Beacon Educator strives to provide a quality professional learning experience. To facilitate this atmosphere, Beacon Educator expects honesty, integrity, and professionalism from all parties involved in our online community of learners. Beacon Educator embraces the following policies and expectations to promote a positive learning environment:
Professional Conduct
Beacon Educator expects learners to follow the professional and ethical principles in the Florida Code of Ethics for Educators (Rule 6A-10.081) while completing our courses and modules.
Beacon Educator encourages peer collaboration to engage learners and deepen their learning. However, summative assessments are the sole responsibility of the learner and should be written independently in the learner’s own words. All submissions and communications should use standard English (proper grammar and conventions).
Plagiarism
Beacon Educator requires learners to submit responses to summative assessments in their own words. Responses must demonstrate understanding of content presented in the course. Plagiarized responses are not acceptable. Additionally, sharing responses with other learners is not acceptable. Plagiarism occurs when a learner submits identical or essentially identical information from the Beacon course, other websites, other texts, any Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs, or another learner in a summative assessment without crediting the source. Paraphrasing by changing the words of a sentence while maintaining the sentence structure and ideas of another’s work is also plagiarism.
A minimal amount of text written by someone other than the learner may be included as part of a summative response; however, the original author must be credited. No more than 10% of a summative response may be cited content.
Submitting plagiarized work violates the Florida Code of Ethics for Educators and it is a serious (academic) offense that can result in serious consequences. If a learner plagiarizes in a Beacon Educator course, the facilitator may require the learner to resubmit a response. Under some circumstances, a learner may be required to submit a statement of authenticity. Consequences for plagiarism may include denial of credit and/or notification of district personnel for unethical conduct; no refunds will be made. Denial of credit prevents future registration in the same course. Beacon Educator reserves the right to block accounts, thereby denying any future registrations.
Copyright
Beacon Educator course content and materials are protected by United States copyright laws. Learners may access, download, and print materials with the Beacon Educator copyright notice from the site solely for personal and non-commercial use.
Learners may not copy, modify, distribute, transmit, display, reproduce, publish, or license any part of this site, including course content and summative assessments. Learners may not create derivative works from the Beacon Educator site, link to, frame in, or use on another website, or transfer or sell any information obtained from the Beacon Educator site.
Any learner who violates the copyright policy is subject to legal action. Beacon will notify the learner’s district of any infraction and penalty. Beacon reserves the right to block accounts, thereby denying future registrations.
Websites that violate copyright laws by displaying Beacon Educator content and materials are subject to legal action. If a hosting site is notified of an infringement, the copyrighted content must be removed immediately.
Course Transfers
Beacon Educator offers learners a “one-time” option to transfer to another section of the same course or module due to extenuating circumstances, such as illness or major hardship. Transfers are not automatic and are at the discretion of Beacon Educator Administration. Learners who are enrolled through a district should contact the contract manager to request a transfer. Learners who have paid their own registration fee may request a one-time transfer by using the email form on the Support page.
Refund Policy
Payments by individual learners are made by credit card as part of the registration process. All payments are final. No refunds or discounts are available. Reasons such as registering in the wrong course or for a course no longer needed, having technical difficulties, or failure to complete the course requirements for any reason do not justify a refund. Disputed transactions will result in the user’s removal from the course until the disputed transaction is resolved. If the dispute is decided in Beacon’s favor, the user must pay any fees associated with the dispute prior to being enrolled again in any Beacon course or module.
Reporting Inservice Credit
Per Florida statute, only school districts can report inservice points for teacher certificate renewal. Courses and modules must be included in the district’s Professional Learning Catalog. Learners should check with their districts to verify course acceptance and registration requirements. Many districts pull their own reports of learner completions; however, learners may download a transcript of their Beacon completions from the Beacon website to submit to their district certification office.
Learner Expectations
Courses
Beacon Educator courses are rigorous and designed to provide research-based content for application in the classroom.
Trained content-area specialists, called facilitators, guide learners through Beacon Educator courses and provide individualized feedback on chapter summatives. Facilitators hold learners accountable for submitting thoughtful and thorough summative responses showing mastery of the chapter content. This accountability is necessary so the facilitator can verify each learner has processed and synthesized the course material.
Learners are expected to submit summatives in a timely manner to allow adequate time for the facilitator to provide feedback and for the learner to resubmit, if needed.
Beacon reserves the right to limit rounds of feedback facilitators provide for a summative task. The facilitator must approve all the chapter summatives for a learner to successfully complete the course.
Late submissions may result in non-completion of the course because there is not enough time to complete the submission review process before the end of the course.
Learners are automatically withdrawn from the course if no summative assessments have been submitted according to an established schedule. For sixty hour courses, learners are withdrawn three weeks prior to the end date. For courses between one and thirty hours, withdrawal occurs one week prior to the end date.
Modules
Beacon Educator expects learners taking modules to read course content, complete formative assessments, and review all other resources (such as video clips, external Web links, and documents) prior to completing the summatives (quizzes).
On the end date of a section, Beacon Educator automatically withdraws learners from the module if all quizzes have not been successfully completed (passed).