And so Coronavirus brings Online Learning and the Virtual School into the spotlight.
Up to this point, our schools have clung on dearly to their bricks and mortar tradition. A physical centre, a place of learning, a workplace for teachers, a social centre, a community hub. Assembly rooms, science laboratories, music practice rooms, tech facilities, a gym, a theatre, a swimming pool, playgrounds and sports pitches.
Online has so far been an add-on to the standard design and perhaps, this year, the online options will push through and become the design. We can be sure that some very good minds are being applied to the challenge as I write.
Where schools have been closed for a period, perhaps as a spring break is brought forward, they have been hurried into getting their solutions ready. We cannot expect things to be right first time. We have a lot to learn.
I am seeing quite a lot of what I call, ‘postal services’. What I mean is a school setting up a means of getting work (reading, research, tasks, exercises, texts) planned by teachers from A to B, using standard tools. Email, Google, Sharepoint, Dropbox, WhatsApp. And with an invitation to return it for marking or comment.
Some schools are very quickly adding Talk or Video two-way links although it is yet to be seen how much these are used for the admin side – making sure that work gets through and completed work comes back – and how much for a teaching and learning transaction. There are very few of us who are experienced in distance tutoring, so we have much to learn very quickly.
Other schools are pushing on further by adding direct classroom feeds and occasional video-conferencing. How often the school can arrange these enhanced experiences for a class is yet to be seen.
The question we all need to ask ourselves is, what is the cognitive core to our Virtual School ‘solution’? I happily acknowledge that I learned this from Cody Claver at I-Cademy in Dubai – someone who has been making online solutions work for years.
I have often blogged about the mistake that many people make in forcing a choice between direct teaching (usually described negatively) and inquiry-based teaching (too often viewed through rosy spectacles). The truth is that both approaches can be made to work very well as long as the school adheres to five or six key principles of cognitive science. It is how well you do it, that matters.
The same is true of Online Learning. A school needs to consider exactly how it is adding to the postal service. How does a module of work begin – are you locking on to, and adapting to, what individual students already know and feel? Show me.
How are you organising the content so that it builds towards a grasp of an overarching concept? Show me.
How are you ensuring that students practise, practise and practise to the point where they are secure in their new knowledge and understanding? How are you introducing ‘organisers’ that help students to remember what they have learned and apply it in new settings? Show me.
How are you ensuring that there is loads of instant, and delayed, feedback? Student to teacher. Teacher to student. Student to student. Without feedback, nobody can know that meaningful learning is happening. Show me how you are keeping the feedback alive.
And show me exactly how the experience is developing the student’s sense of control of their learning. Of course, more self-organised work at a distance should enhance control but it simply won’t do that if the transaction is reduced to a ‘send-me-send-you’ roundabout.
When trouble comes, we should normally take care, hunker down, look after our loved ones, but also fight against the factors that look to diminish us. And that means we should work even harder to make sure that the opportunities created for new learning are exploited constructively. We should make sure social isolation doesn’t do any damage. We should keep learning deeply and broadly, as well.
It can be a really exciting time for learning if we design and deliver the virtual school properly.
