Education for all
IB colleagues reveal the creative teaching methods that mean more students are receiving the chance to better themselves in the classroom.
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Andrew Bollington and Paul Fairbrother explain to Ann Oliver how the Diploma Programme Online will open doors for students and teachers around the world.
It was Marshall McLuhan who in 1967 declared “the new electronic independence recreates the world in the image of a global village”. In April this year, the International Baccalaureate announced that, subject to funding, it proposes to recreate its own world in that very image. When IB World spoke to Andrew Bollington, the IB’s Strategic Planning director, and Paul Fairbrother, IB’s Learning Technologies manager, who has the task of managing the project, both were full of optimism and excitement about this ground-breaking new initiative.
“It’s called the Diploma Programme Online and it’s exactly in line with the organization’s strategic plan, which talks about developing online opportunities for our curriculum,” says Andrew. “There’s already a team in the academic directorate dedicated to managing the project, and as well as being an important part of our plan to broaden access to the IB, it will benefit existing IB World Schools.”
Under Paul’s direction, the team spent six months carrying out a scoping project and it now has two main priorities. Andrew adds: “Our first priority is to secure the funding and the second is to establish the infrastructure that will allow us to get this right over the next six years. We’ll need $2m a year over six years. There’s no way the IB has the reserves to make that possible, so we’re looking to external donors and companies who might want to help us raise the money.”
So how is the IB going to preserve the Diploma Programme’s rigorously high standards, and its essential ‘IB-ness’, while efficiently offering its content online?
“That’s what the six-year pilot is there to establish,” says Paul. “If we wanted to take an IB course and put it online, we could probably do that by the end of next year, but we want to ensure the Diploma Programme Online genuinely is a programme, infused with the IB Learner Profile. Subject to funding, there will be two years of preparation, with the first students starting in September 2008, followed by a four-year teaching pilot. As the Diploma Programme is a two-year course, this will allow us to get sufficient students through the pilot to make sure we get this right. We want to ensure the students (who will take the same diploma exams) achieve comparable results and a comparable educational experience.”
There has already been a small-scale, pre-pilot project, using some of the same technologies: 11 students from the USA, Ecuador and Brazil studied standard-level economics online over two years, taught by Shawn Horst, based at Associaçao Escola Graduada de Sao Paulo in Brazil, who developed and taught the course.
One American student describes the experience: “The benefit of having students from different countries in the class was that I got to see world events from other countries’ points of view. Growing up in America, I sometimes see events very differently than people from other countries would. It was a breath of fresh air to hear different points of view.”
There are three main benefits of the project to the IB’s mission. “The first is a tangible benefit to existing IB World Schools, as it’s going to allow these to offer more subjects,” says Andrew. “For instance, there’s a whole range of subjects that schools find it difficult to recruit teachers for: some of the science subjects, mathematical subjects, computer science. And if you think about the language provision in the IB Diploma Programme, it’s often difficult to offer the range of languages a school would like. Online learning can help to solve that problem.”
Paul adds: “The issue of class size is important too, because if you have half a dozen students who want to take a particular course, that small number might not make it viable to recruit a teacher, but the course becomes possible when taught online. It means schools can enrich their curriculum.
“The second benefit is that it enables the IB to reach students who wouldn’t normally be able to attend an IB course,” he continues. “If you want an IB education you have to be able to attend one of 1,800 schools round the world. It seems like a big number, but really it’s a drop in the ocean.”
Andrew says: “The third benefit comes back to our existing schools, because they can create a much more international and intercultural classroom online than would normally be possible across the vast majority of IB World Schools.”
The IB stresses that there will always be an IB World School at the centre of these online communities: the Diploma Programme Online will not be set up in competition with, but as a complement to, face-to-face education. But because the IB sees IB World Schools themselves becoming one of the providers of the online content, it’s another way of helping schools to reach out to improve access to IB programmes.
“This is one of the most exhilarating things about the project,” says Andrew. “Any particular cohort of students going through the Diploma Programme Online is likely to be drawn from many different parts of the world, in a way only the most diverse of international schools would expect.”
Paul, a former subject and curriculum area manager, is dedicated to making the academic side blend seamlessly with the technology. But, as both he and Andrew emphasise, the IB is not going to become deeply involved in technological provision.
Paul says: “We’re talking to lots of other agencies and organizations who will be involved. We want to create a framework and a model in which experienced providers can work with us.”
That said, Paul is enthusiastic about some recent developments in online technology. “The implementation of social publishing, with tools such as WIKIs [short for What I Know Is], blogs, and products such as Delicious (http://del.icio.us) for social bookmarking, enriches the online environment and really facilitates collaboration,” he says. “Blogging technology can contribute to the element of classroom discussion and debate that’s so vital for the critical thinking element of IB teaching.”
He concludes that general improvements in VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) with platforms such as Skype (www.skype.com), offer the sort of technology that makes online language learning, for example, much more of a viable proposition than it was perhaps three or four years ago.
Teaching methods have changed, too, says Paul: “The former online course hierarchy was based on a pedagogy where the teacher just placed the material online and the student had to consume it. Now we’re teaching the digital generation, we need a pedagogy to match. There’s far more emphasis on collaboration and interaction, and we’re now moving into that era when large learning management systems and those technologies will catch up with that.”
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Over to you:
IB World Schools who would like to take part in the pilot can express interest via email at dp.online@ibo.org. All interested schools will be added to a mailing list and contacted as soon as formal application is invited.
If you have any interesting teaching models that you would like to tell us about, please email editor@ibo.org, ring +44 20 8267 5114, or write to IB World, Teddington Studios, Broom Road, Teddington, Middlesex, TW11 9BE, UK
