IOE to Cooperate with GlobalLab
This September, a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between IOE and GlobalLab, a Russian-based venue for schoolers and teachers from across the globe to build L&D networks and collaborate on various educational and research projects online.
GlobalLab is a cross-border online community of children, parents and educators who are passionate about learning through joint enquiry-based initiatives. This e-venue hosts projects within individual disciplinary areas of the school curriculum alongside a range of multidisciplinary and extracurricular endeavors. All of these undertakings share the common philosophy of facilitating comprehensive individual learning & development through experiences drawn from a robust synthesis of personal and collective experimentation, exploration and discovery.
Today, GlobalLab offers a broad variety of courses, hands-on assignments and other educational products for individual students and groups. Launched by a team of Russian teaching innovators, the platform has become increasingly popular both in this country and overseas.
As part of the cooperation framework, IOE and GlobalLab have jointly embarked on a broad and diverse applied agenda. Specifically, the parties will build on their shared expertise in upgrading IOE’s professional development program for extracurricular educators. Thus, IOE’s developments in the realm of extracurricular regulation and evaluation will be complemented by GlobalLab’s modules on organizing children’s project-based activities and building personalized learning paths in online education.
Another key area, as Sergey Kosaretsky of IOE notes, is factoring in GlobalLab’s experience in designing and delivering e-curricula when developing programs to remedy disadvantaged schools. Joining GlobalLab might provide students and teachers in less privileged socio-economic settings with important incentives to improve the quality of education and rectify academic outcomes, Kosaretsky comments.
GlobalLab’s developments will also provide groundwork for IOE’s further studies of 21st century school curricula, teaching practices as well as student competencies and skills. Given unique datasets that GlobalLab has accumulated on how students and teachers act in modern-day digital realms, this data will become crucial to explore deeper perspectives in how ICT and project-based learning influence student motivation and achievement.
In addition, GlobalLab is surely worth studying as a pretty good example of how Russian EdTech can be effectively exported, Sergey Kosaretsky adds. Now that the e-venue has been generating more and more interest in the post-Soviet space and beyond, IOE experts will research into what the key factors of GlobalLab’s international success are.
In turn, IOE will support GlobalLab on an ongoing basis in further developing its networking platform and educational offerings while also sharing expertise in best-practice educational monitoring and evaluations.