In the last month LGEG-C successfully facilitated a full online transition for more than 300 teachers and 2000 students worldwide. Ed-tech specialist Taras Molotilin reflects on the key lessons we’ve learnt so far.
Going digital is one of those things everybody with a strong footing in their field usually wants to do, but prefers to postpone for various reasons. Everyone knows how important online presence is, everyone appreciates the benefits it provides. Distance constraints disappear, opening new frontiers where a wider audience can engage with your content, overheads and logistics become a lot simpler. Not all of these may be directly relevant to education providers with an existing local student body, but if you take a minute to think beyond this time of contingency, so much more becomes possible…
However, what is also a common belief, is that going online is hard. That only a handful of education providers have mastered it properly, and others who claim that they did are just fooling themselves.
Regardless of whether one is an adept of these views or not, the moment comes, when you’re faced with the fact that you needed to go online yesterday. And today is the next best chance. It’s a daunting realisation, but also a galvanizing moment of clarity.
What did we learn from transitioning learning online in five days? Well, for starters, it is not hard: open your browser, contact your students – there, you’re online, congratulations. Not hard, but rather complex. Going online properly involves dozens of steps that are absolutely crucial if one is concerned about the quality of their educational product.
There are technical challenges: how do we ensure the stability of our presence online? What is our backup solution? What is the backup for when the backup is down?
How do we assess the quality of the learning that takes place online? And how do we compare it to its offline predecessor?
How do we bootcamp our teaching and admin team to switch to online teaching rapidly? How do we prepare our learners and their parents?
How to adapt the curricula? Keep up with cutting edge apps and tech? Make our lessons fun?
If these questions are left unanswered, going online for you will not be far from the “1) open the browser 2) that’s it” scenario. Addressing these issues properly will rocketjump you into a state on the verge of omnipotence: now even the most daunting educational paradigm shift looks doable. And fun.
Armed with a well-oiled process for online transition, a library of tool kits and check lists, a battery of training materials, screen casts and webinar scripts, we’ve observed over 300 teachers, 100 administrators and 2000 learners shift to whole-day virtual classroom teaching. So far the results are encouraging: students love it and teachers feel invigorated with a new challenge to their praxis. All of this is enabled by a solid technology baseline and well-trained support team, leaving teachers the space to do what they do best: innovate and engage.