The Digital School’s Road to One Million Learners With Dr. Lesley Snowball

Full Transcript

Dr. Cristi Ford (00:00):

Welcome to Teach & Learn, a podcast for curious educators, brought to you by D2L, a global ed tech company committed to transforming the way the world learns.

I’m your host, Dr. Cristi Ford, vice president of Academic Affairs. In each episode, either myself or one of my colleagues will meet up with some of the sharpest minds in the K-20 space. We’ll break down trending educational topics, discuss teaching strategies, and have frank conversations about issues plaguing our schools in higher education institutions today. Whether it’s ed tech, personalized learning, virtual classrooms, or diversity and equity inclusion, we’re going to cover it all. Sharpen your pencils, class is about to begin.

Hello and welcome listeners. As educators, we know that knowledge is power and nowhere is that more evident than in underserved and displaced populations. According to United Nations, nearly half of all refugee children are not attending school and this number continues to rise. That’s why I’m really thrilled to be welcoming our guest today who is doing the work to open up access to education for refugee populations.

Dr. Lesley Snowball is the educational director for The Digital School, the first integrated digitally enabled school which provides digital and hybrid learning in a smart and flexible ways to refugees. Launched by the Mohammed bin Rashid Global Initiatives in Dubai, the school is aiming to enroll one million refugees and underprivileged children over the next five years.

Dr. Lesley Snowball, welcome, really glad to have you joining me today.

Dr. Lesley Snowball (01:43):

Thank you so much for hosting me. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you and to explain a little bit about our work at The Digital School.

Dr. Cristi Ford (01:54):

So before we dive in, Lesley, I want to talk about your work. I want to just first share how we’re connected, with our listeners. I was sitting in the Connections event in the UK and I just finished my keynote. And I was so drawn to you and our alignment with the work that I’d done in East Africa. And after seeing your presentation, I was really blown away at how connected I felt to the kind of work and the impact you were having. I felt that we were kindred spirits around our passion, education. And when it comes to access and providing equitable learning opportunities, I just found the work that you’re doing so compelling. And so I’m really happy to have you join us today and to be able to share with our listeners a little bit more about what you’re doing.

Dr. Lesley Snowball (02:40):

It’s my pleasure to be here. I think I felt that same rapport when we met, and educators often do. But of course we share that real passion for reaching those students that are often thought to be unreachable.

Dr. Cristi Ford (02:56):

Yeah, I completely agree. Those students that sometimes are thought of as being on the fringes, are such mission work and such important work. And so I understand that you’ve always been a fan or dare I say, an early adopter or early disruptor of technologies in your classrooms throughout your whole career. Can we just start by just talking a little bit about that?

Dr. Lesley Snowball (03:21):

Yes. It was somewhat pushed upon me initially. My very first experience was in the early ’80s. I was a new teacher and I was working in a school that was mainly staffed by Catholic sisters. And we had a generous sponsor offer us a new device that had come onto the market called a Sinclair ZX81. It was a first pc, PC with a small P, small C, not the Microsoft version, but we didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know how it worked. And the sisters were very fast to move backwards in the volunteering line up, and that left me as the first. I’m not sure I volunteered or was volunteered, but certainly I took it on. It was a very interesting, exciting venture, but it was laborious.

You had to connect a tape recorder. We had two programs both on separate cassette tapes. If viewers can actually remember what cassette tapes looked like. It took 10 minutes to load a program. They were very, very basic games, very simple games. And at the end of the loading, it was mainly a text-based game, not graphics.

But at the end of the loading period I often got an error message and that was like, “Oh no. Okay, you have to start again. You wait another 10 minutes.” I hope it taught my students, patience. But they were so motivated by those very, very simple games and that really got me hooked because my kids had very diverse special learning needs, and anything that motivated them was a real blessing. And so that was my start.

I then went on in another school to the UK government was pushing technology. And a few years later there was a big government initiative to get computers into schools, and this was linked to the BBC, the British Broadcasting Company and a computer company called Acorn. And so I had a BBC Micro. And in order to get that, this time I did volunteer. Each school had to send one educator for a two-day training course. And as a reward for that, you actually got the computer in your classroom. That was more sophisticated. It was really well set up for classrooms. It had extras like a keyboard that could be particularly used with students who had physical disabilities. It had a micro mic that you could use to control, for example, a boat to get it across the river. That was also really exciting.

I had the experience of, I had one child who was an elective mute, a grade eight boy who hadn’t spoken for years and years and years in a school setting. And he started to speak just with sounds using this micro mic to control the game. And so things like that were small step in a way, but a huge step for him. And that was it. I was hooked. I was lucky that in all my subsequent schools I was able to have computer in my classroom or computers, or we had good computer labs.

And so I’ve always seen it particularly for students who had specific learning needs, it can be such a huge motivation. Of course, they learn skills, they learn digital skills, they learn subject knowledge. But the main thing is the motivation. It hooks them into learning. It gives them a different interest, and just to see them engaged is a reward for that kind of students.

Dr. Cristi Ford (07:36):

That’s really profound. And as I listened to you, we refer to selective mutism here in the U.S. I actually had my experiences working with kids on the spectrum as well as folks that have selective mutism and found that the power of digital learning, the power to be able to use technology to augment the learning opportunity or the learning moment as we refer to it here at D2L, was just second to none. And like you, just really got hooked very early around this work.

I’d really love to talk a little bit more about your pedagogical framing and your background. I know you have a passion for self-directed learning. I’ve heard you talk about curriculum design and really the ways in which you’re passionate about creating these spaces that allow for more inclusive education. Can you share a little bit more about that with our listeners here?

Dr. Lesley Snowball (08:35):

Yeah, certainly. I would also add to that list a thread of professional development for teachers, which has always been really important. And of course that’s a vital factor in the success of anything. So put that together with a particular approach to learning, a particular approach to curriculum. And you can create learning spaces, learning environments that really do work for students with diverse needs.

Again going back to that very first school, maybe everybody’s first school is a formative experience. But that was a school in an era where there was no national curriculum, there was no curriculum requirement by government, and my school just didn’t have the curriculum. We were serving students who’d been excluded from the national system, from the mainstream schools. They had multiple needs. It was a residential school because they weren’t able to cope at home and no one curriculum would actually have coped, would have given those students what they needed.

So we had a very eclectic mix of textbooks that work for some students. Very few of them were working at grade level. Very few of them could have coped with mainstream education. So we pulled together what we could, and the first thing I did was create a personalized, I wouldn’t call it a curriculum, but I suppose it was, but a personalized learning program for each of my students. I had 13 boys all with different needs, aged between nine and 13. I’ve thought actually when I was writing this, if I tried to fit those students into one Venn diagram, there would’ve been very, very, very thin overlaps because they were so diverse. And that was rewarding as well. They were so individual. So that was a very formative experience for me.

Self-directed learning and independence and personalized learning was absolutely essential. I couldn’t group teach. I couldn’t all class teach and no teacher could attend to that many students all at once. So they have to have tasks that they could pursue independently, and those independent learning skills were essential really to developing them.

You mentioned learning spaces, and it also brought to mind that I had children who were ADHD. There wasn’t a designation of ADHD then. It wasn’t defined, but I now know that’s absolutely what they were. I had students who were dyslexic, a whole range, auditory, visual, memory, severe challenges. But with the ADHD children, I was lucky to have a big classroom, a spacious classroom, an absolute flexibility to do what I wanted, move my desks around. And so I made floor spaces for the students. Because the students who couldn’t sit at a two-foot wide desk comfortably could sprawl on the floor with their materials spread out. And they could work, and they could focus, and they could move their legs, and they could squirrel around and they could still learn. If they were confined to a seat and a desk, they didn’t cope and they ended up really just wasting their time disrupting other students. The learning space was also really significant to that.

And then that was right at the beginning of my teaching experience, and I think it just obviously suited my style. I think it would’ve driven some teachers crazy, they would’ve needed that more structure. I thrived on it, the students thrived on it.

Later in my career, I became very involved with a curriculum program that combined a level of personalized curriculum with a high level of self-directed learning. That was the IB, the International Baccalaureate.

Dr. Cristi Ford (13:11):

Yes, yeah.

Dr. Lesley Snowball (13:11):

At the point that I became involved, it was not actually the International Baccalaureate. We created a group to create a curriculum called the Primary Years Program, and that later became part of the IB sequence.

But that allows me to do what I’d done in that first classroom, but on a much bigger scale. Making a program that a school could personalize, they could contextualize. Students were encouraged to contextualize and personalize according to their interests and aspirations. And students were strongly, strongly encouraged to be self-directed inquirers, independent learning. And it really had student advocacy, student engagement at the center. So that came round to a scalable but similar approach to combining those things.

Dr. Cristi Ford (14:15):

Just hearing again, I always enjoy talking with you. We could do a podcast one, two, and three because you have such disparate and diverse experiences around this work. But I want to jump in now to give our listeners a taste around your work at The Digital School.

So I guess I’d like to ask you to share with me a little bit about how you landed at The Digital School, what attracted you to the opportunity? And for those who are listening that have no familiarity with The Digital School, you could just tell us a little bit about the background and the structure, and just all of the components.

Dr. Lesley Snowball (14:52):

Absolutely. Well, let me start with The Digital School and then come to my part in it. It’s a concept as you said in the introduction, a concept that was initiated by Muhammad bin Rashid Global Initiatives in Dubai, and it arose from COVID. There’s always great things that come out of horrible things, and this was one of the great things that came out of COVID. So I was fortunate enough to be in the UAE. My role at that point was working with the UAE government. I was there during COVID. And the UAE coped so well with COVID, including educationally. I genuinely feel very privileged that I was there and not in other parts of the world.

So the education, the schools private and public were given two weeks holiday to get online. Now some of these schools already had online programs, of course, as part of their offerings, as part of their curriculum, but many didn’t. But by the end of those two weeks with support, including from the unit I was working with, they were all online. They all had some form of digital education available for their students. And the next year was really supporting that, pushing them to do more, pulling them along when they felt they couldn’t continue, giving them support. And the effort was really great from the government and from the telecom companies who the government pulled in to give that connectivity support.

So my role at that point was with the government, but not with this initiative. Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai, his idea was, “We did it so well in the UAE during COVID for our people. Surely we can use digital education to reach all those students who not only didn’t get online during COVID but weren’t even in education before that.” He has a real altruistic approach. He wants the UAE to be a leader in many things, but he wants to use that for the good of the world.

And so he launched this initiative and the initial goal was to reach one million students who are marginalized. Now you mentioned refugees at the beginning and refugees make up a big part of our student body, but it goes beyond that. We would define marginalized as any student who doesn’t have regular and reliable access to education. Certainly there are refugees suffering from conflict trauma. They’ve been displaced before at a moment’s notice, not only from their homes, but from their countries, and obviously from their education system. Some students are in poverty and at grave risk of being either put into child labor, or even worse, taken by drug gangs, armed gangs as part of their labor force. Some students are simply too remote to have any chance of a school anywhere near them. So digital education should and can, we believe, I believe, be a real part of the solution to the global education crisis.

So I left after COVID. I left Dubai, I returned home. I’d been overseas for 33 years, and it was time to come home and try to find my place in the UK again. And within a few months, I had been asked to be on the advisory council to help The Digital School get started when it was just an idea. And within a few months of moving back to the UK, they asked me to join them full time and I jumped at the chance. It’s hard work, but of course it’s very, very rewarding.

Why? It allowed me just an opportunity to pull together so many threads that have been my passions throughout my educational career, some of which you’ve mentioned, the curriculum design, the self-directed learning focus for students or the opportunity to focus on educators and their professional development. It wasn’t part of our initial role, our initial mission, but we recognize how essential it is.

And also the opportunity to work in an initiative that is tailored or aims to be tailored for diverse populations. I’ve always worked overseas, or a lot of my career, I’ve worked overseas with multicultural, multilingual communities, and I feel very comfortable in those. I thrive, I think on the unfamiliar. And so Digital School allows me to do that without actually traveling in the way I used to travel. I still get that thrill really of I can be in Lebanon, I can be in Arizona, I can be in Mauritania in one day without actually leaving the office, it’s a lazy way to continue to enjoy traveling.

Dr. Cristi Ford (20:51):

That’s fantastic. As I’m listening to you talk, I just want to do a moment of clarification here. Just for those who are listening, we talk about The Digital School. Are we talking about primary education, secondary, postsecondary? You can just give us a little background in terms of the scale and the breadth of The Digital School.

Dr. Lesley Snowball (21:11):

So it’s important to say we’re in our third year. We are not yet near the million that we are aiming for. We currently have about 80,000 students across eight different countries, and that is set to expand this year, very rapidly. And you’ll be pleased to know that expansion is largely going to be in Southern African countries.

Dr. Cristi Ford (21:33):

Oh, that’s great.

Dr. Lesley Snowball (21:34):

We started with parameters on our ages because we didn’t want to work with very young children because it needs a different approach. We don’t want them online. We don’t want any students online too much, but we certainly don’t want that with younger children. We didn’t want it to be seen as a substitute for good physically present early childhood education. So we set our lower limit at grade four. We think students at that age are conceptually able to work digitally and understand what’s going on.

We set our upper limit initially at grade nine. And the reason we didn’t go any higher than that was because those years, 10, 11, 12, in many systems you are into exam years. And we didn’t want to interfere with crucial years that might influence a student’s outcomes in terms of the national qualification system. However, that was our initial. So for the first two years, that’s what we did.

This year we’ve been convinced through feedback mainly from the ministries of education that we actually work with because we engage with each country at a high level through the government, through the ministry. Their feedback has been, “No, we want you to digitize the whole curriculum. It’s no use to us just having selected grade levels. It is of use, but it’s not as useful.” So we have started with a couple of countries going down to and including grades one, two, and three, and we are just starting to create new professional development courses for our educators that will address the specific needs of learning online for younger students.

Dr. Cristi Ford (23:46):

That’s great.

Dr. Lesley Snowball (23:46):

These students are not online at 100%. The Digital School makes up part of their day. For example, if they’re in a refugee camp, they’re attending school for a morning session or an afternoon session. And Digital School might be two or three hours a week for particular subjects within that morning or afternoon.

We’ve also then this year agreed to go above grade nine, again with the urging from the governments. And again, because they see the benefits, they don’t want the students to get to grade nine and then have to switch back to traditional forms of education. They can see the motivation, they can see increased attendance from students and increased engagement when they’re actually there. It’s early days to say whether we can claim that their outcomes are improving, but the first steps have to be you get them in, so the attendance increases. You get them engaged so that their actual learning improves, their motivation improves. And then we hope in the next year or two we’ll be able to see real impact in terms of progress in different subject areas, and of course, progress in digital skills. They’ll improve with their digital skills as well as we hope in their subject areas.

Dr. Cristi Ford (25:18):

As I listened to you talk about this, I have to go back to some of my original questions and get you to give me a little follow-up. As I think about my time in East Africa, I realize how increasingly difficult it is to break into new countries, and you’ve created this very specific model. Can you share with the listeners a little bit about where are the countries that you’ve partnered with and how have you been able to break that barrier down and get into those countries and partner with government entities around this work?

Dr. Lesley Snowball (25:48):

Yeah, that’s a great question. And first of all, I’d just like to say we do have a model. We’ve created a model. But one of our success factors, and one of the reasons we’ve been able to go into very diverse countries is that model is only a framework for us. We do not go in with an off-the-shelf solution, a one-size-fits-all approach. There are many, many entities worldwide working with marginalized students in education under the fields. And many of them, not all, but many of them do go in with this is the solution we offer. And it does help.

But I think one of our huge strengths is that we passionately believe in localizing. We passionately believe in looking at needs not only the students’ needs or their learning needs, but the community needs. And we tailor. We genuinely do not have two countries that have the same package, if you want to call it a package. And even within a country where we have multiple communities, we do not have two communities with the same package. So that’s one of our success factors.

I think another is we engage with the country at a high level. It’s government to government. We are a government entity even though we’re an independent initiative, but under the umbrella of Mohammed bin Rashid Initiatives. And so engaging ministry to ministry, government to government, means we are going in a high enough level to not guarantee. There’s no guarantee. And I have examples of where it hasn’t gone according to plan. But it does give us a high level assurance that there is commitment from the government and therefore you can hope that you’re going to have commitment at a school district level or a community level.

Our approaches changed actually, because initially we needed numbers. We needed countries and we were seeking countries, and we got an agreement with Egypt. It was largely through personal connections within our government. Somebody knew the minister personally, or had worked with the minister. Or sometimes there’d other UAE support initiatives. For example, we worked closely with World Food Program in Egypt, and it was through them that we initially started The Digital School in Egypt. So Egypt was an early one. Columbia in South America was another one.

Since then, the approach has changed because our reputation has spread very rapidly, and we’ve had some very good airtime with high level entities like UNESCO, the World Government Summit, even the COP27, 28. We were present there. And so now countries are coming to us and saying, “We really need your help. We know we want to digitize, we want to do digital transformation, but we don’t know how and we don’t have the capacity to do it.” So we are now in Mauritania in Western Africa. We are in Jordan and Lebanon. And Lebanon was just, it took off so quickly. We have grades one through 12 in Lebanon, all subjects covered. It was a dream in a way.

Whereas other countries, it’s been slower. There’ve been barriers. Governments change. For example in one country, the main language of instruction is currently changing over, and so that puts delays on us. We did pilots in Afghanistan with girls education for girls who can no longer attend school. After grade six they’re not allowed to physically attend school. We did a remote pilot for some grade seven girls, and that was very successful and we hope to be able to continue that.

We also did a pilot in Bangladesh. Again, there were challenges there, but it had some measure of success. And we’re currently talking to the government there about, we use the pilots as a feasibility study to see is this going to go somewhere? Is it scalable, is it sustainable from the country side and from ours?

And then the very big excitement for this year is that we have signed a three-way partnership with World Food Programme, Southern Africa and SADC, who are the Southern African Development Community. And that consists of 16 countries. And we will start phase one with six of those countries. I’m probably going to forget one now, but South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Madagascar, I think Mauritius. Anyway, five or six countries in phase one. All very, very excited to be engaging with us. And we’ll start that by training the teachers. They will nominate a cohort of teachers to go through the professional development. And then later in the year, probably late spring, we will start digitizing the curriculum with a view to starting students in the LMS.

Of course, the Brightspace LMS is our connection here. D2L and Brightspace is our main LMS. Professional development is done through that LMS, and that helps them also become familiar with the platform so that when students start, the teachers are already familiar. And then we’ll enroll students into Brightspace probably August, September, and they will start their learning. We are going to be across a broad range of countries this year.

Dr. Cristi Ford (32:31):

This is just so fantastic. More than 80,000 learners in more than 10 countries in two and a half years. And this new work that you’re doing just speaks to the level of impact. I will just say I was just so excited to see how we’ve been a partner with you at D2L to be able to offer that contextual opportunity. I love that there is such a focus on localization, and thinking about the culture and the community of each of these countries. And so I was excited to have you on today. I think is before we wrap up, I guess I’d love to understand a little bit more about what’s next for you, Lesley?

Dr. Lesley Snowball (33:13):

Well, certainly the Southern African project is going to be a major project, and I’m really interested in that. We were at a launch event in Cape Town at the end of last year. And there was such passion and commitment from those countries. And one thing that struck me, one of the things I was thinking about in preparing for this is what is it about The Digital School that draws me in? And one of the things that jumped into my mind was a comment from the minister of education for Namibia who was present at that summit. And she just made a simple comment that, “Think about how much money we spend every year on printing physical textbooks and distributing them.” And Namibia is a very big country and many of its communities are very, very remote. They don’t even have electricity yet, let alone internet connection.

But she was really excited by the fact that we won’t have to. We’ll no longer have to print textbooks and distribute them, and how much money she was going to save, and how much easier it would be then to revise the textbooks. She said that it’s off-putting. “You know there needs updating, but are you seriously going to put all that money into updating it again or can’t we just wait another year, or two years, or five years?” So she sees that as a major benefit.

So I really want to be involved in that. I’m hoping I’ll be able to play a leading role in that project and see an impact in that part of the world. Africa suffers more than most regions from the global education crisis. There are fewer students in school. There’s a huge teacher shortage. And if we can make a little impact there, then it’ll be so rewarding. So I’m hoping that’s my next step. That’s my next planned step.

Dr. Cristi Ford (35:21):

Absolutely. I love everything that you’ve shared. I feel like we became fast friends and kindred spirits when I met you later last year. And I am just excited to see the work that you continue to do. I’ll be championing you from the side, and anything I can do to support you around this work I think is really, really fantastic.

I want to share with listeners just a bit, if they want to stay connected to you, what’s the best way to stay connected to The Digital School? And obviously in some of the out pours, we’ll make sure that we connect to some of your profile information. But are there other places that you wanted to shout out before we wrap this episode up for those who want to follow up from this episode and learn more about you?

Dr. Lesley Snowball (36:06):

I think you can find me and The Digital School on LinkedIn. That’s a good stopping place to find both of us. But The Digital School is also on Instagram, on X. And so yeah, follow us wherever you can and reach out to try and support what we’re doing.

And Cristi, thank you. I appreciate your support personally, professionally. I really value the partnership with D2L. Brightspace really genuinely has a very important part in making this work for us across our locations and across our students. So thank you.

Dr. Cristi Ford (36:44):

Absolutely. Thank you for making the time. I know you have a hectic schedule, but thank you for making the time to have this conversation with me today and being here with me.

Dr. Lesley Snowball (36:54):

My absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Dr. Cristi Ford (36:58):

As Lesley mentioned, please follow Lesley Snowball and The Digital School on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and the other social media platforms.

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