K-12 team has been working on revamping our program, and I am pleased to announce the NEW TTU K-12! The curriculum team has redesigned all of our courses. When you log into a course, you will see that they all include new syllabi, a consistent look and feel, module overviews and updated exams.

Speaking of exams, we have changed our final exam retake policy. Students will no longer be charged for their retake attempt. That means that if you fail the final exam in the class, you are able to retake the exam without asking for a retake, setting up a new proctor or waiting for the new CBE exam to be sent.

You will also notice that all of our online CBEs and courses come with online/remote proctoring through Proctorio. Adding remote proctoring enables students to take the final exam as soon as they complete all of the required assignments and checkpoints. Students (and their parents) will no longer have to find a proctor or set up a time to test with that proctor. There's no need to watch for an exam code. As long as the student completes all of the required elements in the course, including the checkpoints, the final exam will open and be available for you as soon as you are ready to take it. We think these two changes will help our students be successful and allow them to complete courses faster.

One other big change I am pleased to announce is to our grading policy. In the past, a student would have to pass the final exam to pass the class, no matter what their homework average was. As of September 1, all new classes and new enrollments will benefit from the updated grading policy. The new policy is a 50/50 spilt between formative and substantive assessments. This means that your homework average and your exam/assessment averages are each weighted equally. Your grade in Blackboard is your grade in the course. However, this does not alter our rounding policy; final course grades will not be rounded.

The K-12 team has also added new instructors to assist our students and parents. Eight new full-time teachers started this summer, and they are here to help students with questions, grade assignments, support our part-time faculty and be another resource to encourage student completion.

In the next few months TTU K-12 will be offering tutoring in some of our core high school classes. We will offer some new courses at both the middle school and high school levels, and our elementary courses are being completely overhauled.

This is the NEW TTU K-12; but one thing that has remained and will remain the same – our commitment to providing you, our students, parents, and stakeholders a quality distance education from anywhere! We are dedicated to your success.

Thank you for your continued support of TTU K-12, and I look forward to working with you this year!

Sincerely,

Justin R Louder, EdD
Associate Vice Provost
Interim Superintendent, TTU K-12