Many issues remain, but while many people involved in schools are moving online, I want to share even a little of what we learned. I am publishing this quickly, but because the issue is still ongoing, please understand this as a personal article rather than an article from the organization.

Background

• In normal times, we teach English in physical classrooms.
• Teachers are bilingual teachers with TOEFL scores of 100 or higher, working part-time.
• Students move forward with their own learning while teachers teach English and provide coaching.
• It is closer to individual instruction, but classes are run with multiple teachers watching multiple students.
• To improve the learning environment, we use our own LMS, or learning management system, which we usually develop.
• Because we use that LMS, we already use iPads in normal operations.
• We also provide a fully online writing correction service, which we also usually develop, as teaching material.

That is the background. What was good was that the organization had relatively high digital literacy and already had a learning system based on online use. On the other hand, what made online conversion difficult was that our competitive strength included things that show value face to face, such as creating a learning environment using classrooms, coaching, and individual-instruction-like learning. I will explain these later.

What we did first

• First, we created a response preparation room, planned verification work with a small team, decided the purpose, and proceeded with research along that purpose.
• In parallel, we created a checklist for the communication structure for school closures.
• We surveyed employees, teachers, and students about their PC environment, internet environment, camera environment, and microphone environment.

First, we made a plan with a small team. There were many unknowns, such as which tools and procedures to use, so the urgent task was to proceed with verification work. If you are not usually prepared, you cannot suddenly provide a service. At the same time, to avoid losing the purpose, we first created agreement on the team’s purpose.

The places that usually stream lecture videos online and are already prepared are really impressive.

Harvard and MIT move classes online for coronavirus response _As COVID-19 spreads through the biomedical community in Boston, Harvard University announced a shift to online lectures and told students not to return to campus after spring break._www.technologyreview.jp

In parallel, we created a checklist for school-closure response. Preparing online lessons while also handling emergency communication is extremely draining. To move into a structure that drains people as little as possible, we quickly created lists. We also wrote code to automate task processing for efficiency.

The article below was also helpful in building the response structure. It is by Miyasaka, who is now vice governor of Tokyo. Since we were working remotely, we adjusted some parts.

What should you do during a major incident? | miyasaka | note _A former Yahoo subordinate suddenly messaged me: “Can I use the words you left for emergency response in an upcoming seminar?”_note.com

At the same time, we surveyed environmental issues that would soon become obstacles. For employees, we quickly arranged mobile Wi-Fi for members without an internet environment. Issues that look like they will take time should be crushed early. We also reviewed survey items step by step as we collected answers from employees, then teachers, then students, because the answers let us add survey items.

At this point, it is good to clarify as much as possible what students and guardians want. They probably have many demands, not only safety and academic improvement. I think it is important to solve the highest-priority demands first through survey results.

Verification work

Once we had the rough priority picture, the verification work started with documentation. We wrote out what might become hurdles, reviewed it with team members, and gradually made the image more concrete. Once we had an approximate image of how it could work, we held trial lessons internally.

At that time, we narrowed the lesson contents as well. If we tried to do every lesson, it would take a lot of time, so we limited it to part of the curriculum. What was quite difficult for us was the individual-instruction-like learning. If the class format is one teacher teaching many students in a lecture style, I think it can probably be provided more easily.

By this point, the bottlenecks became clear. This time, resolving bottlenecks was important, but we prioritized clarifying what we could and could not do. Once we clarified what could and could not be done, we moved on and thought about bottlenecks later.

For example, preparing printed materials used in the classroom looked difficult. So we had to decide whether to send them as data, prepare something that could replace that curriculum, or not do it.

After those bottlenecks had mostly appeared, we returned to the purpose of the first verification work, prioritized which bottlenecks should be resolved, and moved into the phase of resolving them.

As we gradually continued verification, our knowledge of online lessons increased. At this stage, we expanded the trial scope and expanded trial slots to include actual students and teachers. Before beginning a trial, we always created survey items, such as in Google Forms, and asked participants to answer after the trial. We then made the next improvements from the responses.

We are currently at this stage, continuously rotating the improvement cycle. The big steps forward were that we were able to provide online lessons to dozens of people and start rotating the improvement cycle early.

Going forward

As I wrote in a tweet, many points still need improvement. Capacity in particular is a major issue. In the current improvement cycle, we are prioritizing and working on things that can be implemented as much as possible, so fundamental breakthroughs are especially difficult. Perhaps development from a long-term perspective, separate from the improvement cycle, will be necessary. In any case, we will continue working on the issues while watching the situation. If there are updates, I will share them.

Personally, in working on online lessons, the things I usually keep in mind during development, such as agile, lean, and self-running teams, were very useful. People involved in schools may not be very familiar with these ideas, but in highly uncertain situations like this, I think the approach of starting with what can be done, trying it, learning, and continuing to improve is effective. I hope this is useful as a reference.