Anezka

Anezka Anjanet Silalahi

Goal

In the wake of the pandemic, many schools have adapted by adopting online learning classes. Students and teachers alike needed to work together in order to create a functioning learning environment inside their homes, this was to avoid the further spreading of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19). As fellow users of online classes, most students are a part of the 92% that believe online learning is as, if not more effective than on site learning. Students and teachers are able to schedule their study times and—for schools—can casually enter classes and allow for a potentially more productive learning session. Not many doubt the effectiveness of online learning.

However, there is no doubt a hint of bias among the common consensus of online learning. Although online mediums have proven their effectiveness in terms of convenience and efficiency, there are cases where students are unable to learn at an optimum level. Speaking from our personal experience, learning virtually poses a degree of difficulty that mass surveys and research papers are simply unable to represent. Oftentimes they require additional individual study to truly understand the topic. And we plan to help aid those students willing to deepen and strengthen their academic knowledge. Cooperating with teachers and perhaps substituting them, we plan to create a server where most academic advice is easily accessible. Establishing a learning community in the process to inspire those who feel discouraged in learning. We want to know their issues, their problems, and their feedback in order to better ourselves and convey to the teacher in the long run.

Our group believes that an online student-led tutoring session will be one of the most effective methods of teaching other students, especially seniors to juniors. Our interactions will be held online, so as to avoid the dangers of the pandemic. We will create a discord server, a well-known media application, and utilize its various unique features for academic purposes. As a side product, we also plan to create a website documenting and listing down topics we have covered so anyone can revisit previously discussed topics. This website will also act as our backup plan. In case that our server receives few direct tutoring requests, we will instead create tutorial videos and enrich our site. The topics we will cover will include mathematics, sciences, English, Bahasa Indonesia, and general skills (preview for DP subjects, courses, and [QoL] quality of life skills).

Our goal is to help students who are struggling with their academics because of this pandemic.

Experience Description

CAS Project Strand: Creativity and Service
Duration: 1st April 2021 - 27th August 2021
Place: Online

Reflection of Investigation Process

Date/time: March-April 2021

LOs Achieved:

• Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experience

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

• Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

• Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions

We set a time to meet with our advisor and discuss our ideas and plans we made collaboratively. We also talked about how our plans can demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance, and adjust our plans to really meet the goals of providing needs to our community. We showed commitment to our CAS Project by setting another meeting to discuss our plans and progress. We work collaboratively in investigating issues of global significance in our community, which is by creating a survey that asks MYP students about how they are doing in online classes and subjects they are struggling with. We recognize and consider the ethics of this survey, which is keeping the data confidential and not sharing it with anyone else than our members. Something important from this stage is that I was able to practice my communication and social skills. Being in a pandemic, it may be hard for us to come together and discuss our project. However, we were able to come together and work collaboratively through social media. And even if we met online, we were able to finish this stage productively. There were difficulties in aligning schedules with each other to meet up and informing about meetings. I was not able to attend some of the meetings as I didn’t read the announcement in our group chat. However, when we met to do our project, we were able to meet our goals and finish our objectives we set for that day.

During this stage, I constantly feel motivated from our progress as we were able to finish our goals by working collaboratively. I think it’s because everyone is willing to work together, that I was also influenced into putting my best effort into the project.

This experience is an opportunity for me to improve many aspects of myself, namely my communication skills and my social skills. For this project, I have to challenge myself in working collaboratively that involves constant communication and participation. I am lacking in those aspects, therefore I am going to try my best to improve it as much as possible. In this stage, I practiced being open-minded. We were mainly brainstorming ideas for the project, so we had to be open to others’ opinions and ideas.

Reflection of Preparation Process

Date/time: April-May 2021

LOs Achieved:

• Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experience

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

We showed our commitment towards this project by meeting together through discord voice calls to do our preparation stage together. For this stage, we created a SWOT analysis, assigning different jobs to each member, and creating a timeline. We created a SWOT analysis to identify our strengths and weaknesses and also the issues we are going to face so that we can be prepared to overcome it or avoid it. We divided our jobs by considering each other's strengths and weaknesses and in result, we were able to sort ourselves into three different groups that are responsible in specific areas. We also created a timeline so we have a vision on what we will do for the next few months. After preparing these, we are now ready for the action stage and we know what we will be doing. Therefore, we were able to demonstrate the skills and benefits of working collaboratively. After that, we discussed and created rules to be implemented on the server. By creating rules, we are trying to ensure students are able to fully learn effectively, an example we made is that tutors are not allowed to give students full answers, instead they are only able to share resources and guide them to their own answers. We called through Discord, and in this meeting we are ensuring that the server is working fine. We are trying to make sure that the students will be able to join easily and set tutoring sessions easily. I was able to practice more on my communication and social skills for this project. Through the preparation stage, everyone worked collaboratively and contributed into finishing our goals and objectives. In addition, we still found a way to communicate and come together to do the project despite the pandemic that hinders us to meet physically. Communicating was a bit of a problem as our only way of communicating is through online chats. Sometimes I didn’t read or missed it, causing me to miss out on some important information about our meetings or projects. I did miss some meetings, but I tried to still contribute to finishing the little parts missing from some of the work.

During this stage, I constantly feel motivated from our progress as we were able to finish our goals by working collaboratively. I think it’s because everyone is willing to work together, that I was also influenced into putting my best effort into the project.

This experience is an opportunity for me to improve many aspects of myself, namely my communication skills and my social skills. For this project, I have to challenge myself in working collaboratively that involves constant communication and participation. I am lacking in those aspects, therefore I am going to try my best to improve it as much as possible. For this stage, I have practiced being open-minded as I listened and considered others' opinions and ideas. I was also able to be caring, as in this preparation stage, we are trying our best to ensure our juniors are able to receive tutoring sessions easily and have no difficulties. By creating rules, we were also able to be principled students and ought to provide them motivational and effective tutoring sessions.

Reflection of Action Process

Date/time: May-August 2021

LOs Achieved:

• Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experience

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

• Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

• Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions

After finishing our Preparation stage, we invited the students who registered to be in the community to our server. In this stage, students are starting to ask questions. Tutors who are responsible for those subjects helped the students in answering their questions. We followed our rules on the server and guided the students to their own answer. Unfortunately, as the student asked a question that is not in my specialty, I wasn't able to help them. However, I tried contributing to the group by providing a resource for Biology, which is the subject I am responsible for tutoring. Therefore, we had demonstrated engagement with issues of global significance.

Since May, the one who are responsible for the website have started creating it. Members of our team, even those who are not responsible for making the website, help in providing the contents for the website. This shows our commitment and collaboration skills in this project. In June, we finished creating the website and officially published it.

We continued showing our commitment to the project by continuing what we are doing, and had a group meeting about our project. From this meeting, we decided to add more things to the website as we think it is quite empty. Therefore, we decided to create podcasts about several topics about DP. Here, we demonstrated the skills and recognized the benefits of working collaboratively by distributing jobs equally so we can have the project done.

We showed more of our commitment to the project by doing the task that is given to us. As we were assigned to create a podcast that talks about DP and advice, we met up online and did the podcast (both making the script/creating topics to talk about and the recording). We were able to work collaboratively for this task, and in result we were able to finish it well. Since we shared information about DP as well as advice for DP, we made sure we didn't spread information and also shared bad advice, hence we were able to recognize ethics of choice and actions.

I then stayed committed to the project by continuing and finishing the task I've been assigned to. Since I have the job to edit the podcast me, Hanie, and Sean recorded, I also have the responsibility to make sure the podcast is well made and doesn't have any negative aspects to it. The podcast we made is talking about DP and advice we have for the new DP students. While editing, I made sure everything included in the podcast is appropriate and does not contain misinformation. Therefore, I was also able to show the learning outcome of recognizing ethics of choices and actions.

After finishing the podcast, I did a self-reflection and thought about all the things I’ve contributed to the project. I thought that my contribution was still little, so I decided to make something on my own. I created 3 presentation files that outlined all the Internal and External Assessments for VA to which I uploaded it on the website. Here, I made sure I did not spread misinformation, hence I was able to recognize and consider ethics of choices and actions.

From this stage, I was able to practice more on my communication and social skills for this project. Through the preparation stage, everyone worked collaboratively and contributed into finishing our goals and objectives. In addition, we still found a way to communicate and come together to do the project despite the pandemic that hinders us to meet physically. In addition, I was able to improve my self-management skills which I am lacking in. I was able to do and submit all my tasks on time, following the schedule we made beforehand. Lastly, I was able to reflect on myself which leads to self-improvement.

We had some difficulties communicating. Our only way of communication is through social media, and as we have a long holiday, some of us rarely check or chat in our group chat. We did not really ask each other’s process and what they were doing with the project, thus, some members had less contribution to the project than others. However, we were able to overcome this challenge by meeting again, and we were able to solve the problem by creating more tasks so that all the members can contribute as much as the others.

In this stage, I feel motivated from our progress as we were able to finish our goals by working collaboratively. I think it’s because everyone is willing to work together, that I was also influenced into putting my best effort into the project.

This experience is an opportunity for me to improve many aspects of myself, namely my communication skills and my social skills. For this project, I have to challenge myself in working collaboratively that involves constant communication and participation. I am lacking in those aspects, therefore I am going to try my best to improve it as much as possible. Other than that, I would be able to improve other skills such as self management skills I’ve been practicing often. Therefore, this project will help me in self-development. From this stage, I was able to improve myself as an open-minded, principled, caring, and reflective person. I improved as an open-minded person by listening to other members’ ideas and opinions. I improved as a principled person by recognizing ethics in choices and action, making sure I will not negatively affect others. I improved as a caring person, as I wanted the best to be made so that I can help my juniors with their studies. Lastly, I became a reflective person by constantly reflecting on my strengths and weaknesses, as well in the the things I did for the project.

Evidences