Welcome to the Brighter Thinking Pod from Cambridge – the podcast that brings you advice and conversation from authors, teachers and academics. Today we’re going to be taking a closer look at online schools; the benefits, the challenges and types of learners who thrive there.
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Ep 49: Online schools
Adam: Hello, welcome to the latest episode of the Brighter Thinking Pod from the International Education Group of Cambridge University Press and Assessment. Today, I’m your host. My name is Adam Steele and I’m a Senior Communications Executive at Cambridge. I’m also the producer of this podcast.
We created our Brighter Thinking Pod to support teachers around the world. Each episode brings you helpful advice and interesting conversation from authors, teachers and academics. Today, we’re going to be taking a closer look at online schools and we’ll hear from two special guests. For this episode, we’re joined by Louis Bone, who is the Online Schools Development Manager here at Cambridge. He is joined by Catriona Olsen, executive head teacher of the online school, King’s InterHigh. Welcome to you both.
Catriona: Thanks, Adam.
Louis: Afternoon, hello.
Adam: Remember, all the links and info that we discussed today are available in the show notes for your ease. And if you want to get your voice heard on the show, you can get in touch on Twitter (X) or Instagram at Cambridge International.
Best way to start a lesson/meeting
Okay, so to begin with, we normally start with an icebreaker to help our listeners get to know our guests more. And it also helps our guests to get energized for the discussion ahead. On that note, I want to know what’s your favourite way to start a lesson or meeting to get everyone ready to engage. So Catriona, let’s start with you.
Catriona: Yeah, no problem. And both a lesson and a meeting always has to start with what the weather is doing in your area. We’ve got students from all around the world. We’ve got staff dotted all around the UK and Europe and around the world as well. So what is the weather doing? The weather is always topic number one.
Adam: It’s become a classic way to start a meeting. And there’s always such different here in the UK. So it’s a good one. And Louis, how about you?
Louis: Well, I’m going to lean more on the lesson side more than the meeting side if that’s okay because although I work for Cambridge now, I used to be a class teacher for 12 years. And while I did that, the latter part was when I was teaching online. So I remember when I would be teaching online and I’d have a class of students that were perhaps a little bit unsure of each other, a bit unsure of this new online education world that they were stepping into.
It was a quite new territory for them, for me, for everybody involved. And I found that when they were all gathering to our online lessons, it took us quite a long time to warm up. So I was thinking to myself, how can I get everybody engaged straight away? So one of the things that I would do is, as the students were joining my online lesson, I’d have a waiting screen where they would be able to engage with something from the off to get everybody engaged, collaborating, thinking about what they’re going to need to prepare for the lesson, some open-ended questions. And it would just get us all thinking and on the same page right from the get-go.
Adam: That sounds interesting. So what kind of things would you put on there? Could you give me an example?
Louis: Yeah, usually something quite topical. I noticed that they opened up quite a lot when talking about things that were happening around them around the world. So I would take a story of something that happens. Maybe it’s something of a year four level, which is the year group I was teaching. Maybe a new dinosaur had been discovered in Dorset or maybe a new planet had been discovered in the Andromeda galaxy or something. And with an image of that on the screen, several open-ended questions around it that they could perhaps relate to.
Adam: That sounds great! I would respond a lot better to meetings if people open them with, there’s a new dinosaur been discovered and I got to learn about dinosaur facts, that’d be great.
Louis: Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I should really bring these into my meetings now as I’ve switched professions slightly. I should really cherry pick some of those previous experiences and take them with me.
Adam: Definitely bring it across.
What does a typical online school look like?
Great, thank you very much for that. So let’s dive into the main part of the podcast and we’ll start with question one. So very basic question and I think Catriona, because you’re actually the Head of an online school, we’ll come to you first. So can you describe what a typical online school is? Is there a typical online school, do you think?
Catriona Olsen: I’m glad you asked that second part of that question because I do feel that online schools are all different.
They offer synchronous, asynchronous, they offer flipped learning, live lessons all day, packed lessons all day, timetables with gaps in them. There’s so many different models of online schools out there, but I don’t think it’s a one size fits all. And that’s the beauty of it, the flexibility of just even across schools as well. They are quite different. If you look in Europe, you look to the States, they all offer quite different models.
So no, I don’t think there is a typical online school. I can describe my online school, which is King’s InterHigh. And we really emulate the physical school environment. So we do have a live timetable that runs all day. Students join their lessons at set times. But then we do offer the flexibility that the lessons are recorded so that a student, if they can’t join at that live time, that they can watch back the lesson at another time.
Class sizes as well are fairly similar to your kind of traditional in -person schools. We cap ours at 20 students, which just allows our teachers to engage and interact with students on a better level.
So a typical day for us: we start off in the morning with either assembly for students or they have like a forum group or a tutor group in the morning where they meet their tutor. Or we start off with we’ve got a cyclical cycle of tests called cycle tests that students write their assessments, especially in the upper years. And then we have an eight period day.
I think the only difference between us and a traditional school would be that we have to make sure we’ve got lots of gaps in that day. We’ve got five minutes in between each lesson so that the student can go from one room to the next. You know in a bricks and mortar school all the years of experience I have you give students five minutes to walk from one lesson to the other. In ours, we give them five minutes to go from one virtual room to the next and then we build lots of breaks into the day as well: morning lunch and afternoon. But then also we would never have a day where a student has the full suite of eight lessons and we’d make sure that students have that kind of away from screen able to get up and walk around time as well in their day.
And then again just like a traditional school at the end of the school day we offer clubs and societies so students and academic support as well that students can go to and choose from as well. So quite traditional but in an online setting.
Adam: Yeah, I don’t know really what I expected. So I’m very new to the concept of online schools. But from what you’ve just described, it sounds like a brick and mortar school, but online and with more flexibility, which I don’t suppose I was expecting. Yeah, so that’s quite interesting.
Catriona: Yes, it certainly is a common misconception of online schools that it’s going to be very different to your traditional bricks and mortar or somehow easier or somehow people can’t fathom how you can do your full education online, but it offers everything that you do in a traditional school but actually a lot more benefits as you said flexibility being a massive benefit of it.
Adam: Yeah, and we’ll come on to that a little bit later. So Louis, is this a sort of typical school that you’ve encountered with working with Cambridge under your role?
Louis: Well, I can just start by telling you a little bit about my role and what I do and then that can perhaps lead into it. So I’m the Online Schools Development Manager at Cambridge, as you explained, and one of my primary roles is to take online schools through the approval process to judge whether or not they meet our approval standards to determine whether or not they can become a Cambridge online school. And so from that, I’ve had the luxury of meeting a number of online schools all around the UK, in some cases around the world, one of which being King’s InterHigh.
So Catriona and I actually worked very closely on King’s InterHigh’s approval and it all went clearly very, very well. Hence we’re all here together on the same podcast. But in answer to your question, Adam, about a typical online school, I mean, I completely agree with what Katrina said. There really is no one size fits all description of a typical online school. At Cambridge, we’ve worked and approved with online schools whose teaching models can appear really quite different. So some have thousands of students, some have far fewer.
Some teach live synchronous models of teaching, some completely asynchronous. But what connects all of the schools that we have approved is that they all align with Cambridge’s values and demonstrate that they can meet our registration standards for online schools. And class sizes, I mean, Catriona said that, yeah, that the class sizes in King’s InterHigh are around 20. That’s quite typical in that they are significantly smaller than the traditional bricks and mortar classroom, which really facilitates personalized learning. The student body is often very diverse.
It includes students who are seeking different flexibilities within their personal and professional lives. Some students have special needs. In fact, we have approved a school quite recently that’s going to be joining us in Cambridge over the next few months that is taking a lot of professional sports athletes and actors. So they’re people for whom flexibility is, of course, very important in their daily education. Otherwise, they simply couldn’t do what they do and what they love to do.
Adam: No, that makes complete sense to me and I wish I could count myself as one of those people for whom that was an option too. That’s why I’m not a sportsman or an actor right now, I think. If I had this option when I was younger, then who knows?
Louis: Hahaha. Well, you said a few moments ago that what Catriona and I were describing to you were really not what you were expected. I mean, just if you don’t mind me playing into your for a moment to flip the question back at you, because I’m imagining that a lot of people who are listening to the podcast right now might have the same impression as you. So what did you think an online school would look like in actuality?
Adam: It’s a great question because I suppose when I first had this idea for a podcast and I was put in touch with you, I didn’t know what I would expect from an online school. The concept of doing schooling all online – I wouldn’t know how that would work on a day-to-day basis? And I suppose for me, and this is sort of touching on one of the things that I think we’ll come onto later, the best part about going to school for me was seeing my friends. And I know that you can do that in an online environment, but being in person with them every day was great.
And I also wasn’t sure how that would work if there are, or if there are the special platforms that you use, or if it’s all built around the technology that we use in work like Zoom or Teams.
Louis: I mean, Catriona might agree with this, but I mean, it’s important to state that perhaps online education may not have been for you. I mean, online education really meets the needs of lots of students, and there are of course for whom the physical bricks and mortar setting is what suits them best. And that sounds like it might have been the case for you.
Catriona: I would absolutely agree with you. It was exactly what was on my mind as you were speaking, Adam. Online is not for everyone. It suits a lot of students with the needs that they want to have online education for. It certainly doesn’t suit every student.
Adam: Yeah, and that’s bound to be the case, but it’s great that it is an option for those students that do want to go down that route.
Is the online schools sector growing?
Adam: I was just going to ask you one more question that came to me, though, before we move on. So how have you seen the sector grow over the last, what, the amount of time that you’ve been here at Cambridge? Because I’m guessing that it is probably growing.
Louis: Yeah, hugely, in fact. So when I started at Cambridge in November 2022, we had close to 20 approved online schools globally. We now have close to 50. So there is an increasing number of schools that are reaching out to us at Cambridge because it is becoming such a… well, there are lots of other schools entering this market, and schools are turning to approvals so that they can separate themselves within that market to demonstrate that they’re meeting more standards, and it makes them, of course, more appealing to parents and the students.
So it should be no surprise to you that at Cambridge we love our research, our market research. So I have a few facts and statistics to throw at you if that’s okay, on that very point. Yeah, so on the topic of how much the online education sector is growing. So according to a report from Research & Markets, the online education market in the UK is on target to have grown at a compound annual rate of about 13 % between 2020 and 2025.
And in this same report, it estimates that the market size for online education in the UK was about 2 .7 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach about 4 .7 billion in 2025. So it’s a rapidly growing area of education.
I can add a few more stats there to you if you want, Adam? I just didn’t want to bore you with… I’ve got a few more. So another statistic that came out that really interested us at Cambridge was conducted by the British Council. The British Council conducted a survey in 2020 which found that 48 % of UK higher education institutions plan to expand their online provision over the next five years.
Catriona: I love them Lewis, keep going, keep going!
Louis: And another survey by the Times Higher Education in 2020 found that 91% of students who studied online during the pandemic were actually satisfied with their experience and 82% say would they consider studying online in the future. So the future looks bright for online education.
Adam: Yeah, it definitely sounds like it. I suppose it’s interesting the figures you read out about how was it 90, 90 something percent of students responded that they’d be happy to continue learning online or they were satisfied with their online learning?
That’s really interesting, it just shows how it’s one of those things that if you actually sit down and embed yourself in the learning, do the learning and learn to learn that way then why can’t it be as, why can’t it be just like the bricks and mortar schools? Yeah.
Catriona Olsen: And I think just to add onto what Lewis said there, I love those stats and figures, but also we’ve got to think about, well, why has it grown this way and why is it going to grow? And you spoke about students being online for the COVID -19 pandemic. And I think before that, there was some kind of thoughts about online education, like Adam, you yourself had about online education and what it included. And then you had the emergency online education that everyone had to flip to.
But then you have the online schools now that are established and experienced in this online education. I think it opened the eyes of parents to say this is actually an option. This is really beneficial to my child and their situation. Therefore, I’m going to continue with it. So I think that was one of the biggest reasons for growth is because we were able to actually showcase through trial of online education for so many.
Many people that they could see that they were able to do it. And I think then because of that as well, parents seen the benefits of being able to be globally mobile, as we call our students, parents who are moving around the world for jobs or whatever it is, they’re able to then access this consistent standard of education for their child as well.
So and obviously there’s the developments in technology as well. It’s all getting a lot easier now with technology and broadband and everything that’s developed over the nearly 20 years since King’s InterHigh has been an online school. It’s obviously a lot easier now to access online learning as well. So I think it’s only going to grow and grow.
What are the benefits of an online school?
Adam: It definitely sounds like that and we’ve sort of come on to our second question which was what are the benefits of an online school? And we’ve covered quite a lot of that but I don’t know is there anything else apart from the ease of access now, the flexibility that it offers students and parents and teachers? Is there anything else you’d like to mention about the benefits of online schools?
Catriona: I think, yes, it is the flexibility for students. And I know we spoke earlier about students who are trying to be what we call the goal chasers, or the dream chasers. They’re wanting to be professional sports people or actors, or they’re just following their dreams. It gives them massive flexibility around their education.
I think the autonomy as well for students, a big feedback that we get from parents is that in a traditional bricks and mortar school, your children are really helped with everything. They don’t really build that independence. And when they come to an online school, yes, we give our students so many tools to support them with their learning, but at the end of the day, they still have to sit there and be self -directed. They still have to click on join that class. They still have to do their homework and submit it and have that time management. So it’s actually really good for the students as well. And moving on into jobs and university, they already have that skill that they’re able to pulled through which maybe in a bricks and mortar school or traditional school they may not have built as much as a student in an online school would have.
And of course the inclusivity of schools as well. The diverse range of students that we have. I would be all day telling you all the situations of students that we have in our school. We’re very all online schools are very inclusive in nature. You’ve got students with like mobility issues or students who need learning accommodations. You can build in tools to the online environment that are more difficult to build in in your traditional bricks and mortar school as well.
But it’s not just special education needs as well. We also have a lot of students that join us with social and emotional needs. And not being in the classroom with that peer pressure, with even just the noise, even just the amount of people in the room with them, can really reduce those needs that they have.
Adam: Yeah, I can totally understand that. And as you said, it’s helpful for the diversity of a school will help for whatever those students then go on to witness because you’ve got the benefit of a background of being in such a diverse group of people. You’ve shared those experiences and those learnings with them.
Catriona: Yeah, and I think as well, it’s not just the diversity of needs within the UK. We have students from around the world. So I know I said earlier about we start at the beginning of a lesson talking about the weather, but really grasping on that global aspect, we have so many students that join us from outside of the UK that even when you’re discussing a poem in English or you’re discussing something in geography or, you know, there’s so many different applicable scenarios that students from all different countries and different backgrounds are able to comment on and learn from each other. Again, it’s a massive benefit.
Adam: Yeah. And Louis, any other benefits or do you want to touch on the benefits to maybe teaching a Cambridge curriculum as a online school?
Louis: Yeah, I mean, I can certainly come on to that. I just want to quickly add to something that Catriona said that was really interesting about the students who attend King’s InterHigh who perhaps felt that in the physical setting, it was a bit too overstimulating, a bit too noisy.
So when I speak to online schools and I speak to them about their student makeup, that is actually one of the surprising reasons why a lot of students have turned to them as online alternatives to their education. And that’s that they did it during COVID and they simply just found that they prefer learning this way.
They learned that they are able to concentrate a lot better, they’re able to complete a lot more work, a lot more fluidity in their timetable, and they just preferred it and carried on. So in addition to that, yeah, I can come on to a few of the benefits that I know of reasons schools come to speak to me and telling me about, and also about some Cambridge-related ones as well.
So specifically, I touched earlier on about the smaller class sizes, but it really does mean a lot more individual support to meet learning needs. So online class sizes, they tend to be significantly smaller with lots more opportunities for one-to-one support from a form tutor or to a targeted progress leader, they can be much more targeted to learners’ particular needs and learning styles.
So also, I want to touch on the fact that it improves the access to a Cambridge education if you are opting for online with one of our approved schools, because learners can access our curriculum even if there isn’t a Cambridge physical school nearby or if they move locations regularly. So although learners at Cambridge Upper Secondary and Advanced stages will need to perhaps attend registered exam venues to sit their exams. They still really feed back and share with us that just not living near a high quality physical Cambridge school, that shouldn’t stop them from being able to access a Cambridge curriculum, and it doesn’t.
Catriona: Yeah, and I think we have a lot of students that join us for that exact reason as well, Louis. They don’t have the curriculum that they want, specifically the British International Curriculum, in their local area, so they look to online for that education. And it’s fantastic. Yes, they do then have to go to exam centres. But we do have, especially at A Level, students that join us for that reason. We all know that Cambridge is internationally recognised and really rigorous education. And parents outside the UK and students outside the UK want that for their children.
Challenges of an online school
Adam: So moving away from the benefits, can we maybe talk about the challenges of an online school? Who wants to start on that? Maybe Catriona, you probably know the challenges very well.
Catriona: Yeah, no problem at all. Well look, at the very basics of it you need good internet connectivity and obviously students in the UK, generally 99% have that. Maybe in the middle of the Scottish Highlands not so much, but generally have good connectivity.
Students joining us from outside the UK sometimes can struggle with it. I mean our system we ask or we advise that you have up to 10 megabits per second connection. Some people can join us on 5 megabits per second fine. It may lag a little bit so I think that’s the kind of main issues or the main issue we would have for students outside the UK the technology is fairly simple you just need a laptop with a headset and you can access if you have the internet connection.
I think one of the biggest challenges for us, and probably in a traditional school as well, is making sure that our students remain engaged and motivated with their learning. And it’s not the same as dropping your child off at the door and in they go and there’s a teacher able to see if they’re engaged in the lesson in a traditional sense, as in watching them sitting at their desk. We don’t have the little bird on their shoulder watching them. So we have to employ lots of methods to keep students engaged in our lessons.
We have like automatic engagement meters that we can actually see if a student is engaging in our classroom environment then we can reach out to them you know to offer support or see how they’re doing but it is a constant point of challenge for us teachers and us in the online school. It is a standing item on our professional development methods of engaging students, effective methods of engaging students and it constantly will be as well. You know because you don’t have that physical presence of the teacher. Yes you can turn the camera on like this but it may look like I’m looking at you and I may be looking at something else. So it’s that level of engagement I think is the challenge that we face as well.
And I think that’s from a student point of view, from a teaching point of view as well, we might get onto this bit later but also you can’t just turn to online teaching from traditional teaching in one day. It takes training, it takes practice. We have a big professional learning schedule for our teachers as well. They have to be so adept with using digital platforms and tools and make sure that they are teaching effectively online. They need to be really engaging to their audience as well, their class. And so that is also a challenge for us as well. It’s recruitment and training and taking care of our teachers as well.
Adam: No, that’s an interesting point. And we actually did an episode, I think it was in series three, where we talked about online teaching and we had a teacher who had been teaching online since before the pandemic. He’d come on to give some tips on being engaging when you are a face on a screen. And it’s not, I’m probably doing all the bad things thinking back to that episode because I’m slightly slouching. I’m not sat properly. But I have got my camera on, I am making eye contact with the camera when I can, so there’s a lot more to it than I know.
Catriona: Yes. Yeah. But you are right though, we do actually give teachers advice about teaching online. Sitting, looking at your screen, you know, your lighting, your background, etc. It’s all those basic things because you don’t want students distracted by what’s going on in your background or by you looking to the side all the time. So all those things really, really matter for quality online education.
Adam: Yeah, yeah. And Lewis, any challenges from your perspective?
Louis: Well, technology was one that Catriona mentioned. Very quickly, and I think for the listeners that might not be aware, we had to, of course, play testament to that. We did have to reschedule our recording of our podcast here today because of that very incident of technology causing poor internet because of bad weather.
So no one’s immune to technology entirely, but we find that our students at Cambridge online schools, the requirement of list of things that they need to actually access the lessons are generally quite basic. Like Catriona said, laptop, headphones, with the camera, it’s all quite apt.
So the other one I wanted to touch on was about how to, a challenge or certainly a perceived challenge is about how to manage screen time carefully. So this is one that I’ve often thought and considered and something that when I conduct the school approval visits with schools to determine whether or not they are meeting the standards to become a Cambridge school. It’s something that I will look at when I’m conducting lesson observations and it’s how screen time and lessons are actually managed in such a way.
But in a similar way actually to how we would vary activities and our focus in a traditional bricks and mortar classroom, learners should actually be given the opportunity to come away from the screen and perhaps complete a task in a lesson as well. So they should be able to ask for help or share their work with the class afterwards and some of the best examples of lessons that I have seen online have involved time for the students to complete some work, perhaps with a pen and paper or complete maybe an outdoor activity of some kind.
One online lesson does not necessarily equal one hour of screen time is one of the key takeaways that I’ve had. And that actually directly links to one of the standards that I am required to judge against. And that’s the Cambridge standard says that an online provision at this school must encourage active learning and collaborative learning which fulfills the school’s mission and educational values, which directly links to managing screen time effectively and fostering an engaging hour of work.
How to encourage learners to engage in lessons
Adam: Yeah, and you’ve brought us on to our next question quite nicely actually, so thank you, Louis, which was how do you encourage learners to engage in lessons? How do you get them active and participating in active learning?
Louis: Well, I can certainly point your listeners to something. So you mentioned that you’re going to include some things into the notes. So Cambridge recently published a Getting Started with Online Teaching and Learning Guide, which has broken down into some really informative sections. So it’ll be really useful to anybody who’s listening that wants to learn more about online education, whether you’re an established teacher or whether you are somebody that’s new to the online sphere of education. One of the sections in that is all about how to encourage learners to engage in online lessons.
And some of the things that it mentions in there are about interactive content, for example, incorporating multimedia, quizzes, interactive elements to make lessons as engaging as possible.
Real world relevance is something that I quite wanted to factor into my online lessons when I was a teacher, to make sure that lessons would relate to real world scenarios, showing practical applications. And crucially, which links back to that standards that I was just telling you about, student collaboration is a great way to make learners engage in a lesson. Encourage group projects, breakout rooms, discussions to foster a sense of community and shared learning.
Catriona: So if I was to answer that question, I would have said everything that Louis said, or definitely on the same page. Or maybe I just read your document and it seeped into my long-term memory Louis! I would also say, as well as the interactive content, the active learning strategies as well, you know, making sure students are actually doing things, whether that is on the screen so you can see, or whether it’s, as you said earlier, Louis doing something on paper to make sure that they’re not just passively learning, they are actively learning in the lesson as well.
And then the other one I’m going to add on there is personal connection. And that really encourages the student. So whether it’s in breakout rooms, as you said, or whether it’s in group work activity, whether it’s between the teacher and the student in like a one-to-one, Q&A, whatever way that the teacher can encourage that personal connection to the lesson which links to the real-world examples too doesn’t it?
And then another element that we’re really starting to build into our lessons as well which students love is obviously gamification elements; that kind of ‘I’ve scored this, what have you scored?’ competition against each other and badges and awards really does help to boost engagement actually especially in the lower years Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 they absolutely love it.
Adam: Yeah, I can imagine. I was all for stickers and badges and any sort of thing like that when I was in school. Absolutely loved it.
How do you create social connections and manage wellbeing in online schools?
Adam: You again touched on something that we’re going to come onto as well. So I talked about why maybe I couldn’t imagine an online school and it’s that I associated school with being in person and with my friends. So my next question is, how do you create those social connections and manage wellbeing in online schools? Katrina, I think we’ll come to you for this one.
Catriona: Yeah, no problem. And I think I probably should have answered this part as well when we talked about the challenges, because I think it’ll be an ongoing challenge to online schools to ensure that you are allowing students, if they want to, to create social connections. So I’ll start with the social connections part. So obviously with VR becoming more prevalent now, we’re really using it to allow our students to socially connect more. So in our key stage two, we actually have a VR playground that students can go to on their breaks.
We’ve got the friendship bench, which is just absolutely beautiful. Makes me smile every time I think of it. Teachers are supervising the same as you would do in a traditional bricks and mortar school, but we have little activities for the students to do. So just like you would be doing in a playground as well, they get to do that in their Key Stage 2 playground. We’ve rolled that up as well now into Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4. Key Stage 4, we’ve actually have like a buddy system. So we have like our student forum and other students who volunteer who want to be a buddy to other students. They go and meet in this virtual space.
Again, we’ve got different areas that they can go to in the virtual space and all supervised by teachers as well. And then in Key Stage 3, we have our forum groups, our tutor groups. On a rotation, they do challenges in the morning. So they all meet up in forum groups and they do challenges. The latest one is trying to find some kind of evidence in Egypt.
There are a lot of online opportunities available, but then also in-person trips. Now obviously it’s not possible to have say to the whole year group you’ve got to meet all together because we’ve got students all around the world, but we do give the opportunity. So all of our Key Stage 3 students for example are all going on a trip to London, to different museums, they have like a little bit of a scavenger hunt around, parents can come as well if the child needs some kind of social support as well, but they get to meet each other in person as well and we’ve got lots more opportunities for the students to meet in person if they want to. It’s always the choice because we never know what an individual child’s personal needs are. Some students want that connection, they want to go and meet people in person. Some students that would be their absolute worst nightmare, they would much rather go to an online club. So that’s the kind of social connections side of our school.
Adam: Yeah.
Louis: I just wanted to briefly add to what Catriona said. I mean, this is something that really stood out when I spoke to Catriona and I learned more about King’s InterHigh through the approval process. The virtual clubs and activities that are put on offer at a number of Cambridge schools, including King’s InterHigh, they offer a real online extracurricular activities to help students connect meaningfully over mutual shared interest, but crucially, as Catriona said, if they want to.
So another one of our Cambridge online schools, when taking a bit of a deep dive into their ways that they foster social connection. They had clubs such as like coding clubs, psychology clubs, DJing clubs, debating clubs. These are clubs that might not have any pertinent relation to a syllabus that’s being studied, although actually the school did gauge the interest in these clubs as ways of thinking about what syllabus is to offer in the future. So it did have some indicative signposting for them. But I’ve seen it done in a number of ways and I would encourage you to perhaps if you look at Cambridge online schools, check out their social media, their Instagram, their LinkedIn, their X or Twitter accounts because I know that I see quite a lot of the fun things that schools get up to on there about how they help their students foster meaningful interactions.
Adam: That’s great. And social media is always going to be the perfect place to find out what schools are doing around that.
Louis: In fact, I recently saw on King’s InterHigh’s Instagram about people traveling to skiing slopes, about people meeting up physically in London. So yeah, all that very, very active and meaningful.
Catriona: Yeah, I think it’s really important to offer that to students and to continue to grow that offer to students as well, but not just put it on for the sake of putting it on, but actually, as you said, it’s actually looking at what students are interested in and what they want to actually get involved in.
Wellbeing
Louis: On the topic of wellbeing, I actually think this is one of the greatest misconceptions about online education. So anecdotally, I will sometimes talk to my friends, talk to my former colleagues who still work in physical schools, and I will say about what it’s like to work with online schools. And one of the first things that they will say back to me is, how can you actually tell how your kids are doing, how can you see how they are within themselves, how could you monitor their wellbeing?
So to help address this, I mean, I know that schools do a lot to address this. So we, at Cambridge, we had a piece of research recently conducted where about 23 of our online schools were all involved in this research. And we got some really interesting findings that came out of it.
It reaffirms the fact that online schools are doing a lot. So, for example, all of the centres that we spoke to, the 23 of those online schools that we spoke to, all centres offered some form of social-emotional learning within their school. Many made it compulsory. So most schools have some form of specialist support, like counsellors, wellbeing specialists, therapists, mentors. So nearly all as well had homerooms and form groups, similar to what you might be familiar with in physical schools, where the form tutor or homeroom tutor would have the primary responsibility of addressing the wellbeing and need of their students, finding out how they’re appearing on camera, how they are working.
So extracurricular clubs, I mentioned to you this one. So many of our larger schools like King’s InterHigh recognize that students together in a low stakes environment can form really meaningful online friendships like psychology, coding, debating, DJing, the clubs I mentioned to you earlier.
Apps was a really interesting one as well. So a really interesting outcome we found that was a number of our Cambridge online schools were using apps like EIPulse, Tranquility, Thrively, and they were actually using these as one point on a triangle to really get an excellent understanding of their students’ wellbeing. So the apps were used with their students multiple times a year to judge the well -being, where the students would just answer some questions.
So the second point on the triangle would be the Cambridge Wellbeing Check and the third being a more formative observation of those home groups and of those form groups that I was saying earlier. And between those three points, it was possible to form really quite an accurate picture of how their online students were coping with their wellbeing.
Adam: Excellent, we’ll put all the links to the processes and the systems that you’ve just mentioned in the show notes so teachers can actually go and check those out for themselves.
Louis: Yeah, I’ve paraphrased quite quickly there a blog that was published by Cambridge. So if you do want to find out more about that research, then all the details can be in the blog.
Catriona: And I think in the online classroom as well, just another thing that we do as standard in all classrooms is have little polls in every lesson, in assemblies, in our forum groups, say how are you today, how are you feeling today with different ratings and it really helps the teacher then. If someone you know puts down they’re not feeling so well to reach out to follow up and in forum groups to then actually have a one-to-one conversation with that student as well. We found that to be really powerful and really quick and easy way to find out if a student is struggling. So it’s just one little way on top of everything that Louis just said there that we do as well.
Adam: Yeah, do you often find, and this is just sort of popped up in my head, that it’s maybe easier to reach out if you’re in an online school because it’s less awkward than a face-to-face conversation sometimes? So they can, if they do want to talk, type it?
Catriona: That’s it exactly it, because you can do it, you can do it privately as a teacher, a student can say that they are not feeling good today privately to the teacher in the poll or in the Q &A, whatever it is. The teacher can bring a student into a breakout room to have a quick chat with them in the physical environment. That’s not possible without everybody seeing what was going on and seeing the teacher speaking to you on a one-to-one basis. So again, that really helps with that anxiety that students feel around that as well.
Adam: Yeah.
Louis: Actually, an unexpected and added outcome of the research I was just talking to you about there was that some of our online teachers that were surveyed as a part of the research stated that their online students are some of the students that they’ve known best in their entire career that spans teaching, physical and online. They say because there is that perceived distance and gap between them and their students, they actually say that they try even harder, like they go that extra extra mile to make sure that that bond is there, which is actually, in their words, contributors to some of the most meaningful student teacher relationships that they’ve ever known.
Adam: That’s really interesting. I wouldn’t have thought that. See, I’m learning loads today!
Louis: Yeah, glad to be of educational service.
Catriona: And I do think that is one of the common misconceptions that we have with staff who come and interview with us and come for a job with us. It’s nearly always the question that they will ask in an interview. How do you build relationships with students in the online environment? And we all also get that feedback from our teachers that are with us. And we also get it from parents as well. You know, the teacher-student relationship is really powerful and you can really build up a relationship with your students that you may not do in a class with 20 students.
Misconceptions about online schools
Adam: Yeah, that’s a good point. And we’ve come across so many misconceptions, I think, just during the course of this podcast. So my final question was going to be, what are prominent misconceptions?
Catriona: Well, I wanted to speak about people’s perception of online schooling, the misconception of online schooling, and that somehow it’s got inferior quality to traditional schools. And it certainly does not from our platforms, from the offers that we have to our students, the different pathways, the different wellness support, the technology, all the enhancements that we do with students, the curriculum that we offer.
I think need to kind of debunk this that online schools are inferior and ‘oh you teach in an online school, like how does that work?’ It’s really about I think educating everyone that online school, as we said earlier Adam, suits a lot of students for a lot of different reasons and it is for a lot of different reasons. So I think it’s important to think about that. We teach the same curricula, our students write the same exams and they get on, according to some research, slightly better than students in traditional schools.
Adam: And Louis, do you have anything that you’d like to say on that point?
Louis: Everything you said there Catriona is exactly our thinking at Cambridge. We really see that online education has a meaningful place in the world of education in today’s day and age. The pedagogy is exactly the same, but the same pedagogy that dictates high quality and learning standards in a physical classroom, that same pedagogy, although it might look different, and it could be delivered in a different way, that same pedagogy drives excellence in an online setting as well.
And not only is it possible to just match what’s possible in a physical classroom through digital technology and through the tools, softwares and platforms that are coming out there now, it is possible to vastly supersede what’s happening in physical classrooms, which I think people are going to become more and more aware of.
Most people use, when people switched to online learning in a hurry, Zoom, Teams, some of these some of these learning platforms were being used that were not ideal for student learning. Now, we are seeing a number of different learner platforms that are developing. AI, for example, where AI is monitoring the involvement, the contribution, the understanding of students in various breakout rooms, which a teacher even wouldn’t be able to do in a physical room. Like a teacher wouldn’t be able to be in four different groups at once, whereas using different types of AI and new platforms, it is possible, which is just one different one example of how technology and digital tools can be used to even supersede what’s possible in a physical room.
Adam: You both make excellent points. In education, when there’s a new technology, there’s a lot of focus on how teachers are going to use this technology. Where as if the focus remains on how a student’s going to learn best, what’s the best thing for students, it’s the medium of instruction that changes a little bit, but the goal doesn’t change.
So you’re still getting the same results and as you say, some better in some circumstances because you’re getting the benefits of the new technology as well. Yeah, that’s been really interesting. Thank you very much. That’s it. That’s all my questions actually today.
Catriona: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and Louis, thanks.
Louis: It was great to fly the flag for online education to you and your listeners today, Adam. So thank you very much for the opportunity and it’s been great to talk to you all.
Adam: You’re very welcome.
So that’s all we have time for today on our Online Schools episode. Thank you to Catriona Olson and Lewis Bone for being such fantastic guests and sharing some really useful insights. Catriona, if people want to find out more about your school, where can they go?
Catriona: Yeah, you can go to kingsinterhigh.co.uk and at King’s InterHigh on all of the usual socials (X, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook)
Adam: Great and we’ll put those in the show notes links. And Lewis, if people want to find out more information about Cambridge and online schools, where can they go?
Louis: I really recommend first and foremost that you interact with the Getting Started with Teaching and Learning Guide that will be in the notes. The head of online education, Matt James, writes a number of blogs which you can find on the Cambridge website. And you can also find out more about Cambridge’s online education on the website. That’s cambridgeinternational.org/why choose-us/online-education.
Adam: Perfect. They’ll all be in the show links. Don’t forget to tell your friends and colleagues about us and rate our show on whatever platform you’re listening on. Our show notes have lots of useful links that we’ve discussed throughout this episode, so be sure to check them out as well. And you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at CambridgeInt. That’s CambridgeINT. Thank you for listening. We hope to see you again.
If you want to learn more about online schools and what they can teach us about inclusive education, check out our recent blog.
