How Sora Schools and Outschool Are Creating the Future of Learning

In summer 2021, Outschool began working with Sora Schools, a fully-accredited virtual online middle school and high school to complement their core program with unique electives and enrichment.

Sora Schools is a fully-accredited virtual online middle school and high school. Students who attend Sora School learn in a project-based environment where students start their own projects, choose their own timeline, and set their own evaluation metrics. Teachers serve to challenge students, structure individual curriculum plans, facilitate their learning, and help them complete their goals, not deliver lectures and lessons which do not hold their interest. 

Some of the key differences between Sora Schools and traditional schools are:

• They've moved away from the scope and sequence of a traditional high school curriculum.
• They’ve broken apart important content and competencies into a "buffet of learning experiences" as co-founder Garrett Smiley calls them.
• Students are active participants in creating their own learning plans with faculty based on their interests to learn real skills that can be applied in their next career step - college, research, or a job.

Sora Schools is also different from many traditional online schools in:

• Having a schedule that blends live and independent learning instead of being overloaded with virtual meetings.
• Providing students a virtual school environment which is also social. There are a variety of clubs and extracurricular activities.
• Connecting students with mentors with professional work experience in the field of their interest who can provide guidance on their future professional paths. 

At Sora, students progress academically through Projects and Learning Expeditions.

Projects: Students work on independent projects based on what they’re interested in learning or mastering. When a student works on a project, they guide what academic standards they’re planning to learn. As students progress through their project, they regularly meet with faculty who are available to discuss, troubleshoot, and help guide them towards completion.

Learning Expeditions: The academic calendar is divided into 6-week cycles, students take a selection of learning expeditions to explore specific topics and skills. Instead of lectures, students engage in discussions, projects, labs, and other active learning formats. The learning expeditions meet synchronously at select times throughout the week, so students are able to share ideas with their classmates.

At Sora Schools students earn academic credit based on the material covered in the learning expedition by presenting deliverables to faculty that will be evaluated according to our mastery-based scale.

We talked with co-founders Garrett Smiley and Wesley Samples about their beliefs about the future of education and their partnership with Outschool.

Q: What do you notice about students that find their way to Sora Schools?

Wesley: Students have felt like the traditional system has held them back. They had interests they couldn't pursue in their school. Or they learn in a different way, and felt like the traditional system put them in a box.

A lot of students feel like their learning in traditional schools wasn't relevant to their interests. Students like Sora because they can tailor the learning experience to their interests. Parents wants students to be engaged, learning and happy, and at Sora, they can be all those things.

Q: What do you think people would be surprised about when it comes to students' learning at Sora Schools?

Garrett: Past attempts to improve education have been incremental, working off of the traditional system. At Sora, we started from the ground up. There are years of educational research and science about how kids learn that hasn't been carried over to school yet.

We're building the infrastructure to create a new way for people to think about school. Our credit system, our community, is all completely different. We think of ourselves as the school of the future.

Wesley: Being an online school, people wonder if students are engaging and socializing with others. We actually think students at Sora are interacting with each other more than at a traditional school, where you might get to socialize with other kids in between classes or at lunch.

At Sora, students are working together to actively create their own learning plans, and they're also working with us to build the future of the school.

Q:Sora Schools students take Outschool classes. Why is the relationship a good fit?

Wesley: Outschool courses fits Sora School's expedition model well. We started mostly with academic classes on Outschool and have now expanded to social-emotional learning classes, physical education classes and more.

We believe the schools of the future will plug into world-class learning experiences through providers like Outschool. One favorite example is a student who took an astronomy course on Outschool, and is now diving very deeply into astronomy. It is awesome to see how he found that spark on Outschool.

Garrett: Outschool has a level of differentiation and options that are impossible for other schools to compete with. We believe the schools of the future will plug into world-class learning experiences through providers like Outschool.

Q: Outschool values interest-based learning. How does that relate to the Sora experience?

Wesley: We're a small community compared to Outschool. There's going to be something on Outschool for everyone one of our students to connect with. Outschool's interest-based classes fit into what we're doing because we see students pursuing their interests and it leads them to follow paths for more learning or even a career. 

Garrett: The only way to give students the resources we want to is to tie into a marketplace where kids can get access to so many different options. To help students connect with as many like-minded peers as you want them to, you need to connect them with a marketplace like Outschool.

Learn more about Sora Schools by visiting their website. For more information on our partnership, check out their blog post here and listen to the founder of Sora Schools interview Outschool co-founder Nick Grandy on Village Global’s Venture Stories podcast. 

Interested in bringing Outschool to your school or district? Learn more here.