GlobalLab has been recognized in HundrED's 2019 Global Collection, as one of the leading education innovations in the world. From Russia, GlobalLab is an educational platform dedicated to collaborative investigative learning where curiosity rules. GlobalLab takes the premise of project-based learning and expands the scope for data collection from the classroom to the whole world. Read what they've been up to in the last few months!
Valeria Latsenova from GlobalLab explains what they have been up to since the 2018 HundrED Innovation Summit and their plans for the future!
What does it mean for GlobalLab to be recognized as a leading education innovator in the HundrED 2019 Global Collection?
Our team has always endeavored to develop the “world’s biggest class for collaborative projects” since the platform GlobalLab was first created. Attracting new members from all over the world to our open GlobalLab Community, which has the motto “Where curiosity rules”, was vital for us. With HundrED’s support, we have been able to pull off this issue more effectively and extensively! Without HundrED’s recognition, we wouldn’t have been able to involve students and teachers from more than 65 countries.
Simultaneously, the HundrED Community encourages us to spread our impact and to stay current with global educational changes, while giving us a fantastic opportunity to adopt other innovators’ experience and to acquire new knowledge. We are very pleased to be one of the HundrED Global Collection!
What are your biggest takeaways from the HundrED Innovation Summit?
Admiration for the ambassadors, innovators, and other stakeholders who are focused on pushing forward the points they feel need the most improvement, such as access to inclusive education. The story that impressed me the most was told to us by Oliver Percovich during the second day of the Summit. His project “Skateistan”, which endeavors to raise access to education for all, especially for girls, regardless of their ethnicities, nationalities, or socio-economic backgrounds, in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and South Africa, deserves special attention from stakeholders and HundrED innovators. I was also delighted to hear from Saku Tuominen and Pasi Sahlberg about current and forthcoming education changes addressing what is needed to create a faster and more valuable evolution in education and additionally how they made us open to the idea of educational transformation without fear of the unknown.
I would like to point out the efficiency of participating in the pitch meetings, in which innovators could present their projects and get acquainted with the other participants. This helped us to figure out the most common problems innovators face and what solutions they seek to solve them.
How has the HundrED Summit and global recognition helped progress the impact of GlobalLab?
Since the HundrED Summit in November 2018, we have enrolled 31,000 new GlobalLab Community members (16,500, students; 14500, teachers) from different countries (e.g., the UK, USA, Mexico, and India).
Being recognized as part of the HundrED Global Collection two times has helped us build partnerships with nine new regional Russian Institutes of Education Development and National Research University “Higher School of Economics” with the aim of teaching students and making collaborations.
We are also very glad to work with schools and to help teachers to adapt to the changes in the Russian education system, where project work, teamwork, and soft skills are particularly significant. We have enhanced our efforts toward connecting with teachers and providing them with free webinars and all the necessary information about collaborative projects and crowdsourcing activity. We have had over 2000 teachers attend our webinars so far. Many of them are now working actively with us because we are a part of the HundrED Global Collection. This is a great achievement for us!
For students, we have implemented more projects and courses, dividing them into “beginner” and “advanced”. This decision helps us to monitor students’ progress. A wide range of projects has developed questionnaires to enhance student’s skills of working with data. Many new students are interested in our activity due to the fact that GlobalLab is involved with HundrED.
So, what is next for GlobalLab?
We are still inspired by the idea of the biggest world-class for collaborative projects, so, obviously, our team intend to scale the GlobalLab Community even further. We will continue to find relevant topics related to education promotion for our teachers as well as to produce leading projects and courses that can contribute to the development of students’ soft skills, especially creativity, critical thinking, communication, and cooperation skills. We are also mindful of the topics students and teachers choose most and in this way, we want to work further on some interesting themes that will unite all the members of our community from all over the world. Now, for example, we are going to elaborate on new IT and ecology courses because they are quite popular among our foreign students.
All our efforts are driven by our conviction that members can obtain the best results through collaboration. Furthermore, we are zeroing in on opportunities to GlobalLab students and teachers who may have limited access to education and insufficient resources to acquire new knowledge. We have confidence in the various platforms and communities we work with, like HundrED, and hope that they will help us to encourage concerned stakeholders and potential partners to participate! These are our essential goals and tasks in the long term.
What would you say to innovators who are looking to connect with HundrED? Why should they be part of the global community for change?
For stakeholders who are now searching www.hundred.org and who are inspired by the vision of HundrED and their 100 innovation projects, we would just say: “Hurry up!”
We firmly believe that if your project is really interesting and vital for societal development, HundrED is the best place to scale it and to find new friends and like-minded people! Just come and join us!
Do you want to find out more about using GlobalLab in your setting?
If so, visit GlobalLab on the HundrED platform here or reach out:
