Course Guidelines and Expectations

John Hattie, a researcher in education, has produced a monumental synthesis of more than 800 meta-studies of what makes for successful learning. In his book, ‘Visible Learning’, Hattie says that education is most effective when the teaching is ‘visible’ to the learner. In a very generalised and direct way, this course has been designed to empower everyone. The course may not be designed to be community-driven while taking it, but it requires community participation while implementing it. This community includes teachers, tutors, learners, researchers, educators, and administrators at all levels and disciplines, from primary to higher education. Lastly, the course is self-paced and language-friendly.

The course is built on the Blarkpryde Academy pedagogy. The Blarkpryde Academy’s pedagogy has been designed from an interaction between the Nigerian and West African education policies and examination boards as well as the European and American educational policies and examination boards. Hence, learners are exposed to a wide range of interconnection and in the end, they can feel at home teaching anyone from anywhere in the world. 

In this course, we will touch on many different approaches – not just whether to deliver a class over video call or upload a recorded lecture, but also how to facilitate discussions and collaboration between your students, and how to encourage and support them in self-guided learning.

We hope this course serves to develop a community of practice by allowing us to share ideas, support each other, and build libraries of shared resources, that is why we advise learners to use the comment section a lot.

Time Management:

We know many of you are under time pressure, and we want the course to fit alongside your day-to-day activities like chores, work, lectures, schooling, and teaching without being so much of a burden or leisure time consumer.

We are taking a task-based approach, with most stated learning time feeding into work you’re already familiar with: teaching, planning, adapting, and reflecting. This course is divided into four modules with each module having an average of five lessons.

Comments, Questions, Answers, and Support:

Our learners can count on our content creators once a week, to be online to get involved in the comments and discussions. Our content creators or digital educators are simply the best. They have been trained to use the best of a wide variety of pedagogy and curriculum to ensure learners get maximum outcomes out of this course. While online, active or not, they will answer learners’ questions and support in the comment section. Notwithstanding, co-learners are encouraged to participate in the support and answer provision. This will enhance community participation and more so experience has taught us that these questions and comments are numerous in number.

Conclusion

For the first module, these are the courses we will be looking at:

• How to make use of the course

• Equipment needed for online education

• Some Terminologies in Online Education

• Pros and Cons of Online Education

Our world today requires teachers to teach in an entirely new way. Just as it requires learners to learn in an entirely new way as well. So we admonish you to be open. Your journey to becoming truly empowered as an educator has just begun. See you at the end of this course and most affectionately, see you are the top.