Monarch Online Homeschool Review
Monarch is simply an online textbook replacement
Monarch is an online homeschool curriculum produced by Alpha and Omega Publishers. Alpha and Omega has been around as a homeschool book pack curriculum (“Switched On Schoolhouse”) for a very long time. Monarch is their entry into the digital world by providing all online content for parents that are looking for that type of homeschool for their students.
First, let’s take a moment to look at the difference in online curriculums. Some are intended to supplement parental teaching. That means that the parent is still responsible for teaching the material, just like he/she would be with a book pack, but they can use an online tool to add to that teaching. Instead of a textbook, for instance, the student could read passages on the computer. Others are meant to replace a large portion of the actual teaching by providing a video of a teacher explaining the material to the student the way a teacher would in a class. Abeka and BJU Press are of the latter type providing a teacher, whereas Monarch is a supplemental curriculum. Basically, the Monarch material replaces a student textbook, but the homeschooling parent is expected to still teach the material. This is a very important factor, because Monarch was not intended to be a “stand alone” program.
To further illustrate this difference; With Abeka a parent can start a subject by sitting the student down in front of the computer with his/her textbook and allowing the student to listen to the teacher. The teacher will instruct the student to read passages in the textbook and complete assignments in it. Parents will present students with handouts when the teacher on the video indicates that it is time for one. Whereas with Monarch, a parent would allow the student to read the material in Monarch and, then, teach the material to the child. Simply sitting a child down in front of Monarch and expecting him/her to learn the material by his/herself would be like giving a student a textbook and expecting him/her to learn everything simply by reading it. The program does have an option where the computer will read the information to the student, but it is simply “reading” the passage, not teaching it.
Parents must make their own lesson plans and teach lessons
Monarch does not come with parent teaching manuals. Instead, parents will have to read the material in Monarch ahead of the class and come up with their own lesson plans, which makes it substantially more difficult than some of the bookpacks that come with a teacher’s manual that allows the teacher to simply “read” the lesson to the students. (Basically, they write everything down so the parent, who is not a professional teacher, can just read it out loud instead of coming up with their own plan to teach it. Monarch doesn’t do that.)
As long as Monarch’s purpose is clearly understood, the program itself can be a good asset to a homeschooling program.
Monarch allows homeschooling families access to a huge number of classes at a very low price. Families pay one fee for up to three students that allows them to access all the main subjects for every grade. Electives are extra.
Monarch cost is very reasonable
The cost for Monarch for a year for three students is $629.96. If there is only one student in the family, the cost would be $359.96 a year.
Monarch has a large number of electives, and although the cost of them is separate, it is very reasonable, ranging from $33 to $90, depending on the subject. They have elective subjects that are not easily found elsewhere, including courses in various career choices, like Allied Health or Construction. This makes Monarch a good supplement to any other homeschool curriculum, particularly for electives.
Parents have a lot of control
Monarch gives parents a lot of control. With the Monarch platform, parents have a dashboard, and students have their own dashboard. Therefore, parents can go in separate from the student account and see their student’s work, set assignments for each student, and even send messages to each student through the system. Monarch sends parents an email to their own private email to alert the parent if a student has not completed an assignment.
Quizzes and tests are all online, so Monarch does also calculate grades, and parents can see where a student’s grade stands at all times. The parent will need to grade some of the questions on tests and quizzes, though, which it allows the parent to do through their dashboard. Parents have full control over grades and can change them.
The concept of Monarch’s dashboard is great, but it isn’t very user friendly. It is somewhat difficult to learn, so parents should go in and familiarize themselves with how it works before school starts.
Long reading passages, outdated graphics
Parents also need to be aware that Monarch basically replaces a textbook, and as such, daily lessons are comprised of long reading passages. We have heard there are some basic videos as well. We did not encounter any in the classes we observed, so we are unable to comment on those. But we would love to hear from other families who have used Monarch.
In today’s world students are used to bold colors and heavy visual graphics in the images they see on online. Whereas, back in the day, when most of us homeschooling parents were in school, our books had simple sketches, and we were perfectly happy. Monarch has the older type of design, so its graphics would be considered very crude by today’s standards. Parents should be aware that if they have students that are used to a lot of heavy visual imagery, Monarch will seem very bland, and possibly “outdated” visually to them.
Our staff tested out Monarch’s 10th grade Chemistry. It consisted of large reading passages with very crude graphics to break it up. The material was quite difficult to understand, and I have to admit that my mind was wandering far from the lessons after the first few pages. To be fair, Monarch claims to use 50,000 interactive elements including video clips and games in their lessons. We didn’t encounter any, and perhaps our review would have been a little different if we had. In reading about Monarch initially we were pretty excited about what we heard from them and were looking forward to the interactivity. What we saw was not nearly as interactive as expected.
Could work as a supplement
When observing students in the program, we found the same problem, with one of them citing it as “torture on a screen”. It should be noted, however, that the students we were following had all previously used other curriculums, so they were accustomed to either a more contemporary design or listening to a teacher. One of the students was ADHD, and her mother found that Monarch simply did not work for her needs because the student was unable to focus long enough to learn the material.
Now with that said, students that are used to more traditional programs, in which they have long reading passages where they need to gleen the information visually from reading, may do very well with Monarch. Also, students that begin with Monarch and become accustomed to that type of learning may also do well with it.
The other thing that should be taken into consideration is that if the parent is providing a stimulating learning experience in addition to Monarch, it could work as a good supplement.
Alpha and Omega does offer an academy that uses Monarch as its teaching material. We do not have any first-hand knowledge with Alpha and Omega Academy, so we do not know if any of the problems associated with Monarch are also issues with the academy, or if they are using it in a way that overcomes those barriers.
You can reach Monarch’s website at the very strange URL of https://www.aop.com/curriculum/monarch.
Our review - 2 out of 5 stars
In today’s world research has shown that students have shorter attention spans then they did 50 years ago. This is due in part to children being exposed to fast moving clips of information on television and the internet. Whereas, years ago, students had no problem learning from reading long passages with minimal graphics, that really is not the case with many students today. Often times, students’ brains wander if they do not have enough stimulation.
Monarch was written in a style used many years ago. The graphics are outdated and crude. The reading passages are very long, and in the courses we reviewed the information was extremely difficult to digest from reading alone. None of our staff was successful in being able to stick with any of the subjects for more than a few days.
Monarch has some unique electives. And they also have a low price that makes it possible for families to school a number of children without the cost being burdensome. However, parents need to be extremely realistic about this curriculum. It is not a stand-alone teaching platform. Parents MUST act as teachers to their students, using the curriculum only as a textbook-type replacement. Students should NOT be expected to simply use this curriculum and learn the material by themselves.
With that being said, Monarch also complicates teaching for the parents because most curriculums come with parent guides that tell the parent what to teach each day and how to do it. With Monarch, making a teaching plan daily is completely on the shoulders of the parents. Parents will have to read the material themselves in advance, create a lesson plan, teach the concepts, and come up with their own supplementary materials to help students understand what they have read. This makes Monarch significantly more work for parents than even Book Packs.
We cannot recommend Monarch because, of all the curriculums that we reviewed, Monarch was the least student-friendly, meaning that it is absolutely boring and extremely difficult to understand. The list of classes sounds exciting, and so does the pricing. We thought certainly we would be able to get some educational benefit out of all those classes. But the fact is, it really doesn’t matter the variety and the number of classes if students cannot follow the material enough to learn anything. The truth is that we paid for a year subscription, and none of the students completed a single class because after we tried it ourselves, we didn’t have the heart to make our students suffer through the material.
Our personal opinion is that there are many options out there that are much better than Monarch.