Piloting online learning

Helen Murray 

Today was our first online Deep Dive session with lovely, bubbly and engaging facilitator, Rachael. In our original planning for Waymakers we wanted to think bigger than one small group that would suit and grow with our own children. Our vision was to create space for them and other children in the local home educating community to change their minds, explore their interests, needs and preferences flexibly, while still feeling part of a bigger something with some shared values that felt a bit less huge and amorphous than the wider community as a whole, which is in itself a wonderful thing to be part of.

Today's Deep Dive touched on science (reactions, acids, bases), history (alchemy, witches), English (writing hypothesis, observations, thinking up recipes and purposes of imaginary potions) and Maths (measuring) as children planned and made their potions getting suitably messy and having lots of fun in the process.

It can be really hard to build and sustain home education online learning groups that last because if numbers dwindle/teachers' circumstances change, it can quickly become unsustainable so we wanted to be able to develop a model that meant we could pay our facilitators a fair hourly rate and guarantee enough interest for each session to make it sustainable so we planned for less regular sessions on specific themes rather than subject-specific weekly sessions.

We hoped that novelty, themes and low-commitment might appeal to some for whom the predictability and structure of weekly group in-person or online sessions may not necessarily be a fit and therefore also involve more preferences and needs too. Plenty signed up on the understanding that bookings would be non-refundable (this helps make sure we can still pay the teacher fairly) and in the end only a handful were able to attend which actually made for a really lovely, small session and could still have feasibly gone ahead with an even lower number attending if needs be. We may explore separate recorded sessions (without participants) and learning materials in future and make those available (if anyone fancies recording one and donating it to Waymakers, we'd love that by the way!), 

In response to one of today's participants' suggestions to have a cooking-themed one next time, we're thinking a cheesecake-making session might be on the cards! Keep an eye on the Whatsapp group and website for details of when it will be available to book.