[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Tom Worthington]

Frank O'Connor wrote:

> ... but I was talking about making online education more responsive 
> to the individual needs of teachers and students rather than the current 
> standard Web based rote approach. ...

The technique I was introduced to is "Mentored and Collaborative
e-Learning: 
<http://www.ijcim.th.org/v15nSP4/P09SEARCC_ComputerProfessionalEducation.pdf>.

This is designed to be responsive to the individual needs of the
students. But it is not inexpensive to do, as the teacher needs to pay
attention to each individual student (mentoring) and also encourage the
class to work together (collaboration). It takes a lot of work behind
the scenes to give the students the impression that I am not doing any
"teaching". ;-)

> Now if they were for example studying the geography of Indonesia or PNG 
> or whatever, wouldn't it be nice if the brilliant students could also 
> access geological studies on volcanism and other stuff ...

Yes, teachers are always looking for material. But finding suitable
material takes time and effort (which costs teaching resources).
Creating educational materials takes even more effort and interactive
multimedia very much more. This is much more than simply finding stuff 
on Wikipedia. I don't think it makes sense for each teacher to do this 
on their own.

> ... Amnd wouldn't it be neat if the app could detect slower students  
> and flag them for the teacher's attention ...

Yes, the Learning Management Systems, such as Moodle, help find students 
who are having difficulty. But this assumes the course materials are 
designed for this. As an example, I include assessable work each week in 
my courses. I can the use the system to see how the students are going 
and make sure there is not someone who has been forgotten.

> The point I suppose is that relying purely on a restricted standardised  
> Web based approach ...

The point I was trying to get across is that creating educational
materials is difficult and expensive. We can't afford to custom make the
educational content for every student.

Also the students (and there parents) will not thank us if the courses 
are so customised that they do not meet educational standards. Students 
want to be able to go down the road (or across the world) and present 
their educational results to help get a job. If there is no 
standardisation between courses, then this cannot be done. In the case 
of vocational courses the public want to assured that the worker has 
been trained and tested to a set standard, so they can do thier job 
efficiently and safely.

> You said it yourself in one of your replies ... the NBN will allow 
> students, teachers and schools to engage from any numbers of venues, 
> mediums and means. From school, from home, remotely ... on pads, phones, 
> PC's and laptops ...

Yes, I try to design educational content to work on smart phones and 
tablet computers, as well as laptops: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/postgraduate_professional_education/>.
But this is a skill which has to be learnt. I had been teaching web 
design for mobile devices at ANU for about six years before preparing an 
e-learning course: <http://tomw.net.au/2009/>.

> Yeah ... things are happening, but only now with an NBN will ALL 
> students in AUstralia have EQUAL access to the networked resources ...

It is not feasible to provide equal access for all students, unless we
artificially restrict access for those in the city. What we can do is
design the online formats so that they do not use more bandwidth than
necessary. What annoys me is where I see inefficient formats, such as 
poorly designed PDF documents being used which waste bandwidth, are 
difficult to read and so limit access.

> ... take the load of teachers (a heap of this 
> reporting could be automated and generated without teacher input ...

It has been interesting to see how much a LMS like Moodle can do. It
does allow a lot of the annoying paperwork to be eliminated. But there
are some frustrations, for example:

1. Incompatible systems: I have to manually transcribe student results 
from the LMS to the educational institution's student record system,
2. Incompatible business processes: I can enter results online, but then
have to print them out and scribble a signature on the examination return.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra