Background

When I was hired as the Director of Learning Design at Great Hearts Online in October 2020, one of my fundamental tasks was to understand the essential pedagogical techniques of Classical Education and devise means of translating them into online practices. While certain lapses in classical standards had been permitted in the rush to distance learning, Great Hearts Online was meant to be fully classical while also being fully online. Given that core practices of classical education, the use of math manipulatives, developing attractive penmenship, and the annotating paper books, it was not immediately obvious how to do this. Like all schools and startups, of course, the translation needed to be accomplished as inexpensively as possible and requiring as little training as possible.