Seventeen-year-old Dante Bonet Espinosa doesn’t take the school bus or car to go to school. In fact, he doesn’t ‘go’ to school at all — instead, he switches on his laptop and logs into his classroom. His classes begin at around 11:30am and depending on the timetable, end either at 4:30pm or a little later. The Dubai teen spends the rest of his day pursuing other interests like karate, learning Japanese, hanging out with friends and giving piano lessons to children.
The Year 12 student has been studying at the UK-headquartered online school King’s InterHigh since 2017. “We are huge fans of online education, which I believe is the future,” says his mother Sabrina, who works as a business adviser. “It is affordable, adapts to parents’ and students’ various needs and provides quality education.”
Students and parents became more familiar with the concept of online schooling and discovered its joys (and horrors, depending on whom you ask) during the ongoing Covid-19-pandemic. But to parents who were on the lookout for an alternative method to teach their children, enrolling them in an online school for the long term seemed like the logical thing to do. It also seemed like the right step for children facing bullying, mental health issues and so on.
Tahoora Khalil, head of Middle East, King’s InterHigh, explains that many parents opted to remain in their online school even as schools across the world resumed classes offline. “For many families across the Middle East, online schooling is a pathway to top international universities and they pursue an international education at secondary school age to increase their chances of gaining admission,” she says. The school has 400 students in the Middle East.
Closer home, the Dubai-based online school iCademy Middle East has 1,500 registered students across the Middle East and IT Manager Fazal Rehman says the pandemic drove the number of student enrollments up. “We provide a high quality American education with flexibility, for students from K to Grade 12,” he says, adding that most teachers are based in the US and Canada.
Logging into digital classrooms
In an online school, all classes, activities and school events — like exhibitions, festivals and workshops — and internal assessments are held online. Classrooms feel cosmopolitan and futuristic, with students logging in and attending classes from all over the world using virtual reality technology and artificial intelligence. Classrooms are also smaller in size, with a better teacher-student ratio — for instance, UK-based online school Sophia High School has one teacher for every six children. The schools also come equipped with online student portals and learning management systems to record students’ grades.
Apart from the core academic subjects, schools also focus on unconventional topics. “Wellbeing, mindfulness and personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education are at the heart of our school,” says David McCarthy, director of education, Sophia High School. “Year 5 and 6 students practise chime meditation at the beginning of each lesson, to encourage focus and calm. We also practise a gratitude exercise roughly twice a week. More recently, we spoke about laughter therapy and we have a very open dialogue about mental wellbeing, anxiety, stress. And finally, we try to squeeze it in chi gong too.”
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