Thursday 10 September 2015

The World of IB



The other day my son asked me a question…. Why do we call a honey bee by that name?” I replied with overweening confidence and with an air of finality that it is because it collects honey. Pat came the next question… “Why do we call a butterfly by that name?” This time I was stumped!
This incident bears testimony to the kind of inquisitive minds that children today are born with. We would be doing grave injustice to them if we were to put them through a curriculum that stifles this curiosity which is so imperative to research, discovery and culmination of all learning – invention. It is a sad commentary on our so called “time-tested” methods of education, that we have hardly had Nobel Prize winners. That we pride ourselves on being the “heroes of zeroes” seems to be a dubious distinction.
Any parent who has run the gauntlet of those never-ending questions from a young toddler would swear by the fact, somewhere along the way the “formal education” that a child is put through ends up writing an epitaph on this natural inquisitive mind that a child is gifted with. The International Baccalaureate Organisation, a non-profit educational organisation based in Geneva, Switzerland, founded the IB Programme to overcome this pitfall. The focus in this program is on “how” and “why” rather than “what”. It is meticulously designed to foster creativity and build the global skills that today’s young globe-trotters need. Though it has its headquarters in Switzerland, the IBO is an international organisation, not associated with any particular country and free of national or political intervention. This course stands out as one that steers clear of political incursions.
In today’s globalised workplace, we operate on a global platform, making the cultivation of global mindedness and intercultural understanding indispensable. We have to carefully instil intercultural respect in the minds of young learners bearing in mind the fact that today’s students will be tomorrow’s corporate honchos shaking hands or perhaps bowing to the leaders from many countries across the world. A parochial education that gives a laundry list of concepts to be merely committed to memory, limiting the child’s perspective to the national frontiers, will no longer suffice.





As the diagram above shows, IB focuses on breadth and depth of knowledge and takes learning outside the classrooms. Learning is more application-oriented leading to the creation of individuals who are highly employable. It bears reiteration that if we do not ivory-tower scientists or arm-chair theorists, IB is the way out.

Thursday 9 July 2015

Online Education framework: An Introduction

Virtual instruction was a mind boggling term, even five years back. Considering the instruction arrangement of India, which still puts stock in the slate model, or in the educator to understudy exchange of learning procedure. In any case, very little has changed even with the progressions of innovation and the new condition of workmanship offices accessible in the present situation, even with a capable apparatus as virtual instruction, we are as yet taking after the educator to understudy classroom model, where the information exchange is a top down stream.

Online instruction can be utilized more than just to convey online addresses or presentations, to understudies from a remote area, it can be utilized as a model to collaborate, to impart, and to help one another to find the responses to complex inquiries, with no provoking from the educators.

The virtual world is steadily picking up its priority in all areas and instruction is not lingering a long
ways behind in promptly tolerating and embracing the change. The vast majority of these web learning administration frameworks are in light of participatory methodologies, where the teachers permit the understudies to interface with one another on a typical electronic stage, trade thoughts, develop another hypothesis, or ad lib the current one.

The Top schools in Hyderabad, which are going for making training a less monotonous and unwieldy action in a kid's life are receiving and exploring different avenues regarding the courses in which these creative virtual stages could be utilized without, taking after the acknowledged standard inside of the instruction framework. Endeavors are made to make presentations or the whole session more intuitive, without slaughtering the youngster's interest of knowing more.

In addition, these online instruction frameworks are drawing in, as well as they can track dynamic development rate of a learner member, as the greater part of the assignments that are given, are either in test arrangement, as a movement based organization, one line answers. Accordingly, these courses don't stretch out for more than a time of four to six weeks, which gets to be simpler for youngsters to recall whatever they have mulled over promptly and show up for a test or exam,on it and toward the end of the course in light of the execution of the learner in every last task, and cooperation on the web stage with different members and the end of the year test understudies are recompensed testaments for the specific course they took the exam for.


These courses can appear to enhance a tyke's scholarly profession, as alongside its standard school educational program, your youngster can take up these worth included courses, which will either improve his/her dialect capability, specialized mastery, gastronomical capacity. Considering the achieve, why ought to internet learning be confined to just erudite expertise?