Germantown Friends head Dick Wade said the opportunity for students to work with peers from other private schools "will be an enriching experience for all concerned."
The courses, for students in grades nine to 12, are meant to supplement, not replace, traditional classes.
The goal, Wade said, is for participating schools to offer their challenging courses online and show that they are taking a "cutting-edge idea into the next phase of education."
Germantown Friends, which has 1,845 students in kindergarten to 12th grade, is the only school in the region involved.
The consortium includes such well-known private schools as the Dalton School in New York; the Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Sidwell Friends in Washington; and the Punahou School in Honolulu, which President Obama attended. King's Academy in Jordan is also a founder.
Online instruction has been around for years. In 1997, the nonprofit Concord Consortium in Massachusetts helped launched the Virtual High School with courses at 27 public high schools in 12 states. Now, an independent nonprofit organization, the Virtual High School Global Consortium provides 412 courses to 770 member schools in 35 states and 45 countries. It specializes in AP and enrichment courses.
Cyber charter schools - where students receive Internet-based instruction in their homes - operate across the country, including a dozen in Pennsylvania.
But Global Online Academy is different.
It aims to take challenging courses taught by skilled teachers at participating schools and put them online for students at other schools.
With those schools spread across multiple time zones, courses will employ asynchronous learning, which allows students to access lessons and information from the network on their own schedules.
