Thread by @matthewhood

I've been asked a question about quality assurance. Hopefully this thread will shed some light on how we do that at @OakNational. We think we did and continue to do a solid job but it's not perfect and we're always really grateful for feedback on how lessons can be even better.

Context! We had to plan a curriculum and record lessons for 4-16 year olds in a broad range of subjects and had no more than six weeks to do it. We started as soon as we could (June 2020) and teachers needed a holiday so wanted everything done by the start of August.

As any teacher knows. Quality starts with curriculum. Poor curriculum = poor lessons. And quality curriculum takes time. Way more time than we had. So we didn't start from scratch, we put up the bat signal. Schools, School Trusts and Subject Associations came flocking.

We asked those orgs to share what key stage & subject they felt they were particularly good and asked for example curriculum maps and resources. A sub-group of our project board alongside our curriculum team reviewed these and divided up the curriculum across those partners.

SIDE BAR - you can see the partners here (thenational.academy/2020-21-partne…)

Each partner identified a Subject Lead (think HoD or Phase Leader) and we assembled advisory groups in each subject to help them refine their existing curriculum maps so they were fit for remote education at Oak. These were our principles (thenational.academy/blog/how-shoul…)

Once we'd agreed, and published those curriculum maps those subject leads began to identify teachers from their network who were up for helping with our mammoth recording 'sprint' - 10,000 lessons in three weeks was the target.

We chose that model as we wanted to find teachers who are already familiar with the curriculum content provided by a particular partner. The ask on our amazing teachers was pretty big anyway. Adding 'learn this new curriculum' was something we wanted to avoid.

Alongside teacher recruitment we then began 'technical QA' recruitment. The wonderful folks at @KPMG lent us a team of amazing project managers (1 per subject / key stage) and the @BrilliantClub helped us recruit a few hundred PhD researchers to work in those QA teams.

I can't quite remember the exact numbers but roughly we had ~30 subject leads and project managers, ~300 teachers and about 150 technical quality assurers. Someone from the team jump in if I got that wrong!

On to induction! Before sprint started we had a week of induction for everyone. This covered everything from their curriculum, technical requirements for lessons, what we'd learnt about online pedagogy, the QA process. It ended with everyone making a test lesson.

And then we were off! During the sprint we had two types of quality assurance - what we called a technical check from our PhD tutors and project managers. This looked at safeguarding, spelling, resolution, sound etc. Every lesson had this check.

The second check was for lesson quality. This was done either peer to peer or by the subject lead. Everyone doing this check was a teacher. This check was a rolling formative process and done on a sampling basis. Each week we pulled themes and I shared those back with everyone.

So summary for that period! 1) Curriculum 2) Strong Team 3) Induction and CPD 4) Technical Check 5) Pedagogy Check.

Whilst we're really happy with the outcome. I think it's astonishing what this amazing team did. We knew, across 40,000 different elements (videos, quizzes, worksheets, powerpoints) there would be errors.

Which brings us to now. We created a feedback mechanism at the lesson level within the site which allows anyone to share feedback on a lesson with us, these are triaged and improvements are made in priority order.

Sometimes we can do this in 'post production', sometimes we need to do some more recording with the teacher (we try to avoid this as all of our Oak Teachers are back in their own schools working their socks off already).

Thanks for getting all the way to this tweet! I hope that helps. A reminder, please keep that feedback coming, we're really grateful. Also please be thoughtful with that feedback. These are real teachers. If there is a quality issue the buck stops with me, not them.

And as a reward for getting this far here is a picture of our new puppies Huck and Molly. You are welcome.