For educators ready to connect their students to peers and other educators to collaborate on learning myriad subjects all over the world, doing so digitally is just what linkr Education offers.
Gabriel Flacks
Gabriel Flacks, linkr’s co-founder and chief pedagogical officer, says the recently launched online platform aims to “to connect teachers and students and help them create a better world.”
Say a professor at a university in the United States wanted his or her students to connect with students across the globe as part of a lesson on cross cultural communication skills, for example. Flacks points out that the professor could link the class with another class at another university and students could collaborate on assignments or comment on each other’s work and gain valuable insight from peers who would never connect otherwise. The linkr network allows for all kinds of collaborations between students, teachers and institutions.
Already, the global educational network and the interactive content inherent within it has attracted hundreds of teachers and thousands of students from more than 15 countries. “The student experience is very much content-driven, so students are really navigating and sharing content,” Flacks says. “It is from publishing and engaging with content that collaboration between students can be sparked.”
In a recent LinkedIn article, “The Unique Power of Networked Teaching and Learning,” Flacks describes it this way: “All linkr users can explore myriad opportunities to apply course content through interactions with community members around the world. linkr is secure, free from ads, free from data sharing, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant and guarantees users own the content they share. Further, it is full of features to make the space easy to explore and manage, making it simple to integrate this pedagogy. I am working with a wonderful team to keep improving linkr so it benefits as many educators and learners as possible, including my own students this fall.”
Flacks also explains that he and his own students at Champlain College, Saint-Lambert benefit from applying course content within linkr. More from his post:
Becoming part of a Global Educational Network opens each student and class to a nearly infinite set of possibilities for applying and extending course content. The networked teaching and learning paradigm embraces cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary, and international learning and makes it easily accessible to learners in higher education, secondary school, language programs and other contexts. This structure reimagines the learning and teaching experience while dovetailing easily with existing curricula.
When an instructor embeds a class within an organized network of classes from around the world, students are given a powerful, flexible, and meaningful way to make course material personal and vibrant. Within a global educational network, any course experience can become interdisciplinary, interactive, and international.
Flacks will introduce linkr at the Connected Learning Summit Aug. 1 at MIT during the tech showcase.
Banner image: Screenshot from linkr
