Beijing School Turns E-Learning Challenges Into Opportunities

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Even though we’re still held up at home, quarantined from the rest of the world, things are slowly starting to get back to normal. Well, normal-ish. While the kids aren’t back to school as originally planned before the Coronavirus outbreak, they are starting to go back to their schoolwork.

Teachers and staff at international schools all over Beijing have been working tirelessly to create e-learning platforms for their students. But how does e-learning work and can it be applied to every subject?

We interviewed AISB School- Hope International’s Head of School Mr. Randal Eplin on their process of creating a productive e-learning syllabus for their students.

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How has your staff been handling the current outbreak?

As we come back to work from the Chinese New Year holiday, I can honestly say that our teaching staff is ready to engage and work diligently in the midst of the novel coronavirus outbreak here in China. The faculty and staff at AISB School- Hope International (HIS) are highly committed to meet the learning needs of our students, and they have been working for several weeks now, even before the required date to return to work.

Are your teachers still in Beijing or have they returned to their home countries?

We have invited our entire community to make decisions that focus on their personal safety of themselves and their loved ones. At this point, we trust our community members as they make good decisions to keep themselves safe and secure during this challenging time. No matter where faculty and staff are in the world, they are all committed to delivering instruction where ever they are in the world.

Have you had similar experiences in the past?

I was working at the International School of Estonia many years ago during the SARS outbreak, and at this time, our school developed an online e-learning platform in case we needed to deliver instruction online. This experience has helped me in the planning and implementation of our HIS e-learning initiative.

What has HIS planned in terms of e-learning?

Our goal with the HIS e-learning platform is for students to learn. As simple as that sounds, it takes a dedicated and hard-working staff to achieve. Our goal is to meet all of our students, from preschool through grade twelve, at their instructional level. We are doing this by helping our teachers to plan manageable and relevant instructional tasks.

What platform will you be using?

There are many platforms that can be used for e-learning. The criteria that we are applying is to implement something that works seamlessly in China, and something that students can easily access and use. We are committed to finding, using, and changing the platform(s) we are using that fit this criteria.

Has it been difficult for the teachers to revise their syllabus for e-learning?

At HIS, we take pride in being what I call a learning organization. As a learning organization, our teachers embrace this challenge as an opportunity to learn and grow in different ways in order to deliver the best instruction that they can during this time. It is exciting to see teachers work together to learn and grow and make e-learning work for our students at HIS. The level of the dedication that our teachers have is humbling and encouraging.

How are your students handling the current situation?

Actually, I think that students are handling this situation better than all of us. We are serving a “wired generation” of learners who are often times more comfortable with technology than we are. The students at HIS are highly engaged and they are completing assignments and continuing to do their very best at this time.

We look forward to putting this outbreak behind us, but until that time, we are dedicated to providing the very best learning through our newly developed HIS e-learning platform.

At this time HIS hasn’t announced an official return date for their students and faculty but the school will continue to educate and inspire its students through e-learning for as long as it takes.

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Photos: AISB School- Hope International, nebraskapta.org, skillmile.com, transferoflearning.com, gofluent.com

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