Making remote learning more connected

Boy sitting on chair next to desk working on laptop

Curro Holdings is South Africa’s largest independent education provider – so keeping teachers, learners and parents connected seamlessly while ensuring continuous teaching and learning can happen remotely, is a massive undertaking. With the right tools, it need not be a challenge, though.

For Curro, that means using Microsoft Teams as part of the wider Office 365 Education ecosystem. Teams is an integrated working and teaching collaboration platform that provides a virtual classroom which facilitates online face-to-face connections, assignments, files and conversations into a single place accessible on mobile device, tablet, or PC.

The school group first adopted Office 365 Education in 2013 for its email infrastructure – but as Curro’s offering grew, so did its technology needs. Curro also identified the need to give both learners and teachers a centralised place or platform to create and produce work, rather than just consume the resources and tools at the centre of digital learning. This is where Teams came in.

“Although we had digital learning tools and resources in place, we saw the need to standardise one central platform for teachers across the entire group to collaborate on, as well as provide teachers and learners with a platform to create their own learning and teaching materials,” says Riaan Vlok, Head of IT at Curro.

Getting thousands of teachers across a geographically diverse group on board and adept at using the platform, required intensive training and commitment. Curro’s head office therefore implemented active training through tutorials and live webinars early last year and trained over 5,000 Curro staff members.

The value of on-the-ground support and collaboration

There is also a Teams peer coach and champion per phase in each school to provide on-the-ground support, to help staff get comfortable with using the different capabilities of the tool, including assignments, videos and learning resources. “Because our teachers are learning from and supporting one another, we have seen a phenomenal adoption of Teams, and now have 16,500 active users on the platform,” says Angela Schaerer, Technology Business Relationships Manager.

As a peer coach, Francois Vermaak – also Head of High School Academics at Curro Rivonia High School – has seen the value of this collaboration among teachers in driving adoption of the platform and facilitating remote learning. Curro Rivonia was one of the pilot schools in the Curro group for Teams in 2017 when Vermaak joined the school, and he immediately saw the benefit of the user-friendly platform.

“I was one of the first teachers in the school to start using the assignments and feedback tabs, and the way it facilitated collaboration was great, so I wanted to encourage other teachers to use it. I hosted a ‘show and tell’ at the beginning of last year and when I saw how well it was working, we introduced it across the whole school,” says Vermaak.

This forms part of his top-down peer coaching and training approach – and it is working so well that the school even uses Teams to do its daily register for each class. This allows teachers to communicate seamlessly in real time and makes daily planning easier.

For Curro Klerksdorp, it also acts as a seamless and simple way to manage the administrative processes and policies of the school. “We are nearly paperless in the management and administration of the school, as we have noticed that using the platform speeds up processes exponentially and enables greater collaboration,” says Jacques Nel, Executive Head of Curro Klerksdorp.

Helping teachers and learners manage learning

One of its useful applications is also an academic improvement tool that all teachers have access to and can use to manage each learner’s performance.

It helps learners manage their own performance and take responsibility for their own learning by allowing them to go at their own pace – the visual stimulation offered by the different tools and resources available also helps make learning more exciting for them.

This has proven to be true even in Curro’s Meridian and Academy schools. “For example, the learners at Meridian Karino in Nelspruit love the platform and the interaction. Using tools like the Whiteboard app helps eliminate the distance between teachers and learners, and makes learning more interactive and fun,” says Johannes Sithole, Economic and Management Sciences (EMS), Computer, Natural Sciences teacher and peer coach at the school.

Apps and tools like these will come in handy as Curro schools embrace remote learning even further. Curro has ramped up its capabilities to enable this in the coming days and months by:

  • adding guidance material for remote learning into its Curro Technology Playbook;
  • creating a Remote Learning Team for all Curro staff, which currently has over 1 000 members (and growing) to access all communication, resources and most importantly for all teachers to share ideas and support one another;
  • compiling a package of Remote Learning tutorials hosted on Stream for all staff to watch;
  • using a combination of Teams Meetings and Teams Live to facilitate interaction;
  • incorporating live webinars to provide an overview of its Remote Learning support plan and resources;
  • providing support from the head office training team for individual schools and teachers, and school peer coaches supporting the teachers at their schools to prepare for remote learning

“It’s important for teachers to realise that using Teams is a journey – that they don’t need to know everything about the platform when they start and that they can start small and go at their own pace with the help and support of ongoing training and peer coaches,” says Schaerer.

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