The Freedom of Having No Oversight

Well, not exactly no oversight, but close enough. The English departments of bilingual schools and the entire international school community generally operate outside of local education requirements. Of course, schools must follow safety codes and provide qualified instructors, but they are left almost entirely to themselves when it comes to designing and implementing curriculum. They must answer only to the customers, parents who determine whether their personal goals for their children have been met.

What freedom! (Except for the din of conflicting parental expectations.)

There are no high-stakes tests to teach to. No higher authority has lain down weekly units for the teachers to follow. No. Schools are given the freedom to meet local needs completely. What an amazing opportunity.

Unfortunately, few schools have staff with the experience and drive necessary to take advantage of this opportunity. They end up throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Or worse, they listen to the publishers and get sold huge amounts of material which never gets effectively used, leaving little budget for the important things. (The same thing happens in the tech sector all the time. Don't trust someone who wants your money, kids!)

Each school is different, and each set of students requires a different approach. We need the freedom to take those different approaches.

Still, having no structure leaves many schools without direction. They don't accomplish as much as they could if they had just a little more help.

This is why we are developing a bilingual framework for elementary schools in Asia. We want children and their parents to get what they pay for. Let's set realistic program goals, followed by yearly goals and reasonable objectives. Let's figure out a great way to measure these goals and how to get our students the recognition they deserve as they move forward. Let's have a complete set of curriculum and technology tools available to them for as close to free as can be managed.

One size does not fit all, though, so we are developing this framework in a free and open manner. The license will be chosen soon, but it will probably be some form of Creative Commons license. This will allow the material to be localized for teacher support or the spelling and content adjusted for American / British English without needing to obtain a special license. A CC license will also let a school simply send out material for printing if e-book readers can't be used for some reason (for example, that there isn't reliable electricity). Finally, an open license means that any school or non-profit can use the program, whether the students' guardians have the means to pay or not. Making quality education available to everyone is the reason we continue to be educators.

We will also make a choice whether to use Google Docs or GitHub for LaTeX code hosting. Will we code an SIS to Google Apps or ask the school to host something themselves? These are important decisions, but they do not need to be made yet. We are still vaporware. We will start with the big ideas first, backward design style. If schools don't like the direction we take at any point, they can fork.