GOA's Vision 2025 - Taking Us into Our Second Decade

This year has been an important year for GOA in a number of ways. Marking a decade since our founding is a cause for both celebration and reflection. This has also been a year of dramatic change in how schools function, the ways teachers are trained and supported, and how students are served. As a team, a board of directors, and a membership organization, we have spent a great deal of time thinking deeply about where GOA has been and where we’re headed.

Our mission has and continues to provide us a clear direction: to reimagine learning to empower students and educators to thrive in a globally networked society. And yet today, with so much change happening in the field of education, and more broadly as a global society, our mission also calls for us to reimagine inequitable systems and structures to create a more socially just world in which all students and educators can thrive.

At the founding meeting of GOA on March 12, 2011, every single founding school agreed that, once we had matured as an organization, we should serve a greater purpose. Today, our board and our team are united in a vision to serve a public purpose, one in which we reach more students and more educators to make a greater impact.

“The GOA team is always looking for ways to broaden their impact by delivering highly engaging, passion-centered online courses to students, and sharing their research-grounded best practices with educators and school leaders. Collectively, as a board of directors, we are in full support of the expansion of GOA’s vision, and we look forward to seeing the impact that GOA will have on the field of education in the years to come.”

~ Bernie Noe, Head of School at Lakeside School

We have never been better positioned to expand the vision for GOA and broaden our reach. By bringing schools together to collaborate, we have amplified the impact of each one of our member schools. Collectively, we built a program that no single school could have created on its own. We’ve offered an incredible slate of passion-based classes in which intellectually curious students could collaborate, engage, and learn deeply. We have helped teachers and school leaders, from independent schools and beyond, move the needle on initiatives in their classrooms and schools. And, we’ve built a team that is capable, smart, innovative, and committed to sharing what we do with as many people as we can serve.

Our expanded vision for GOA is based on four pillars and represents our commitment to ensuring that each GOA program will be Equitable, Accessible, Global, and High-Quality. This graphic highlights the strategic outcomes we’re aiming for.

These pillars have been visible in our work for some time, and we have already made many steps towards deepening our work in these areas. We have invested in instructional design to ensure that our courses are not just high quality, but accessible to all learners. We have grown our consortium to over 125 member schools from 30 countries, including 41 international schools. We have created professional learning programs dedicated to equity and inclusion and opened our summer program to students from all schools. Through our Center for Professional Learning and Design Lab, we have served educators and school leaders from a wide range of schools, from independent to public schools.

At GOA, we embrace the fact that education, an essential natural resource, should be accessible to all students. With this expanded vision statement, we are solidifying our commitment to each of these four pillars as a focal point for the work ahead. As we continue to grow as an organization, building new programs and improving our current offerings for educators, students, and school leaders, we join our member schools in their commitment to broadening opportunities to students through the many incredible programs at their schools.

We will be sharing more information about the work we have already done as it relates to these strategic goals, and the work we will be undertaking in a series of follow-up posts. This work has been and continues to be informed by the conversations we are having with members of our consortium and the larger education community.

Interested in learning more about GOA? Inquire about becoming a member school or learn more about our professional learning offerings.