Allows students to retake only the units or skills that they need to advance. For instance, a student who has demonstrated mastery of 6 out of 10 concepts in an English class doesn’t need to retake the entire course—he can focus on the four concepts that weren’t mastered in person.

An even better approach is Tennessee’s Putnam County School’s Virtual Instruction to Accentuate Learning (VITAL) program, which doesn’t just wait around for students to fail. Instead, VITAL allows students to work on credit recovery modules as they begin to fall behind.