6
SPRING/SUMMER 2020
The Face-Off: IC vs. COVID-19
T
echnically, COVID-19 should have caused some kind of mayhem at school. But the truth is, it didn’t. On February 29th, the Lebanese government asked all schools and universities to close. That was on a Friday. On Tuesday, IC was almost fully operational - online. Teachers and students automatically took their places across their computers. It was school as usual. Ironically, it is thanks to the October revolution, which allowed the school such a smooth transition. Only a few days into the revolution, Mahmud Shihab, the Director of the Educational Resources Center and IT, quickly implemented the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) – which had been in the works for several years now. Maybe it was some kind of premonition on his part, but Shihab had been training teachers – current and incoming – in using the latest web tools. As the once Educational Technology Program Administrator at IC, Shihab began lobbying for the integration of IT in the classrooms over ten years ago when he recognized that incoming younger students were digital natives – children who had never heard of a world without internet. His first challenge was training hundreds of technologically “old” teachers in both Ras Beirut and Ain Aar (“old” defined as anyone born in the pre-internet era or, in other words, over the age of 20) to use the latest web tools. In 2010, Shihab introduced Moodle (Modular Object-
Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment - a high end learning management software system that produces internetbased courses and websites). It was the first step in creating a collaborative learning environment at IC and has proved to be highly effective during the school’s sudden emergency closures during the next few years. In 2017, Shihab took it one step further and introduced google classroom or G Suite. Then and now, G Suite and Microsoft Office 365, provide the single backbone sign-on system for all the school platforms with just one username and password and allows the access of thousands of websites that support Google or Microsoft sign-on systems. Students only need their mobile phones to stay connected with their teachers. And so it was that when both the October revolution and COVID-19 forced the closure of schools, teachers and students automatically took their places behind their screens. But as Shihab recognized, even those measures are quickly becoming somewhat redundant. “A new world is being shaped very fast,” he said, “we have to be ready.” Simply put, ‘being ready’ means the ability to transition at a moment’s notice from face-to-face schooling to a 100% online mode. In a 26-page report submitted to the IC Board, Shihab outlined in painstaking details a K-12 Virtual Learning Framework that he designed (mostly based on Koehler
EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS Academic Management Systems Inspired by the Danielson Framework for Teaching which IC recently adopted, Shihab went a step further and created a Virtual Learning Classroom Cycle. Both his models have been presented to the Lebanese Ministry of Education and the Center for Educational Research and Development (CERD) charged with modernizing and developing the Lebanese curriculum.
Devised by Shihab, the K-12 Virtual School Plan builds on Koehler and Mishra’s TPACK Framework as well as Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge with an emphasis on alternative assessment strategies, student support services, parents’ support, and community support. The student is the central factor that determines the technology used, choice of essential content, teaching methodologies, and assessment practices.
