HaileyburyX, learning organisations and superjobs.
Dr Peter Thomas (then writing as founding director of HaileyburyX).
HaileyburyX develops online courses.
Initially, these courses are for Haileybury students. Eventually, some of these courses will be available to all learners, any age, at anytime, anywhere in the world.
But our motivation is not only to enhance our own students’ learning or to make a Haileybury education accessible to students for whom it is out of reach geographically or financially — although we will do both of these things.
It is to help us to continue our journey to become a learning organisation. One that can identify, understand, embrace and effectively use emerging technologies in teaching and learning.
And we are doing this so that we can best serve the needs of our students not just today, but in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time, and make sure our teachers are prepared to satisfy those needs every step along the way.
Read on to learn about some of the courses we are developing, why we have chosen them, the way in which we are developing them, and how we think about learning, technology and change.
There are hundreds of thousands of online courses, on tens of thousands of subjects, built by thousands of universities, schools and education providers and a myriad of edtech companies. Some are wildly popular, and some have only a few students. Some have been around a long time, and others come and go. Some are excellent, some are not.
Like our pursuit of excellence across our entire curriculum, we want to build online courses of the highest quality — but in the universe of possible courses that we could develop we want to be both excellent and distinctive.
That’s why we’re building an eclectic but carefully curated catalogue of courses for HaileyburyX. The value we can bring, both for our students and for all of our learners, is to combine our track record of academic excellence with a global outlook, an entrepreneurial spirit and our commitment to social justice.
The structure of HaileyburyX reflects this.
Each of our courses is part of a channel. These channels, like many of the courses themselves, are multidisciplinary. We want to give our learners unique, worldview-enhancing learning experiences that support and amplify the learning they do in the curriculum and help contextualise their experiences outside of Haileybury.
As an example, we are developing a course on The Science and Politics of Climate Change.
This is not just a course on the mechanisms behind global warming or how human activity has contributed to it or the possible scientific solutions. It explores the social and cultural context of climate change such as the evolving political backdrop, climate change denial and the social and media responses to it, and the rise and impact of climate change activism.
The aim is to present learning experiences that, as part of a Grand Challenges channel on HaileyburyX, help prepare students to thoughtfully and purposefully engage with the world as an enlightened and committed modern citizen. The course sits alongside others in this channel, including those on financial inclusion, water poverty and the global challenge of access to education.
The Grand Challenges channel complements the learning our students do in the curriculum and will help them apply that learning in the real world (in the case of climate activism, how to engage with the recent climate strike movement, for example).
When learners visit HaileyburyX, we want them to be able to pursue their interests and passions, to extend their learning from the curriculum and also to encounter the unfamiliar. Students will be able to not just study one course, or several courses in a channel, or a recommended stack of courses across channels, but pursue a personal pathway, creating for themselves a unique experience which we can then recognise through a variety of different credentials.
We know that courses are time-consuming and difficult to create. That’s why in HaileyburyX courses are created by teams.
Of course, it’s an advantage to spread work across a team. But the real advantage is creativity: individual teachers are extremely knowledgeable about their own subject but working in a team setting with a diverse set of colleagues, with diverse experiences and knowledge can make for powerful creative outcomes that will make our courses distinctive and so better meet the needs of our learners.
All of our teachers are, as are all teachers, busy, and developing courses for HaileyburyX is another activity to fit in — and one which may be unfamiliar. We are also ambitious to work quickly to ensure we are building courses that are relevant, timely and responsive.
To help with this, we are using a version of the Agile methodology (you can read about this in our first Medium article). Some of our teachers have opted into learning about it in our first professional development course, the Haileybury Microcredential in Agile Learning Design.
What underlies the Agile methodology is a straightforward idea: autonomous teams, working at their own pace, involving users early and deeply, generates creative solutions that make great products. In our context, teams of teachers, with an unparalleled understanding of learner needs, are working together to build great courses and doing it quickly.
In our approach to Agile Learning Design, we have some simple tools and processes:
- tools — a Slack channel for team communication and a Kanban-style Trello board to visibly manage the team’s workflow
- sprints — a way of managing effort in short periods
- ceremonies — planning and retrospectives — which are used to plan the work of the team and reflect on progress
- guardrails — a lightweight and simple framework to guide our teams which has been developed specifically for HaileyburyX courses
- Teams are supported by the equivalent of a scrum master who facilitates progress. Colleagues may be part of many teams and be both scrum master and team member.
We have around 30 courses in various stages of development from proposed, to in planning and in development. You can see them all on our roadmap. We have delivered our first courses in December 2019 — Chinese Language and our own Agile Learning Design course — with more in the first quarter of 2020, and the rest — and more — in mid-2020.
In the meantime, we have also been developing and executing on some activities that are part of our supporting framework.
The first is the Haileybury Microcredential in Agile Learning Design which is currently delivered to our own teachers. In 2020 it will be delivered to any teacher in Australia and then internationally, supported by a dedicated event and meetups.
We are also trying to understand what the future holds for credentials. This is important for our students because, as the interface between secondary and higher education changes, it will be an advantage to offer our students access to microcredentialled learning alongside their curriculum studies. That’s why we are holding our first short-form conference microcrEd: exploring the evolving microcredential ecosystem in 2020. We not only want to learn about how the ecosystem is evolving but also be part of, and eventually lead, the conversation.
microcrEd, and our agile learning design event, are both part of our series of Ed. events that look at topics including blended learning, disruptive innovation, explicit instruction and that promote and celebrate innovation in education. Ed. events are our way to learn more about the issues we are interested in and at the same time nourish our ecosystem. Our events are not dominated by our own point of view: as we say at each event, there is no monopoly on the truth. This results in an open, candid and challenging exchange of views that widens the aperture on some of the key issues in learning and teaching.
Read more about our Ed. series of events in 2020–2021 here.
We’re continuing to build the courses you can see in our roadmap, both for our students and as part of professional development at Haileybury — including courses that extend our digital literacy and improve our fluency with blended learning techniques.
We intend to do much more though and have invited all of our teachers to get involved. They can suggest a course – whether they are eventually part of the team that develops it or not – join an existing team (or more than one), create a new course team, or channel, or act as scrum master for a team.
All of our courses start with the development of a learner story that describes the knowledge, skills or understanding we want students to develop and which allows us to build detailed learning outcomes. The learner story provides clarity of vision about the course and is the first, and one of the most important, activities for a team.
All of the teachers who play any part in HaileyburyX also join our Slack workspace where each course has its own channel, and where they can start new conversations on technology, education, blended learning, Agile and a lot of other topics — or just listen in on the #general channel or look at some of the suggestions of things to read in #reading.
Why would teachers get involved?
To learn.
As we said, our motivation is not just to develop courses but to support Haileybury in its pursuit of continuous evolution. We want to provide opportunities for teachers to develop the new skills, knowledge and competencies that will enhance their careers as prepare Haileybury for the future.
HaileyburyX is just one of the many ways in our school to engage in the kind of high-quality professional learning of the kind described in the AITSL standards that is the hallmark of excellent teachers. Teaching and learning is changing. Hands-on, detailed and practical experience in developing engaging, flexible and above all, excellent online learning experiences will improve learning for our students.
Much of this future is of course about technology.
Emerging technologies like AI will be profoundly challenging to education. But they also provide an opportunity to learn and develop more sophisticated digital, multidisciplinary, data and information competencies that will be incredibly useful both to the school and to individual teachers.
It’s not about turning teachers into analysts, programmers or designers. As Deloitte noted in its 2019 Human Capital Trends report:
“Paradoxically, to be able to take full advantage of technology, organizations must redesign jobs to focus on finding the human dimension of work. This will create new roles that we call superjobs: jobs that combine parts of different traditional jobs.”
Superjobs, even though created out of disruption, are a good thing. They point the way towards not a technology-centred, but a more human-centred organisation where principles like purpose, fairness, growth, collaboration and transparency can thrive. These are the principles necessary to ensure the best use of new technologies.
So to return to our opening statement. We develop online courses. But we are concerned with the future of teaching and learning, for our students and for our teachers.
