After our soft launch, we are now in phase 1 of the School’s first on-campus resumption and are looking forward to phase 2 on Tuesday. Once again, our students and their teachers have mastered an intensive phase of online learning. Unfortunately, the reality is that with the fluctuating infection numbers, we may occasionally have to accept online learning phases in the coming months. Our experience with online learning shows that we have come a long way with school digitisation and our online learning has gained a quality all of its own.
This reminds me of a training course on the "School of the Future" that I attended in Hong Kong about two years ago. In this training, a Finnish lecturer presented ideas of the school of the future, developed the vision of a school exclusively with digital textbooks and even predicted a "schoolless school", i.e. a school in which learning takes place without the old structures, timetables, subjects and books. Instead, he pictured the future students working predominantly digitally and independently researching and developing.
The ‘digitisation leap’ that our teachers and students have made is comparable to Bob Beamon's legendary jump at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, where he beat the existing long jump world record by 55 cm – his new record lasting 23 years. As fast-paced as our world has become, our new knowledge and skills are unlikely to last 23 years. Over the next 23 months, we will have to incorporate numerous new learnings and developments into our wealth of experience and constantly push ahead with the advancement of school education and training.
In order to support our development and learn more, our recent online learning survey was important and confirmed that we have improved our elearning offering. The details of the results were shared with you in our email of 22 September and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your feedback. Your thoughts and comments have continued to provide us with many valuable pointers which we will continue to review and discuss.
Finally, I am happy to share good news before the weekend. The changes to the school holiday calendar explained in the Gazette dated 18 September were approved by the Board at their meeting on 22nd September. This was as a one-time exception for this academic year due to the Corona pandemic. You can find the updated calendar here.
Have a nice weekend
Ulrich Weghoff
Principal
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