[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Frank O'Connor]

Yo Tom,

At 9:06 AM +1100 10/1/11, Tom Worthington wrote:
>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". ;-)

Mmm .. That probably works fine for tertiary students ... but may 
have some problems when applied to the other 90% (Primary, secondary 
and other students not paying for, compulsorily required to do, and 
not inordinately motivated by, their education).    :)

>
>>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.

And they shouldn't have to re-invent the wheel or do it by 
themselves. An inordinate amount of material already exists online, 
in cheap digital encyclopedias ($50 currently for Brittanica - say 
$200 for a local network license anyone?), or in the form of 
multimedia, or from government, science and public benefit bodies 
promoting their own roles, from news organisations, PR campaigns, or 
industry promoting their own products, processes and/or services. 
Surely some of the 40% of the education budget that goes to the 
supposedly productive bureaucrats could be used to source and 
amalgamate this content (by the bureaucracy). Teachers could them 
pick and choose what they wanted to 'plug in' to their courseware for 
different purposes. (And the 'plugging in' process should be simple, 
and not require any coding ... a facility in the application if you 
like.)

Access to vast libraries of content on their own servers accessible 
by a user friendly, content management I suppose you'd call it, front 
end isn't exactly rocket science .. and would provide real value.

>
>>... 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.

Mmmm ... as I said ... standardisation is necessary (even if only to 
pass exams) but we need to go outside that, and if the non-teaching 
bit of the educational establishment wants to add value they'd be 
putting in place systems , processes and content (and doing much of 
the actual work) to free up teachers and educators for adding further 
value to the core syllabus ... as their students require. LMS 
systems, if I understand you correctly, are probably just one module 
of the application (framework/API or whatever) that I envisage. The 
fact that they already flag poor performers is good, but how many 
primary or secondary teachers have access to this application or 
facility? And how many applications simply provide it as an adjunct 
to the vast majority of the courseware.

>
>>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.

Yeah, but as I said before ... 80-90% of students can handle 
standardised courseware fine, and seem to get what they need from it. 
The problem is that ... especially in the compulsory education 
population ... 10% either side of the norm need either help or 
enrichment to make their educational experience serve their needs. 
This is the problem population for any teacher or educational system. 
And having a system that makes the simple addition of modules, 
simplicity, explanatory content, complexity for the high achievers, 
regionally or culturally content or whatever easy on both the teacher 
and the student is probably a good thing and relatively easily 
implemented. Systems that require IT experts to add content or 
materials are what we have today ... we need to make it simple enough 
so that a teachers can pick, choose, link and add with a few 
mouse-clicks without being a programming or development genius.

>
>
>>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.

Access to content and systems shouldn't be an issue. Access to 
courseware shouldn't be an issue. And the difference between a 12Mbs 
and 100Mbs channel isn't huge when applied to 99% of educational 
content. The real difference of course tends to be the quality of 
teaching (not hardware and links), and in an NBN networked world 
content is easily accessible no matter what your geographic location 
... so if some thought was put into designing the application/system 
I'm thinking of, a lot of the teaching inequalities could be 
obviated. (And I by no means blame the teachers for this .. it's hard 
when your stuck 1000 kms from anywhere, and have to provide courses 
on drama, language, high end science or whatever and have no 
specialists available! In that case it's handy to have the experts on 
hand ... rather than a generalist teacher)

>
>>... 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.

<Big Chuckle>

Yeah ... It's amazing sometimes when you look at the design holes 
(especially for high maintenance items like reporting) that you see 
systems and process designers and developers leave in their systems. 
I mean, MIS and reporting is fundamental to most systems, and takes 
up the most time, and adds in the most expense and aggravation ... 
but for some reason (and I think it's probably a species thing) we 
can't seem to automate it so that it incurs less of a load on 
individuals who use the system or process. (It's not helped by the 
fluid and changing requirements of administrators and clients ... but 
there must be an easier way.)

					Regards,