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Case Study - IBO (International Baccalaureate Organization)
PDF Version, Click Here.
Company Overview The IBO aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect. To this end, the IBO works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment. These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right. The IBO offers three programmes to a wide variety of schools located throughout the world:
One of the many services that the IBO provides for its member schools is the online curriculum centre, more commonly referred to as the OCC. The OCC is a web-based resource (available in English, French, Spanish and Chinese) for teachers of the three academic programmes of the IBO mentioned above. The OCC's express purpose is to develop and nurture an international online community to support the three IB programmes and reflect the IBO's overall mission. It achieves this by allowing teachers to:
Business Challenge More fundamentally, however, the IBO was also faced with the challenge of finding a new virtual environment that would facilitate knowledge sharing and information exchange between teachers globally, and also help to establish professional learning communities online. At the heart of these professional learning communities are mechanisms that support and encourage teachers in their own learning and the sharing of good practice. Researching software and environments to do this proved to be a daunting task for the staff working in the OCC department.
Solution Staff in the OCC team found the forums to be quite easy to create and administer. Each subject area has its own category, and each category is moderated by an online faculty member. (Online faculty members are usually IBO teachers appointed for their subject expertise and experience teaching the IBO programmes.) The online faculty member answers teachers' queries through the forums, and they are also encouraged to initiate discussion and debate to keep the forums active. The OCC team has also set up a number of password-protected categories for external consultants, workshop use, and for staff to test and experiment the forums.
Results With the advent of virtual learning and communication environments, there are exciting opportunities for international educators to develop communities of learners with new possibilities for cooperation, collaboration and knowledge product construction. The OCC can now take a leading role in facilitating this process and emerge as a powerful tool for enriching cross-school relationships. One such example occurred in March 2004, when the IBO staged its first online global conference via the OCC. It was most fortunate to have John Abbott, President of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, as the keynote speaker. John is well known to international educators, and has delivered a number of addresses to IB teachers in the different IBO regions. John is currently involved in exploring new understandings about the brain, human intelligence and human memory to understand human learning better and how it can be facilitated further by communities around the world. He used these perspectives to reflect upon the many questions and issues contained within the conference theme. Participants were able to engage with his thoughts and insights through the conference discussion forums and the synchronous chat facility - all of which was made possible by FuseTalk.
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