International Exposure Through Online Learning in a Primary School

The coronavirus forces practically all schools to switch to online teaching.  Recently I had an opportunity to discuss with the head of a primary school in Hong Kong.  The school is reasonably equipped with the technology needed.  It has also managed to provide the necessary training to the teachers themselves. The teachers have now gotten comfortable with the technology.  The school seems to be coping well under the circumstances.  

What happens next?  The virus is pushing many schools to adopt eLearning in a massive scale.  If and when the virus is controlled, most schools will certainly want to return to face-to-face classroom teaching.  Will eLearning disappear or simply revert to playing a marginal role again?  Probably not, and neither should it.  While face-to-face teaching has advantages that can not be fully replaced anytime soon, eLearning also has advantages that should not be ignored.  

One major advantage is the freedom from the constraints of distance.  A teacher can teach from home or school, while the students can stay at home in Hong Kong - or actually anywhere else in the world   It works when the students are stuck in Mainland China or elsewhere and cannot return to Hong Kong.  An outside teacher can be arranged to teach a group of students in Hong Kong from a foreign country.  A group of students in Hong Kong can interact with a group of students in Mainland China with Putonghua, or another in USA with English.  It can also be Vietnam, Cambodia, or Rwanda, with an exotic language and culture.  Teachers from different countries can teach each other’s students, or both groups together as if they are together in the same classroom. A lot of international exposure can be achieved in the comfort and safety of your own school. A school can do this with another school in an underprivileged community, to introduce community service into the classroom, without having to travel.  

Our group has done all of these, at the university level.  Now that primary and secondary schools are getting familiar with online teaching and learning, there is no real reason why the same cannot be done even at a primary school.  This may actually be the time to take the first steps as a front runner.   

One way to start is to cultivate a small community of practice. Bootstrap with, possibly only a few, teachers who are the most keen, adapt, or simply adventurous.  Challenge them with a small, do-able project, perhaps something that has been proven to work elsewhere.  Give them a small amount of seed funding.  And start from there.  In time, your school will have something advanced and unique, that turns a challenge into a competitive advantage.