Global educators have limited access to one another so they reinvent solutions to the same challenges. The pandemic is clear evidence of this; while every educator on the planet was attempting to solve for remote learning, few shared practices resulted in inconsistent quality of education. We need prolific access to each other & meaningful & affordable engagement opportunities.
We’ve created an immersive social learning environment & ecosystem to connect educators to each other and to experts both synchronously and asynchronously. The avatar-based model uses human-centered design principles to professionally develop educators. Educators have agency to choose their own adventure as they walk around our “City of Learning” and partake in learning labs for SEL, PBL, and other pedagogy, as well as connect with other educators spontaneously. We also have a community network that acts as a forum to continue conversations asynchronously. Evidence collection is ongoing and constant though the 800 educators who have experienced our world so far say “it’s the best virtual learning experience they’ve ever had” and they’ve gone on to create worlds of their own using our models and methods. Our models are open source and we use a no-code platform that allows free access to educators. Our community is free as well.
Since Jan 2021, we’ve engaged 1500 educators directly in topics across SEL, PBL, racism, discrimination and social justice, AR/VR in education, assessment, behavioral data use, remote & online learning strategies, student agency, character building, brain science, emergent instruction, visible thinking routines, school sports, flipped classroom models, and math and STEM instruction. We enable educators to experience a wide variety of learning in a novel way online, cultivate meaningful connections, and learn from on another. Nearly a quarter of our participants come from low/middle-income countries. We have 44k followers on other forums such as Twitter & Clubhouse, which has lead to new discussions & virtual world creation. k20 is part of a growing movement to make learning ‘human’ again.
Educators can join our ecosystem at k20educators.com. Or they can use our human centered design principles to host events on their own with sufficient flexibility for adaptations across contexts. If they want to create avatar-based experiences, they can do that too. We have put our work out in the public for all to find. We welcome all educators for free to our network and our events.
