Learning in a laptop world
By Karen Poutasi, CE, New Zealand Qualifications Authority
13 September 2006 |
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New Zealand Computer Society, Wellington
Thank you for that welcome.
I am particularly pleased to be talking to the New Zealand Computer Society. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority has a story to tell - a story about successfully embracing the potential of the online world to improve and reduce the cost, of what we do.
I would also like to give you some thoughts about the way your sector is changing the sector that I now work in, and how change may continue and accelerate, potentially with profound consequences.
Firstly, a little about me. I'm new to the NZQA. I was appointed its CEO in May 2006, having come from the health sector. My most recent position was Director General of Health. I'm on a steep learning curve but really enjoying the work.
Secondly, let me tell you a little bit about the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. We are a Crown Entity established under the 1989 Education Act. That Act says our purpose is to ensure "a consistent approach to the recognition of qualifications in academic and vocational areas". The educational outcome that we, and our sister agencies, contribute to, is "all learners achieving to their potential".
To this end, we are involved in the development of national qualifications and we quality assure them and their provision. We gazette the criteria for approval of qualifications across all providers. We register and quality assure providers, the universities apart, in some cases through delegation. We administer end-of-year assessment in secondary schools, though NCEA and Scholarship are actually relatively small parts of our work, despite the way they hog the headlines.
It's also worth reporting that the Qualifications Authority is undertaking a programme of significant internal change. We have rationalised our organisation into three divisions. Two span our external focus, these being the Qualifications and the Quality Assurance divisions. We then have a Strategic and Corporate Services Division, which includes within its activities our Information Systems Group.
Let me now tell you our online story so far. I should first acknowledge Mike Paine - the Qualifications Authority's Chief Information Officer. Mike this year was Chief Information Officer of the Year in the Computerworld Excellence Awards. Mike has been with us for the past three and half years and has been the driver of much of what I am going to describe now. He will shortly be moving to the private sector, but his contribution to the Qualifications Authority has been substantial.
Late last year, over 124,000 secondary school students sat NCEA exams. From that, about 2000 teachers and former teachers marked nearly 2 million individual NCEA exam papers. In addition, over 6,000 level 3 NCEA art portfolios were assessed. Organising this is a massive undertaking and occurs successfully in part because of technology.
Nowadays, when students sit down to do their external NCEA exams, they don't face the generic exams that you and I did in years past. Each exam paper has the student's individual name at the top and the questions in the exam relate to the specific standards that the student is being assessed against. I need to explain here that for assessment purposes, subjects are now broken down into subsets called standards, roughly analogous to a topic or a particular skill or activity. That each student has a personalised exam paper is only possible because of the data we carry about schools' and students' decisions as to what individual students are to be assessed against. This is part of the thrust towards personalised learning.
The marking too relies on technology. Ten years back markers posted exam marks back to us where they were manually processed. Now, markers enter marks online in a secure way. Then we confirm and collate those results very rapidly. We've achieved this by a massive investment in our online systems.
As an annual average, on our website between 9.00 am and 7.00 pm every five seconds someone searches for NCEA assessment materials. They look at old exams mostly, to help them study or teach.
This is part of a bigger online picture with NZQA. It's not just secondary exams that have been transformed. Tertiary institutions increasingly enter online the information that they provide us for quality assurance purposes. We also have a website, kiwiquals.govt.nz, that shows a vast array of quality assured qualifications available in New Zealand. The website then provides the names of providers that teach each qualification. It's worth visiting.
All up, our investment in online systems has delivered cost efficiencies, lower compliance costs and increased quality. For example, it used to take us 20 days to provide learners with their tertiary records. Now it takes a day and a half.
So, I've presented you with a picture of a government agency that has embraced new technology to do its work better and, of course, we do this as part of the wider education sector.
So what can we say about that wider sector and how it has changed and will be changed by technology?
Let me offer a thought, purely speculative, about where education has been and is going. If we went back to the early 20 th century, in relative terms homes were often information poor and, in relative terms, schools were often information rich. Students went to school to learn things they could not learn at home.
Now, in many households the reverse applies. Students have the Internet. They can access the world faster at home than they can in the classroom.
In the pre online world, for information and communications, and, by inference, for education, it was a seller's or supplier's market, whereas now in the online world it is a buyer's or consumer's market.
To illustrate, in the most extreme sense, think of a medieval handwritten bible - chained to a pulpit in a church, so that ordinary people couldn't read it. That was a world in which books were very rare and very expensive - a most extreme example of a seller's market for information and communications.
The printing press, used first to produce the Gutenberg Bible in Germany in around 1455, began an inexorable shift. The advantage has been steadily moving from the seller to the buyer of information and communications and, I would argue, education.
Think now of a 21 st century student on line, and what he or she can access. The answer is nearly everything and for virtually no cost at all. The world's libraries are now connecting to each other. Information is not just near on free, and instantly available, but we are drowning in the stuff. In fact, when you buy a newspaper you are buying that newspaper's judgement about what to leave out. In an information glut, we pay others to filter the dross.
At the time of the Gutenberg Bible very few people received any formal education at all. We've transitioned to compulsory education, in this country mostly provided by the state. Where the future lies is open.
However, w hen one of my staff started doing research for this speech, he discovered the future all around him. A clerical worker sitting beside him is training to be a teacher. She's done all her tuition so far this year online. At another desk an administrator turned out to have secondary employment as a tutor in a Government Training Establishment. He teaches only online. Someone from our IT department, also helping with the text, said "I did my doctorate via email - never met my supervisor face-to-face."
I'm told that within education circles there's an apocryphal story of an education administrator in the 1940s, who reportedly said "It's 11.45 am. Every child in New Zealand is spelling hippopotamus." At the time this was seen as a good thing. It was, I suspect, a celebration of the idea that standardised one-size-fits-all education mitigated privilege and was a building block of democracy. This might have been fine in a New Zealand where one could only buy white bread and pubs shut at 6.00 pm. But that's not New Zealand as it is today.
One of the priorities set by this government for the education sector is so called "personalisation of learning" - in other words, that the educational experience of each student is optimised to match his or her specific needs, which clearly does not happen if everyone is spelling hippopotamus at the same time.
Teachers have always assessed how their individual students are doing and customising their tuition as a result. However, the standards-based assessment system now in schools and tertiary institutions allows for much greater diversity in the class room or the lecture hall.
Looking ahead, if we bolt personalisation to the online world, new things become possible.
An obvious mechanical possibility is examinations online. It's been tried in some places, not with huge success, and is impossible in schools right now - not enough computers or telephone lines. But 20 years from now, why not?
Already a private language school allows for potential students to undertake tasks online to enable them to assess what education would be valuable for them - so when will more complex tasks be possible?
In terms of tuition, for some time some groups of secondary schools in New Zealand in rural areas have been using on line tuition to join up small classes and share teachers. We also have online providers in the Correspondence School and Open Polytechnic.
In June 2003, the Government established an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Steering Committee for Education. It has been tasked with achieving joined-up ICT architectures across the education sector. This will draw in early childhood educators, schools primary and secondary, and the tertiary institutions.
Broadband access is the starting point, but with these things, what really matters is content. To quote from a report by Penny Carnaby, the National Librarian, "There will be content from a variety of sources and repositories, which will have many purposes and users to support learning and research".
Penny goes on to say "To a much greater extent than ever before, learners can explore, create and add to an e-learning experience themselves. The digital library in all its manifestations is liberated into the e-learning environment and is at the fingertips of next-generation learners who now can move seamlessly from one environment to another."
I think the powerful word in there is "create". Marketers have noticed that Gen Y, or, if you wish, the iGeneration, have a view that they, the new consumers, should help design the products they use. They apparently think this because so much of their media experience is interactive. They assume that they will have input. So, like Wikipedia , an education provision that somehow online learners form and shape may have a particular generational resonance.
And, to quote Wikipedia , the iGeneration " simply takes the Internet for granted as 'natural', with sites such as MySpace, YouTube, iFilm, ... internet forums, Wikipedia and Imageboards as part of its global cultural ecosystem." Wikipedia goes on to say "The iGeneration therefore emerged within a paradigm shift that changed how humans relate to each other and how (virtual and real) communities form within globalization."
However, let's not be dewy eyed. There are issues here.
At a personal level, despite the iGeneration, there are issues of access for those less well off - the jury is still out on whether the online capacity is closing or widening gaps in education.
On an institutional level, if I can study online, then, if I can afford it, I can buy my education from anywhere. If the online world abolishes distance, then in education each university is in competition with every other university, at least within each lingua franca. The same applies to other tertiary institutions and, longer-term, why not secondary schools too.
Globalisation has been described as specialisation in production and standardisation in consumption. For example, clothes and shoes are increasingly much the same worldwide. However, production of say Nike track shoes takes place in just a few places and not in factories scattered throughout Nike's markets. Could education be the same? Could we see global brands emerge? Is there a Starbucks University waiting in the wings, its campus being virtual, apart from one windowless warehouse somewhere?
In case you are lulled into a post-breakfast online nirvana, I should remind you that part of what people value in education, secondary and tertiary, is a shared experience. That's very hard to have on line . In the recent past at least, the learning environment has been about gaining social, team and networking skills, as well as cognitive learning. These skills are just as much valued by employers today, which begs the question of whether these social skills would need to be acquired elsewhere, if price advantages drives online education.
Globalisation has been most marked in products for which, in the economic jargon, the marginal cost of production is negligible. For these products a winner-takes-all dynamic tends to occur. Software is an extreme example. If Microsoft increases its market share, the cost of the extra production is almost nothing - just some more disks and packaging. All the cost is in the developing the software in the first place and then the marketing. From then on, whether you sell 50 units or 50 million units, the production cost per unit is much the same.
So is education like that?
For a physical school, no. Doubling the roll means more desks, classrooms and teachers. The number of teachers available in a country is finite. If more are hired, shortages start to occur and salaries start to rise. So too for a physical university or polytechnic.
But what about an online school or an online tertiary provider? All that may be required to double the roll is more space on a server.
We should not be fearful about such a prospect, but we can't ignore it either. If this trend develops, I can see two questions for New Zealand. Firstly, could the domestic provision of education here compete successfully with the global? And then, will we just be a consumer of global online education or could we also be a producer?
For example, in New Zealand we make cinema in a can-do way. Could we teach film making online and dominate that education market? Could we be the online place from which pastoral farming or yacht design is best taught globally? What are our other arenas of excellence? Given that we are in the Southern Hemisphere, could providing online summer schools for the Northern Hemisphere be our niche. One of the Qualifications Authority's duties is explaining and building the credibility of New Zealand's qualifications internationally. That task could take on an unprecedented significance.
Maybe the online world will in time create an educational context in which some things globalise and some things localise. That's often the way with change. Another option - will we see franchise education - standardised online global provision, coupled to local franchise outlets to provide the social and interpersonal part of the education experience? Could we start a global educational franchise from here in New Zealand?
One can see that developments like that would trigger intense debates about national destiny and cultural imperialism. However, we should master, rather than fear, the future.
Another way to think about this is that in the future technology may enhance education by automating its content-driven mechanistic aspects - the imparting of information, so that teachers need to spend less time communicating facts and more time discussing, tutoring, counselling and inspiring.
For example, a classical Oxford education involved a student reading and then having one-on-one conversations with the professor - fabulous for highly motivated students, but impossibly expensive. But if students can be taken through the content-driven mechanistic aspects of their education online, sparing teachers that task, then maybe teachers can be liberated to increasingly specialise in what I'm sure really interests them and best benefits students. Picture a 'classroom' that looks more like an open plan office. It has students spending much of their day researching and working on projects and their teacher wandering the room coaching and then coordinating group discussions.
And lest you think this is only relevant to academic students, imagine a group of young diesel engine apprentices in a room in which in its centre is a truck engine. The apprentices are told to take it apart, recondition and reassemble it, they and their tutor talking online to the manufacturer as they go about what went into the design. And for things that can actually take place inside a computer, like design and architecture, this could be especially powerful.
At the beginning, I talked about education now being a buyer's market in a context in which, relative to many homes, the school is no longer information rich. It seems to me that in the past educators for much of the time taught people information. Nowadays, the focus is more on teaching people how to find, sort, assess, reinterpret and even reject information for themselves. In other words, educating people how to think, not what to think.
In some way, that brings us back to a strong element of interaction with individuals - tutors and other learners - from which comes social skills and motivation. As is frequently the case, the answer may lie not in either/or solutions, but in how we achieve a balance and a synthesis.
Let me end then by quoting Marshall McLuhan, who said "The trouble with a cheap, specialised education is that you never stop paying for it." In the online world that may be especially true, along with the inverse that "the value of a quality, general education is that you never stop benefiting from it."
Thank you.
Penny Carnaby, E-learning and digital library futures in New Zealand, Library Review, vol 54, no 6, 2005, pp 346-354