Online Schooling

The Covid-19 pandemic has served to accelerate a shift already well underway in some institutions and brings them a greater sense of urgency to demonstrate greater value. Schools now face new pressures to provide an educational experience that is engaging, motivating and effective, regardless of how it is delivered. As schools may stay closed across many countries again, many students and teachers have to adapt to a new reality of remote learning.Online teaching and learning, like the newest form of distance education today, will lead to new, different, and more relevant outcomes. Teaching online requires specialized skill sets including the understanding of how to conduct classes in a virtual environment, knowing when and how to use video conferencing, share content, respond to students’ submissions. Software and technology are also changing very rapidly, and our schools want to keep up with these developments. One of the key challenges in online teaching is how to assess students remotely, to prevent them from cheating, using other materials, or accessing the web on other devices during the test. Online assessments are a critical part of distance learning and should be undertaken with the same level of care and rigor that teachers put into creating their learning content. Therefore, we intend to focus on introducing effective pedagogical strategies for online teaching rather than the technology itself.The general objective of our project is to motivate and help teachers to use online teaching to become a normal part of the educational process in our schools. The more specific objective is to suggest and recommend for implementation a model of assessing students remotely. By using this approach, students might gain enhanced learning outcomes.To achieve and fulfill the objectives, we plan to develop these main outputs:a) Manual for teachers containing curriculum resources for teachers, their professional development resources, digital tools for supporting online teaching and tools for collaboration b) Guide for assessment focused on testing options, methods and software toolsc) Live resources for inspiration – sharing experiences with remote teaching, learning and assessing.During the project lifetime, we will organize two physical staff training events and two virtual, an online workshop for students of all our schools and two transnational meetings for monitoring project progress.