Online learning for ELC-12 students anywhere in the world, founded on the Haileybury traditions of academic excellence, a global outlook, an entrepreneurial spirit and our commitment to social justice.

Haileybury has always embraced technology for teaching and learning.

We see ourselves as innovators. High-speed WiFi, laptops and tablets, video and cloud-based services, along with our school-wide LMS Canvas, are all now part of our students’ everyday learning experiences.

But the latest technology is not what matters.

What is important is technology that meets the needs of students and teachers. Technology that helps deliver outstanding learning experiences that fuel academic excellence.

Innovation, technology and learning

Innovation using technology that brings benefits for our students and teachers is our motivation for creating HaileyburyX.

HaileyburyX will develop online courses not just for Haileybury students but for ELC-12 students anywhere in the world.

As a forward looking, digitally advanced school we are in a unique position to innovate in EdTech - technology for teaching and learning. Our students will benefit from the courses we develop for HaileyburyX.

But we also intend that our teachers, and the whole school community, will get to learn about how we can best use technology to deliver outstanding learning experiences, putting our school at the forefront of educational innovation.

Read on for more detail about some of our plans for HaileyburyX.

For our students

Digital is an integral part of the everyday lives of our students. They have have never experienced a world without ubiquitous technology.

As a result, their expectations of a quality learning experience are different. This challenges us to continually evolve our pedagogical approach.

HaileyburyX is not just about developing and delivering new kinds of courses - whether alongside the curriculum or as part of it - but is about helping us learn about the effective use of technology to benefit the whole student community.

FOR OUR TEACHERS

The focus of HaileyburyX, like our adoption of Canvas across the school, is on enhancing the way we teach learners of today and tomorrow.

Courses are complex and time-consuming to develop. Our expertise and subject knowledge must be distilled into experiences that help our students learn effectively, that engage their imagination and that integrate what they learn into their developing worldview. This will help them perform to the best of their abilities.

To build courses for HaileyburyX we have adopted some of the processes and practices of an approach called Agile which has proved to be extraordinarily effective. It originated in software development and is now used in many industries worldwide.

HaileyburyX is a pioneer of this approach, called Agile Learning Design.

AGILE LEARNING DESIGN

Agile is a name for a set of principles, practices and tools that are now widely used in software development.

Although we will be developing courses, not software, the Agile principles, practices and tools are incredibly useful to us. This is because what sits behind Agile is a focus on the people doing the work and how they work. In Agile, solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organising teams.

We are supporting teachers who work with HaileyburyX by providing professional development in Agile as applied to learning design.

The Haileybury Microcredential in Agile Learning Design, made available to our teachers and education professionals for the first time in 2019, will be launched as an external microcredential for Australian teachers, and then worldwide, in 2020.

Agile supports the delivery of complex products which might have many features. A user story is something that represents an important part of the product. In the case of an online course, an example of a user story might be the get feedback story which describes how students receive feedback as they study. The get feedback story can be added to the list of things to be developed as part of a course.

Teachers are used to working in teams and Agile is about helping teams work together. Agile teams possess all of the skills and competencies to complete a project, and roles do not matter as much as results. Any member of an Agile team can contribute to any aspect of course development: for example, a digital learning expert can contribute to course content, and a subject matter expert can contribute to digital learning design.

Developing a product of any kind is complex. There are lots of things to be done and keeping track of them is essential. In Agile, the list of things to be done is called a backlog and it's used in each timebox to help teams decide what they focus on next. The backlog is often in the form of sticky notes on a task board (sometimes called a Kanban board) or increasingly, using online tools like Trello which allows distributed teams to see the things to be done and share progress.

What's NEXT

We're developing three types of courses.

Courses that sit alongside the curriculum

XPLUS

Online courses that are part of Haileybury's core curriculum

XCORE

Courses available to any learners, anywhere

XGLOBAL

Courses are organised into multidisciplinary channels that will help learners create unique pathways through our learning and to help us to create personalised microcredentials.

All of our courses, the channels to which they belong and their development progress, can be seen on our roadmap.

OUR GLOBAL ADVISORY BOARD

We've also asked a group of education experts, along with business leaders beyond education, to join our Global Advisory Board. Their role is to help us think more broadly about the possibilities for HaileyburyX.

ROADMAP

The HaileyburyX roadmap is public. You can follow our progress by visiting our Trello board for for HaileyburyX here.

LEARN MORE

Haileybury organises events called Startups each year for the whole school. At Startup, new projects and initiatives are discussed.

Peter Thomas, director of HaileyburyX, spoke about the project. You can view Peter Thomas' startup presentation about HaileyburyX.

To learn more about HaileyburyX you can also email Peter

Peter Thomas
director of HaileyburyX
peter.thomas@haileybury.vic.edu.au

If you have a Haileybury email address you can join our Slack workspace to be part of the conversation.

We'll be using Slack, and other collaboration tools including Zoom and Trello, to support our Agile Learning Design teams and to share our progress with the school community.

We're intending to transparently document our progress on HaileyburyX. You can follow us on Twitter @x_haileybury and subscribe to our Medium publication where we share some of the things we are thinking about.

You can also listen to our new podcast HaileyburyX on Soundcloud directly on Soundcloud or via Spotify.

Season 1 looks at microcredentials and features interviews with experts in education, technology and the emerging microcredential ecosystem.