Remote working - by Dr Tim Filtness

"If anything good can be said to have come from Covid-19, it’s that institutions across the country have been required to engage with the wholesale concept of remote working.

For some, this is relatively old hat: most schools and colleges have been using virtual learning environments for a while and in some sectors the concept of MOOCS and other online training platforms are relatively well-established. There are even a small number of centres that exist exclusively in an online environment (e.g. the Khan Academy or the Virtual Learning College) and anyone unfortunate enough to have completed a recent tax return, sat their driving theory test or completed any self-directed learning course will be familiar with the idea of online learning. However, for most of us the centre of gravity still sits firmly with the notion that that learning and teaching are best associated with a classroom environment. And, for me, this is what’s exciting: throughout the country schools, colleges, universities and employers have now been forced to adopt a new approach – learning from home.

Even without Covid-19, Sherborne was already well along the road towards remote learning: our VLE, Frog, has been in place for nearly a decade and we began rolling out MS 365 a good eighteen months ago. Many of my colleagues are already adept with MS Teams (our Literacy lessons, for example, are coordinated in this way) and there are two members of Bow House who proudly boast a completely paperless classroom – a dream for anyone familiar with the joys of marking a stack of pupils’ scripts.

With the pandemic (as can now officially be termed) taking root across the UK, Sherborne has stepped up its plans for remote working and moved forwards a number of deadlines. This is exciting because it means that, from April, all classes at School will have a second ‘virtual’ classroom. This online class is built in MS Teams and offers the facility to set work, submit it, mark it digitally and share feedback in the same way. Lesson materials, past-papers, PowerPoints, videos, discussion fora and other classroom activities will also be made available in Teams too, meaning that the accomplishments of the classroom can be replicated anywhere in the country – voila, remote learning.

However, the remote learning paradigm also offers much more than the simple opportunity to share lesson materials. Digital learning platforms such as Teams make provision for interactive and collaborative learning techniques that are not so easy to replicate in the paper-filled classroom. You can, for example, make provision for assignments to be rewritten so that boys can share a draft of their work, receive comments and feedback from peers and then redraft their work ready for submission. These steps are all visible as separate layers of editing, each complete with comment feeds and digital annotations which allows the teacher sight both of the process of peer evaluation and also of its impact on reflection and correction. The result, therefore, is a much improved piece of work and, crucially, a boy who understands what steps he needs to take to ensure that future work is similarly developed."

Dr Tim Filtness, Deputy Head (Academic)