OPLS blog

Last week we held a three-day training session for six “new” OCC online faculty members*. We hold these training sessions once or twice a year at IB Cardiff so that new online faculty members can get hands-on experience of managing their own parts of the OCC and be introduced to, and start to become familiar with, e-moderator skills. This year we also ran some sessions on the use of RSS feeds and aggregators, social book marking websites like del.icio.us, and we also played around on a wiki. The training session is a great opportunity for faculty members to connect with each other, and equally important, it helps to establish good working relationships with IB staff.

We currently have 89 online faculty members across all three IB programmes. Our newest members are:

Middle Years Programme
Suyi Wang: Chinese B
Marcela Bidegain: arts in Spanish

Diploma Programme
David McIntyre: English A2
Dave Mulkey: computer science
Cynthia Ballheim : DP coordinators

All three programmes
Lynda Slattery: academic honesty.

Welcome everyone, to our online community!

* OCC online faculty members are responsible for managing the OCC discussions forums and resources in their own subject area.

January the 8th saw the very first of our “electronic mailings” to IB World Schools. This means that the IB no longer physically prints and send its main curriculum documentation to schools - no more guides, teacher support materials, specimen papers, coordinator’s notes etc printed and posted. Instead, schools are expected to get their materials from the OCC or from the IB store.

In the early stages of this project we’d planned on having the new OCC in place with the facility for teachers and coordinators to subscribe (by email and RSS) to new additions on the OCC; news, resources, publications and forum postings. However, we have not achieved what we planned to last year and we now have our sights set on mid-2008 for the re-launch of the new OCC, or OCC III as we call it in our office.

In the meantime, to try to help our users with this transition to electronic publication, we created a “latest publications” page - accessible from any subject page on the OCC. It still has a few bugs that need fixing, and it could also benefit from having a search facility, but we think that it works quite well, and hope that it will help our users to find the documents they need and not make the transition to electronic mailings quite so painful.

“It’s a fabulous course… [but] not all kids are psychologically equipped to do the IB.”  So says Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, Adolescent psychologist and author of Surviving Adolescents: The must-have manual for all parents.

Hear what Carr-Gregg, and our own Greg Valentine (IB Australasian representative), have to say further about the Diploma Programme’s success in Australia, via this audio link on ABC National Radio’s Edpod site.

(Thanks, Sandy)