Flipping Things Around
Online learning has taken a new turn at this school.
While many Hong Kong families were enjoying their Chinese New Year holidays, the team at Malvern College Hong Kong (MCHK) were working hard to ensure a swift and smooth roll-out of the school’s online learning programme from the first day back.
Flipped learning
At MCHK, online learning is not just about trying to replicate the school day in an online environment. For relevant years, the school has engaged a flipped learning approach.
What is flipped learning? It’s an approach in which material is introduced to students before class, rather than during class time as it would in a traditional classroom. The class time is then used to dive deeper into the material, instead of merely to introduce it.
To support this new approach, the MCHK teaching body has been creating instructional videos that pupils can watch, pause and re-watch to digest content at home. Using these videos, students can become familiar with new concepts before attempting home learning tasks set by their class teacher or engaging with classmates via online discussions.
Once the students have digested the materials and attempted their learning tasks, they are given personalised feedback from the teacher. This feedback is delivered through written comments, online chats and video conferences.
Supporting parents
The MCHK team acknowledges that parents are under a great deal of pressure during this period of school closure. It recognises, too, that pupils are working in different environments, and in some cases in different time zones. In many Hong Kong-based families, often both parents are working. This means many parents have limited time to support their child’s home learning. For this reason, the school says it has been careful to balance the workload to avoid anxiety for both pupils and parents.
Last year’s school closure has proven instructive as well; MCHK has taken the parental feedback from that period into account and tweaked its approach accordingly. This time around, teachers are working with less screen time and creating more bite-sized learning sessions to retain pupil engagement.
Malvern College Hong Kong is at 3 Fo Chun Road, Pak Shek Kok, New Territories.
3898 4699 | malverncollege.org.hk