The Iberestudios Manifesto
I want a school you can hold accountable for what you have learned. A school that shows its exercises, explains how it assesses them and lets you examine its students’ work. In education, we count hours of video with admirable ease. I am rather more interested in what people learn from watching them.
Teaching, learning and awarding a credential are different responsibilities. A school designs its teaching, checks what each learner has learned and stands behind what its certificate attests to. AI makes us examine all three: what is worth learning, what we can delegate and how we can demonstrate what we know how to do.
I have sold training and founded schools. I know the responsibility you take on when someone trusts you with their time, their money and part of their future. At Iberestudios, I want us to answer for how we teach, what we expect and the conditions under which people study. These are the commitments by which I want us to be judged.
Learning by doing, including when it goes wrong
To learn how to investigate, you have to investigate. To learn how to build something, you have to tackle its components, make decisions and discover where it fails. An explanation helps you begin; then the learner needs to get to work. Our programmes must provide opportunities to try, make mistakes, receive useful feedback and try again. A mistake examined carefully can teach far more than an answer that happens to be right.
Every capability we promise to teach must be practised and assessed against criteria the learner knows. We want to preserve the project and its successive versions: what its author decided, what help they used and what they had to correct. A certificate of achievement will depend on meeting the academic requirements. Anyone examining that work should be able to understand what the learner can do after studying with us.
Thinking can be learned too
I want people to know how to ask questions, check a source, recognise an assumption and decide with incomplete information. That requires knowledge and practice within a discipline. We will ask them to explain why they chose a solution, what they checked and what evidence would change their mind. Confident speaking can be practised in front of a mirror. Judgement needs real problems.
Artificial intelligence is part of that work. I want our learners to understand how to delegate to it: define a task, provide context, choose tools and review the result. They will also need to decide which parts they must do themselves in order to learn. Understanding a result and spotting a mistake are part of using an intellectual tool. Learners should be able to defend how they divided the work between themselves and the machine.
“Cheating with AI means cheating yourself.” Delegating a task can be an excellent professional decision. Claiming a capability you have not yet acquired leaves a gap in your education. It will show when the problem changes, someone challenges a decision or you need to correct the result. We will ask learners to explain the assistance they used and demonstrate what they learned. I would rather see a rough attempt we can improve than a flawless submission its author cannot understand.
Teachers and fellow learners you can turn to
The teachers I remember made me interested in something, asked a question or pointed out an error I could not see. That is the role I want to recover. Their work is to teach, awaken curiosity, offer guidance and ask for more when a learner is ready. Turning them into police officers armed with detectors and suspicion scores consumes time we need for understanding how each person learns.
A fellow learner may spot the error you have spent an hour overlooking. Reviewing their work makes you understand it and explain an improvement. We want to make use of that exchange through peer review, with clear criteria and support from teachers and mentors. Organising help and dealing with obstacles remains the school’s responsibility. When learners get stuck, they need someone who can help them move on.
Free to study, with the costs explained
Iberestudios’ free education exists so that more people can study and challenge themselves. We want the complete course to be accessible free of charge, with basic AI tutoring and our own certificate of achievement when the requirements are met. Keeping it running costs money. We will explain how it is funded, which contributions are voluntary and which optional services have a price. People should have that information before deciding to start. The effort we ask of them should be just as clear from the outset.
The school must be assessed too
A school must show what its learners have learned and explain how it established that. At Iberestudios, we commit to reviewing our exercises, assessments and results, listening to difficulties and correcting the design when it fails. We also endorse the principles of the Serious eLearning Manifesto: relevant practice, guidance, feedback and evaluation of applied learning. It provides a reference for our work.
This manifesto holds us accountable. If you find an activity that takes time without teaching anything, an assessment that rewards appearances or an unclear financial condition, I want to hear about it. We will need to examine the exercise, the rubric or the published information. Those decisions shape the school we are building.