Liberty University Online Academy (LUOA) offers courses for online high school and elementary students (grades 3-12) with a Christian perspective and an emphasis on individualized learning. Class instruction is administered in an online format. Lessons are interactive and designed to stimulate student interest, engage students in the learning process and maintain their focus. Although coursework promotes self-instruction, parental guidance is essential. Daily parental review of student progress is highly encouraged.
(17 Reviews)
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Grades Used: 8-11
Like most things … LUOA is great for some and not so great for others . We love it for our daughter , our son has done a few classes and only enjoyed the dual enrollment. I find their dual enrollment option the single best thing about the program . My daughter ( currently in 11th grade ) will graduate with a highschool diploma and a 2 year AA college degree at the same time saving us tons of money and giving her a jump on her college coursework .
Cons: price
Grades Used: 11-12
LUOA is amazing! My son has taken classes through them and really enjoyed his experience.
Please use wisdom when reading some of the reviews that attempt to discredit this wonderful academy. They seem either to be rebellious children or adults who can’t spell, which makes me wonder about the legitimacy of the comments they submit.
Cons: Pretty much everything
Grades Used: 7, 8
I attended Liberty University during seventh and eighth grade and I was severely disappointed. I did ninth grade history during eighth grade, and I was constantly correcting inaccurate information and/or spelling errors, and my teacher nor the administrators wouldn’t do anything about, despite saying they would. They rely too heavily on free material, such as YouTube videos made unprofessionally, and often were not helpful at all. They would also ask you extremely context specific questions, often derived from the videos, and were utterly pointless things to learn. The tests weren’t even properly designed and literally required you to answer questions that were randomly recycled from previous lessons. Some of them would be so context specific that it would be impossible to answer, as it required you to know what lesson the question came from, as it could apply to anything. They even required you to resubmit already graded assignments for no reason, merely because it was in the question format in previous lessons that the quiz or test was covering. My parents ended up teaching me all of the core information, and it was a pain to use. Most of the positive reviews I’ve seen are from parents whose children have been using the program, and I haven’t seen anything good from actual students. They also hold no standard of accountability (causing me to end up two months behind without anyone saying anything) and in several instances, you couldn’t submit due to something outside of your control. One science experiment I was required the prerequisite of a sunny day. Had the weather been rainy for the week, I would have to stay on that subject until I had a sunny day to work with, and the experiment wasn’t even optional. The amount of money paid for a curriculum that could’ve easily been done by a group of fifth graders is just astronomical, and it is not worth your time and money.
Cons: For me, still less cons than pros
Grades Used: 2,3, 4, and 5
Good things about Liberty: Flexible schedule, access to RightNowMedia. Bad things: Since the system is online, typing should be a priority to teach. It is not. MS Office should be a priority, or at least PowerPoint. We use that a lot. We are not allowed to know who uses Liberty, in our town. They use videos from Bill Nye (vocal anti Christian).
My biggest complaint about Liberty is the same as all “Christian” private schools; they simply copy the public school system (which has been proven a failure.) “Christianizing” a failing system is not intelligent.
I feel that Liberty has access to the best information and people, in the world, so I wish they would use this to completely re think education. There is so much more data about how to successfully teach, now!
Cons: Curriculum filled with errors, lack of timely response from teachers, turnaround time for grading
Grades Used: 8th
We decided to use LUOA this year for Pre-Algebra. After a few days my son decided he liked the independence and asked if we could add more classes. We added Academic Success, Physical Science, Civics, Basic Spanish I (followed by Basic Spanish II), and at a later date English 8.
It didn’t take long for me to regret our decision to enroll my son in LUOA. This year has been an exercise in frustration. Teachers are hard to contact, assignments take days to be graded (even though they have a 48 hour grading policy). The lessons are full of errors. (According to one of my son’s lessons, “We all know that the articles are “a, and, & the.” I could go on and on about the errors but that’s not necessary. In speaking to LUOA about the errors, I was told they are “working on it.”
Academically, I think LUOA is severely lacking. There were days when my son completed all his assignments in less than an hour and other days when Physical Science alone took him two hours. Physical Science, in my opinion, is filled with “busy work.” As far as the Pre-Algebra class, there are many assignments with only three questions, which means if a student gets one problem incorrect they receive a grade of 66%. Quizzes and exams are a little better with five questions. But again, one incorrect problem and you get an 80%.
English 8 was dropped in less than 30 days. The errors and poor teacher were too much to overcome. A change of Physical Science teachers was necessary mid-year due to incompetency on the part of the teacher. He took weeks to grade assignments, deducted points for misspelled words, though the assignments were filled with misspellings and grammatical errors. (He teaches full-time in the public school system. No wonder it took weeks for assignments to be graded.) The Basic Spanish I and II teacher was the best thing about LUOA. She encouraged my son on a daily basis and was timely in her correction of assignments. The Academic Success class was, in my opinion, a waste of time and money. The entire class seemed to be based on a Weekly Reading Log. The Civics class was worthwhile, although there wasn’t much interaction with or encouragement from the teacher.
We started the school year excited about LUOA and the idea that my son would attend LUOA for the high school years, we are ending the year counting the assignments left so we can be done with the torture. My son is a good student and is getting As in all his classes but it has not been a fun journey. Our search for an online high school continues and I give LUOA a failing grade.
Cons: Everything
Grades Used: no body cares
I will never do liberty again. It has very poor teachers who are idiots and think you can do everything on your on and don’t get me started on the science IDIOT. so summery, THEIR ALL IDIOTS, IDIOTS!!!!
Grades Used: 7
I will not re-enroll my child. First off evolution and macro/micro evolution isnt scriptural. Then they forced catholicism into the cirriculum as well. Its pricey as well. Teachers dont respond right away and if a student needs help in a subject and nobody is avail in that dept ur out of luck. my sons an excellent student. However, math is a struggle. School refuses to offer xtra credit assignments or retesting even if no teacher is available to review with a student before a test. I find this very concerning. Especially w these issues coming from a supposed christian school. Theres even more concerning ratings with the college. My kids will never attends college here for sure. It may as well be called public school.
Cons: None
Grades Used: 7th and 8th
Our son started in the 7th grade and has done very well at LUOA. We love that it is a Biblical worldview. You can work ahead and move up in level at your own pace. You test into the school and work at your own pace and you don’t have to be stuck waiting on the rest of the class. He gets one on one attention and his teachers pray for him!!!!
You can do the edge program and start college early at Liberty University. Our son plays travel basketball and this works out fantastic for his training. He is not stuck in school all day just to come home to more homework. He is finished in about 4 hours most days.
We are very blessed to have him home and learning!
I just have a few questions for highschool students. I am thinking about homeschooling with Liberty Next semester and would appreciate some help deciding.
1. How many hours should I expect to work on each subject? One of the reasons I would like to hoemschool is so that I can have more time pursuing extracuricular activities.
2. What is the difficuty level?
3. Do you regret choosing Liberty Online?
Thank you!
Sincerely,
Vivian
Cons: website can be a little slow
Grades Used: 3rd and 4th grade
Our daughter has really enjoyed the new curriculum. She is learning a lot from the videos and the teacher feedback has started to get really personal. By that I mean they are noticing negative patterns and addressing them. The teacher is also very complimentary and caring in her responses. If we did this on our own we would probably let some of this slide to the determent of our daughters learning experience. That is us being self aware not a comment about others. The website can be slow at times. Every time we have had an issue with the system or the curriculum the school has been responsive. Our daughter spends about 4.5 hours doing school (we added spanish to the other five classes through another source) We spend about 2 hours a day helping her. A good amount of work is done off of the computer (art projects, math papers etc) So you will need a good printer and scanner.
Cons: Poorly designed, inaccurate information
This is actually the worst program we have ever used, especially for the money that we are paying. I have to constantly contact the teachers to notify them of inaccurate test questions and information. The science curriculum presents evolutionary theory as factual information. I believe they pieced the entire program together just randomly gathering videos and things from off the internet. It was a lot better before they changed to writing their own curriculum. Don’t waste your money.
Cons: Grading and teacher reply
Grades Used: 10th
So I am a student, and this is my first year at LUOA. It has been a great experience but I do have a couple of things that need to be brought to attention. 1) The grading. When I finish my first attempt, it will say how many I have gotten wrong. Here comes the problem. It doesn’t tell you which question(s). So you second guess ALL of your answers. Now keep in mind that you do get to keep the highest score but this is been annoying for me since the beginning. 2) Teacher reply. Most of the teachers only reply once a day. So sometimes it will only take a day to get something sorted out, and other times it will take a WHOLE WEEK to get sorted out. These teachers most definitely need to amp up their game. Other than those 2 issues, LUOA is a all around great, accredited school that you should most definitely consider sending your child to if they ever want to be homeschooled/ online schooled.
Cons: System always crawls with every click and we have 5 MB download speed. You can't see the what was correct or incorrect on an assignment unless you complete BOTH attempts.
Grades Used: 7th grade math, 8th grade for Bible, Civics, English, and Physical Science
We’ve been enrolled for 3 weeks and we’re withdrawing today. I thought the content for Physical Science was a joke.It first talks about “How to be Successful at LUOA” (this should be in the orientation, not the science class), then “Using MLA in Writing” (we had to do the same thing a week later in the English class) “Worldview and the Scientific Method”, then a quiz, week 2 started with “Introduction to a Science Fair”, “The Why and What of the Metric System” (content for this topic was abysmal)… So far, all the science course has gone over is glossing over metric conversions (you obviously need prior knowledge, or you have to go look up how to do it in order to complete the homework). Most of the video selections we’ve seen so far were obnoxious, and the questions that the student answers at the end of each assignment were either ambiguous, or off topic.
Math was good, Civics wasn’t bad, English had a few issues: the assignment would teach you a part of speech and use very simple sentences, but when it came time to answer questions, the sentences were more complicated and then the student had to write a paragraph using the part of speech just taught! That was a real challenge. I emailed the teacher and she was accommodating.
I was really hoping that LUOA would work out, but I found myself spending more time with my son get through the assignments than I did creating my own curriculum.
Grades Used: 3rd and 6th
I absolutely love the Liberty Academy. My girls used it last year and I found it just incredible. Yes it is online but there is not cost for books and supplies. The projects utilized products and things we already had in our home. The school day didn’t usually pass 3 hours and for my 3rd grader it was often less. The teachers are just wonderful. There is no lesson planning on my part. I work at home and this was a perfect fit for our lives. I cannot think of a more perfect situation for homeschooling. In a time when computers are so much a part of our lives this just adds to the future for them. While a little expensive overall it is a wonderful program and I cannot say enough about it. We were able to add so much to our lives and give them the best education in the world by utilizing Liberty Academy. The things being taught today in schools is not good for our children and I never had to worry or question what was being taught. Definitely worth the money and time.
Not a review but a question.
I don’t like the thought of having my first grader sit in from of the computer 3 hours a day even with interaction from me. Can anyone tell me there experience with that concern?
Thank you
Thank you Tamara for your input! I really appreciate it! I have a 5yr old and 2yr old. I have had a few issues with my kindergartner’s school and thought I should look into Liberty for Middle School for my boys. How long is an average day of learning? Do you stay home or work out of the home? I plan to be working in the next year or so and wanted to know how this could be accomplished when I work. Thanks again for all your insight.
Cons: nothing
Grades Used: 4th and 6th
I signed my 6th grader up and had planned to send my 4th grader to public school this fall. After my 6th grader got started my 4th grader insisted that he wanted to “do it too”. My 6th gragder is a gifted student and both enjoy the self-paced aspect and the content. Both have expressed that they feel that they are learning more. My straight A students are now A & B students. I am fine with that as long as they are putting forth their best efforts. We have also given consideration that they are new to online schooling. My oldest is son is an adult learner. I feel this program will help my youngest son develope his own learning style to his fullest potential. I cannot imagine getting more bang for your buck with LUOA’s early regestration discount of $500.00. That comes to under $2000.00/year. I dream of offering this program to less fortunate communities through local churches. Blessings, Tamara
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