When prospective families, students, and educators visit your school or district's website, they’re searching for everything your school has to offer.

But compared to a state-of-the-art STEM or competitive athletics program, academic sections of a website can sometimes feel…just too serious. While swanky facilities and progressive student activities can sometimes steal the spotlight, your school or district’s curriculum is still the core of your academic experience.

By creatively showcasing your school’s curriculum on your website, you’re featuring the classwork that will engage, challenge, and help shape students during their time at your school. For prospective families and employees alike, it can be an exciting introduction to the coursework that’s to come.

From Advance Placement and the International Baccalaureate to Sixth Form and state standards, let’s take a look at some of the best practices and A+ examples for presenting your school’s academic pages on your website. But first…

What’s the importance of an online curriculum?

A school's curriculum can help prospective families make an informed decision about whether your school is a good fit for their child's educational needs and for prospective faculty if it aligns with their professional goals. Because it speaks to two major audiences, it needs to be a part of your marketing strategy.

Consider what a curriculum page represents:

Educational Philosophy: Private and charter schools often have unique educational philosophies and approaches to teaching that differ from public schools. Parents may want to understand how the curriculum aligns with your school's educational philosophy and whether it will be a good fit for their child.

Academic Standards: When comparing schools, parents may look for higher academic standards and may want to understand how the curriculum supports these standards. They may also want to know how your school measures student progress and what kind of assessments are used.

Special Programs: Schools may offer specialized programs in areas such as arts, language, or STEM education, and parents will want to better understand how these programs are integrated into the curriculum and what opportunities their child will have to participate.

College Preparation: Parents may want to understand how the curriculum prepares students for college (and what comes afterward) and what kind of support is available to help students achieve their academic goals.

Differentiation: Parents may want to understand how the curriculum is differentiated to meet the needs of their students. Smaller class sizes, project-based learning, and personalized instruction offer varied levels of support for students with different learning styles and abilities.

Why create an online curriculum guide?

For schools that only have a printed version or a pdf, it’s often outdated as soon as it's created. And by taking users into a different environment where you have to “flip” a page, it interrupts the user experience.

With an online curriculum guide, updates can be easily made, and site visitors always have the most up-to-date information. While it does take time to assemble on your website, once it’s done, it’s evergreen.

Building your school’s curriculum online

• When designing your online curriculum guide, it’s essential to think about the navigation and structure first. Don’t overwhelm users — for the best user experience, especially while using a mobile device, you want to provide the ability to filter the content by division or grade level, subject, or experience level, allowing users to search or expand into deeper categories.
   
• Showcase your curriculum using clear headings and subheadings. Using visually appealing graphics or images can help organize the information logically and make it easier to scan.
   
• Finalsite has helped deploy a wide range of curriculum website pages for a variety of curricula. With Finalsite’s content management system, Composer, flexible page layouts and design elements offer images, accordions, and custom navigation to keep your design fresh. And with modules like Posts and Resources, schools have created engaging and informative online curriculum guides that are easily searchable and can be updated with just a few clicks.

Examples of online curriculum guides

The Holderness School, primarily a boarding school in New Hampshire, includes Academics in its main navigation and takes users to the Department and Curriculum page.

Interactive images provide high-level information and the ability to drill down further into each department, making it easy for users to browse and search for classes.

Rich with imagery and interaction, each department has a landing page with a featured course and learning-in-action information.

Haverford, a private day PK-12 school for boys in Philadelphia, provides an Academics landing page with links to each school division. Each page features a gallery with images and text overviewing each department.

A gallery view of all the departments, and further, down the page, a day-in-the-life section helps families better understand how students will spend their days. Bringing this to life online is invaluable.

The International School of Beijing (ISB), a leading international school in China, is home to more than 1,700 students representing 50 nationalities. With such a global community, ISB understands the importance of creating a comprehensive curriculum guide for its international community.

The Learning landing page provides an overview of the curriculum. It uses icons to help break down the content visually for site visitors — a nice way to help break down language barriers without the need to translate.

ISB uses tags and accordions to help visitors find information quickly, and as users drill down, the options vary based on the school division.

Belmont Hill School, home to 452 students with diverse backgrounds, created a custom curriculum guide featuring an interactive timeline providing a visual as students move up in grade.

With pop-ups for each subject, students can review the courses offered and learn more about the faculty of each department.

To better support its diverse community, Birmingham Community Charter High School in California uses Weglot, Finalsite’s preferred language translation software provider, to convert its curriculum pages into Spanish and Russian. Again, this eliminates the need for PDFs and enables schools to easily add additional languages based on their community needs.

Dauntsey’s, a co-educational boarding and day school in Wiltshire, UK, offers 860 students the opportunity to study both I/GCSE and A levels. Using Finalsite’s Posts module, the curriculum guide can be filtered based on tags or searched directly to provide personalized results. The Complementary Curriculum, learning support, and Beyond Dauntsey provide visitors with a more complete understanding of life in and out of the classroom.

Key takeaway

Creatively presenting your school’s academic program is a chance to show prospective families and employees your academics are just as impressive as your athletics, lab facilities, community engagement programs, or any other campus feature. By providing an intuitive and well-organized experience, you’re finally giving the important curriculum pages the attention they deserve.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As part of Finalsite's marketing team, Debbie has worked with international schools for the past 12 years while living in both Asia and Europe. She helps schools understand how they can maximize their web presence while partnering with Finalsite. As a parent of three children who graduated from IB World Schools, she has keen insights into the marketing and communication needs of international schools.