The e-Sgoil all started on a small scale.
I remember receiving a request from colleagues in the Central Belt of Scotland, where a school had a young pupil fluent in German who had no means of maintaining their fluency. They could have found a teacher to work with him individually but this would have been expensive.
Instead, I suggested pairing him with a senior pupil who was studying Advanced Higher German in the Western Isles. I provided training to the senior pupil on leading discussion with a younger peer, which became a very successful pilot project highlighting the benefits of pupil-led learning.
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The opportunity provided a senior pupil with mentoring and leadership experience, as well as supporting his younger peer to retain his German language skills. There was no cost to the school and we’ve set up similar links since, all of which work really well for those involved.
A separate pilot involved teaching fiddle to a young woman from the Western Isles who had relocated to the Philippines. We were able to use the Glow (a digital network for Scottish schools) and Vscene (a browser-based web conferencing system, available to all Scottish schools) to make this happen. This enabled the student we were supporting to receive lessons for seven months remotely and ensure the continuity of her education.
Delivering proof of concept has been a really important process for us. We’ve also worked with a family who moved to New Zealand for a year to help them keep up their fluency in Gaelic, and an individual in Albuquerque, New Mexico who wanted to join in with a group of students who were studying Gaelic. These experiences have made us to look at things like time difference, far beyond the usual challenges of connecting with schools in Scotland alone.
Playing our part in the Northern Alliance “regional improvement collaborative” - designed to connect several local authorities across a huge swathe of Scotland - is also key. We’re working directly with Shetland, Orkney, Aberdeenshire, Moray, Aberdeen, Highland, and Argyll and Bute, on a variety of projects. We’re promoting opportunities for pupils to study for a National 5 or Higher in Gaelic, and we’re enhancing equity more generally in terms of Stem and modern languages subject choice for pupils, irrespective of geographic location.
E-Sgoil currently has more than 600 learners across 39 subject areas engaged in e-learning across the Northern Alliance. We’re very pleased with results so far, with pupils attaining at or above predicted grades.
We have developed robust policy and protocols for the delivery of assessments alongside the Scottish Qualifications Authority, building expertise that supports different ways of working in the future while also avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort.
We’re also creating jobs in remote rural communities. We can truly make the most of the many and varied talents of those scattered across the Highlands and islands to add real value to what might be available through the traditional curriculum.
On the island of Barra, we have a teacher working part-time in one of the schools, who is able to spend the rest of his week teaching computer sciences to pupils in other parts of the Western Isles. The teachers we are working with enjoy great job satisfaction as we’re enabling them to work to their strengths.
While I can understand people’s hesitation at seeing schooling being delivered remotely, this is not what we are all about. It’s about building on what can be realistically delivered in any school, giving teachers and young people new opportunities to flourish and making the most of their ability to be part of a global village of experts and learners.
Where teachers are delivering classes remotely, they always aim to meet their classes face-to-face initially, but what we’re finding is that many of our young people are more familiar with their online communities than any other way of learning, so being educated through a digital platform doesn’t phase them in the slightest.
What we’re doing is stirring interest from around the globe. We have an invitation from educators in Japan who are keen to adopt our pedagogy to meet similar rural challenges. The Qatari Foundation is introducing Arabic lessons for employees to be delivered digitally and they’re keen to work with us, too. The University of Strathclyde is liaising with us on providing Mandarin lessons to be delivered virtually and the team around the Climate Ready Classroom is also keen to learn more about how we do things.
Digital learning can be delivered using any device from anywhere, and lessons can be monitored remotely, too. I’m clearly an advocate for the many benefits this way of working delivers, not least in helping to develop young people’s digital literacy and collaboration skills, ready for the world of work. But I’m happy to admit we don’t have all the answers - any lesson will only ever be as good as the teacher delivering it.
Angus Maclennan is headteacher of e-Sgoil, an e-learning project based in Scotland’s Western IsIes
