As the world abruptly stopped and began to grapple with how global citizens would move throughout their everyday lives and continue to manage responsibilities during COVID-19, Rosedale was prepared and well-equipped to maneuver through these unexpected and unprecedented changes to support its partner schools across the global in continuing the delivery quality education.
Our international partner schools in China were among the first institutions in the world to face the immediate impact of the global pandemic, and we acted swiftly and strategically to: successfully support the migration of these schools from classrooms to live, online learning environments; continuously collaborate to help conquer challenges that arose from these unexpected changes; and dedicated resources to provide ongoing support for the delivery of our robust curriculum rooted in the Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD) while ensuring academic integrity in assessments and evaluations.
Rosedale’s innovative Digital Learning Platform provides agility in program delivery
The Rosedale Global High School Program is an educational technology-enabled differentiated education program. Rosedale’s Digital Learning Platform with multimedia curriculum, online assessment and evaluation system, and associated quality assurance services provide the foundational infrastructure and flexibility to ensure Rosedale and our international partner schools effectively respond to COVID-19, while maintaining high academic standards during a chaotic time.
Digitized curriculum and teaching resources: While most other school administrators and teachers were trying to figure out scanning textbooks or putting together scattered digital learning resources, Rosedale’s professionally developed, research-based multimedia OSSD curriculum and teaching resources were ready to use, which provided relief to all classroom teachers in Rosedale’s Global School Community, while supporting a consistent teaching and learning experiences.
Assessments and evaluations on one digital platform: One of the biggest challenges for K-12 schools and school boards, including many international programs during the pandemic, is that schools lost effective approaches to evaluate student learning outcomes when they were not able to host tests/exams in a physical location. Rosedale’s Global High School Program operates a centralized evaluation practice led by Ontario-based Certified Teachers on the Rosedale Digital Learning Platform with all evaluation activities and items are embedded in each course. Students submit their work products on the platform with functionalities to track, manage and report assignments. Tests and exams can be fully administrated on the online platform with academic integrity management capabilities.
Continuous support for teachers and students during COVID-19
The virtual classroom learning environment and academic integrity were focus points at the outset of COVID-19—our team of educators and administrators were required to quickly shift their learning methodologies, while ensuring submitted work was representative of the students, and academically sound. To ensure support in these areas, we created and reinforced:
Teacher training through live, online instruction: Our classroom teachers had to pivot their teaching to live, online instruction, just as their peers in other school boards around the globe. Rosedale provided a series of training sessions with experienced teacher-trainers offering rich online teaching experiences and sharing instructional strategies and techniques that would best support collaborative activities and student engagement on online video platforms.
Flexible learning schedules and operational support: We assisted international partner school administrators and teachers in adjusting course schedules to better fit an online learning environment, while ensuring students complete their courses within the partner school’s existing academic calendar. Rosedale worked closely with guidance counsellors in partner schools to support students in meeting their graduation requirements and completing the global university applications.
Academic integrity for assignments and examinations: A number of enhancements on Academic Integrity were implemented at the start of the pandemic. We improved the Digital Learning Platform and evaluations with features such as enlarging the question banks and adding function that lock a student’s screen during exams, to support the administration of online exams. We updated our existing academic integrity contract for parents and students to help support our international partner schools in addressing concerns of students’ academic integrity when completing assignments and online testing in a remote capacity. Upgrades have also been made to Rosedale’s Learning Management Platform to identify violations of academic integrity in student work and ensure quality education standards through online learning.
With countries across the world cautiously opening more businesses, and with the fall academic term upon us, we continue to empower our international partner schools and monitor how COVID-19 is impacting each individual partner school. Along with the solutions we’ve provided since the outset of the global pandemic, Rosedale’s program supports the individualized growth of students and instructional excellence of teachers—and through our differentiated, higher order thinking skill focused curriculum, innovative Digital Learning Platform, data-driven learning management, and comprehensive quality assurance services, we will continue to deliver life-changing learning outcomes to more students around world through collaboration with our international partner schools across the globe.