The school is developing a contingency plan for the possibility that the school will not host classes at the school due to the avian flu. While some families might evacuate the country and return to their home countries, the disturbing reality is that there really won’t be time to evacuate if a case of human-to-human transfer is discovered anywhere in the world. Once it is confirmed that it can spread amongst humans, the World Health Organization is going to close all international borders. Even scarier is the fact that areas around Beijing will be locked down too.
My guess is that (if it hits) there will be quite a few families who remain here. A number will be back in their home countries. Luckily, the systems I was hired to install support online learning, collaboration and assessment. The challenge will be training the entire teaching staff to use them in such a short period of time. While these systems are quite easy to use, the task of re-engineering a teacher’s ability to adopt them and adapt them to their curriculum will be much more difficult. Fortunately the school has a handful of teachers who understand both sides and will be tasked to train the others.
If the poop hits the fan and we have to implement “plan-b”, it will make a very interesting case study for distance learning at the k-12 level. Studies have already shown that tests scores and attendance improve when students become collaborative creators rather than consumers of content. We could all return to Beijing with a very different type of learning environment with teachers augmenting their curriculum with these new tools.
On one hand it’s very scary to be faced with this…one the other, it’s exciting to see the work I’ve been doing have a positive impact in such a short period of time.