Overview

The Course Distribution Platform is a Moodle Instance hosted on the Nova Schools website. www.novacourse.org.  Nova courses are created by independent authors and provided to the general public for a fee.  Courses may also be sold to K12 schools.

Course authors create their courses according to provided guidelines in a sand box area of Moodle.  The sand box is a course category that initial users have access to.  Course Authors are vetted prior to being granted access to the sand box by submitting their information on the Nova Schools website.

When a course author has completed a course, the author may request a quality review.  The author is given feedback on how to improve the course. Once past the review, the author may publish the course.  In publishing the course, the course is copied into a category that is publicly available.

Course authors may choose how to monetize their courses. The may set the fees a student pays to take the course.  The student can then add the course to cart and pay to take the class.  The course author is provided pricing guidelines but solely determines the course pricing.

Course authors may also allow the course to be purchased by a vetted private or public school.  When the course is purchased by a school, the course is copied into the school's instance of Moodle.  Initially, only participating schools are those that are using the Studia Nova Education Technology Platform.  In time, Nova Schools will support other Moodle instances.

The platform is supported by participant fees. To be a student taking classes on the platform, users must pay a nominal monthly fee.  To provide or sell courses on the platform, the sellers pay a nominal fee.  Authors providing only free courses pay a lower fee rate.  When courses are reviewed, the seller pays a fee to cover the cost of the review.

Many courses will require a teacher, at a minimum to grade work, or in other cases the teacher may conduct synchronous, paced lessons.  Course authors may teach their course or allow others to teach their courses.  Teachers pay a fee to Nova Schools CDP to teach on the platform.

The participant fee structure allows course authors and teachers to maximize their transactional revenue and favors prolific authors and favored teachers.  The more participants use the platform, the less relevant the fees become.