What is a crash course?
A crash course is a quick series of lessons that helps in revising the concepts. It’s a method to meet the immediate needs of the target students who may have missed key ideas that best explain the syllabus content. A crash course may not broadly cover the underlying principles of teaching however it may certainly have prompt examples that best describes the intended content.
It is more of a quick fix guide that declutters the wide and elongated explanations while only retaining and focusing on ‘to the point’ pedagogy style.
IBDP Online crash courses have gained a lot of popularity in the recent past as students want to sum up the concepts in a concise manner without making the effort of revising the books again and again. In fact, IBDP has books that have rich content and many students look for practice exercises through challenging questions that best explains the concepts precisely and not through huge text material which largely remains uncovered by students as they lose interest.
IBDP curriculum is all about assessment criteria. One might know the subject but is majorly incapable of teaching the IB way due to complex and rigorous demand of the areas of knowledge to be explained exactly through the lens of guidebooks. Therefore, it is important to choose the IBDP tutor wisely, someone who knows what is to be included in crash courses.
The idea is to prepare students as per the requirement of the paper. For example, paper 1 in economics require an essay style writing including real life examples and correct diagrams that are labelled properly. Within paper 1, one must know expectations from a 10-marker question as compared to a 15-marker question which is largely evaluative. Students are not expected to repeat definitions and diagrams in 15-mark question if they have already covered them up in a 10-mark question, and similarly many such things.
Additionally, it is to be noted that IB has revised weightage for IBDP subjects. They are different for different papers. Again, in economics, students are expected to answer either section A or section B. For the information, section A is largely based on the international economics syllabus and section B is development economics. I know many schools whose teachers’ have opted to not teach development economics at all this year. Unfortunately, doing this will kill the choices of the students and one must continue to cover development economics syllabus.
Many online crash courses are also designed to help students understand the requirement of the internal assessment. For example, specific to this year, economics SL students have been given revised internal assessment weightage of 30% instead of 20%. The economics HL students have been given revised internal assessment weightage of 25% instead of 20%. Not only this, more emphasis has to be given to paper 1 as HL students now have the opportunity to reap benefits of revised higher weightage of 35% which was previously 30% while for both HL and SL students paper 2 stands to carry 30% instead of 40% previously for SL students and 20% now instead of 30% for HL students.
A similar story is mostly seen in other subjects too where weightage has been changed as this is a unique year and students are given benefit by the IB. Consider, Business management HL and SL students who no longer will have to answer section C (CUEGIS) as it is removed for paper 2. For paper 1, section C was based on additional material based on pre-released case study, which also is removed.
Further, it must cover topics in a comprehensive manner yet concise. An easy multiple-choice question can assist in revising the basics. Further, online crash courses must teach how to answer the question by making students understand what a question demands. In my experience, most students lack question reading ability as they tend to what they know and not what the question demands.
Overall, what remains important is that choosing IBDP crash courses is not easy as one must check the authenticity of the tutor, tutoring company, and above all their knowledge which must be updated.
