“ICT is revolutionising the classroom and learning more than any other development in the last 200 years. It has already had a profound effect on administration within schools, but has barely touched teaching and learning…Learning will become much more centred on problem-solving, collaborative activities, the mixing of ages and advancing at a pace suitable for each child. This quantum shift will be profoundly liberating and enriching, but has yet to be made in most schools. We have yet to get fully to grip too, with young people’s intimacy with digital technologies, and the influences it has on their intellectual development and cognitive skills.”
- Dr Antony Seldon |
Exploratory learning with locally generated content
Why the Virtual School? A journey to the school of the future
The provision of good quality universal education is crucial. At a macroeconomic level, education provides individuals with the technical skills to contribute to, and benefit from, scientific advancement and economic growth. More specifically, numerous statistical studies attest to the fact that the better educated can command higher salaries than the less well educated, an obvious material benefit of education.1 Education is thus rightly seen as an investment in human capital. However, the benefits of education are not just pecuniary. Education has also been shown to improve leisure time, job satisfaction, social cohesion and even political stability.
Yet, around the world, many educational systems are underperforming. Globally, more than 300 million children will fail to complete five grades of primary education, and will leave without basic literacy skills. For millions who remain in school, the quality of education is dismal, and little effective learning takes place. The net result of this educational crisis has been that the target of halving the incidence of adult illiteracy has been missed, and the Education for All decade has seen a rise in the number of illiterate adults. The price paid by societies that fail to improve their educational systems, and the cumulative effect of poor educational performance, has been long understood.This suggests that it is not only efforts to improve education, but the approach used to achieve these improvements that must change.
Educational quality can be improved through 21st century learning technologies. New social learning techniques are proven to accelerate the time to competency of learners, increase the engagement of younger learners and provide a scalable model to improve opportunities for education and training. By making the best learning tools and lessons available in an engaging and accessible format, we can improve access to high quality education around the world. From basic literacy to advanced chemistry, the Virtual School aims to revolutionise learning. It will improve the accessibility and quality of locally generated, student centric educational content; available for anyone, anywhere, regardless of their geographic or socio-economic circumstances. |
Developing the Virtual School
Most educational products are teacher centric through the commercial driver of the teacher as the customer. In our proposal, while the teacher will generate the content, the delivery style will be aimed at the needs and strengths of the student.
We plan to deliver our content through a hybrid model. We will first empower teachers to create digital learning content themselves by creating a fusion toolkit. Where this content is either not sufficiently engaging or teachers feel that an aspect of their lesson would benefit from higher end technology, we will improve lessons through the use of digital media and post-production.
Getting Teacher time: engaging the best teachers to inspire the next generation
A key challenge to developing the 20,000 hours of bite-sized, easy to digest, videos required for the Virtual School will be engaging teachers to donate their time to deliver lessons within the platform. In the UK, as elsewhere, we intend to work with leading educational associations in both the private and public sectors such as the HMC or the National Association of Headteachers to build up networks of high-performing schools. We have already identified a number of engaged lecturers and teachers providing open courseware, some of whose work we would plan to incorporate.
We believe that many teachers will be motivated by the potential of having these tools available to supplement their own teaching, by the prospect of educating millions of young students, and by the wider social good that such a programme is likely to bring about. Nevertheless, there is no reason why additional incentives could not be provided should donated time prove insufficient.
Peer reviewing teacher created content: making sure students only get the best
Teacher time will also be required to peer review the contributions of other teachers. We plan to obtain teacher time on the same basis as above with both moral and financial incentives. It is expected that whilst most content will be of a high standard, some content will be identified as not sufficiently high quality to distribute en masse and will have to be re-allocated or re-mastered. |
The Fusion toolkit: a means to digitise knowledge in an engaging, point of need format
We do not propose to create all the learning content ourselves, but rather to create a high quality ‘tool-kit’ that will empower the best teachers and lecturers in each country to create rich open courseware that covers the entire national curriculum: democratising learning in a manner never before seen. It is envisaged that this content will be accessible to all from an advanced learning platform that will act as a central repository. Our toolkit will comprise:
- Audio and video editing and recording software.
- Access to a large library of stock video content (it is anticipated that this will be particularly useful for history, languages and the natural sciences).
- A flexible piece of testing software that allows teachers to create their own assessments
- An interactive, user friendly, role-play development tool: used to create educational computer games.
- A suite of instructional videos providing point of need instruction to teachers on how to use their toolkit. We will teach teachers more than simply how to use software. They will benefit from our experience and knowledge of learning theory, improving motivation and retention. E.g:
- Telling a story that will engage the learner: our work with corporate clients has shown that to change a belief, you have to change a behaviour.
- Insights into making remote learning as interactive as possible.
This is not new territory for us. Our current business model regularly requires us to train third-party contractors to create rich media content according to our standards, often in cases where their employees have no previous experience in undertaking such work. Our recent award of outstanding achievement in the e-learning industry, bestowed by the magazine E-learning Age, is testimony to the fact that this process does not compromise on quality. |
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Deploying learning content: making the best content accessible and user-friendly
All of the content will be put into our leading social learning platform, developed by a spin-off of Sun Microsystems, which will be:
- Fast – Information can be found straight away at the point of
need through a powerful search function.
- Easy to use – The platform requires no downloads or plug-ins
and is an intuitive solution that requires no formal training to
master.
- Accessible – Content can be found through logical menu structures with a small number of clicks or searched for to find the required information straight away.
- Relevant - Through the use of subject communities, learners will only be directed towards courses that are relevant to them.
- Effective – Point of need, social learning is proven to be more effective and engaging than traditional learning and Fusion’s social learning platform is truly the best of breed.
- Monitored – Sophisticated analytics allow for tracking from both:
- From the student’s point of view: user profiles will allow students to see what they have learnt and what they are still to learn.
- From the teacher, parent and administrator point of view: teachers, parents and project leaders will be able to monitor a student’s course completion and test score statistics.
- Lower average cost – The Fusion social learning platform is significantly cheaper per user than alternative training and educational methods such as web-based or instructor led learning support.
- Motivational – The platform can reverse engineer the learning process: allowing learners to work out a learning pathway based on their end career or academic goal: an additional source of motivation.
- Tailored – the platform will allow for aptitude, personality and disability testing: so that the platform can adapt to the learning styles of students.
- Interactive - Web 2.0 social features will allowing students to interact with others on the site, post comments, discussions or questions or recommend lessons to friends as well as creating their own videos and sharing them with others.
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Adoption of the Virtual School
We anticipate that, given the wide-ranging potential benefits of our freely available solution, both learners and teachers alike will be motivated to use it. However, there are several challenges to address within the deployment of the Virtual School, including but possibly not limited to:
Delivery & Accessibility
Understanding the access environment and using next generation technologies. Both within the UK and across developing countries access to technology and internet connectivity can be limited by geographic and socio-economic barriers. Understanding these challenges will be central to effective deployment of the Virtual School. Whilst the solution is planned as a hybrid of on and offline content and assessments, access to hardware could act as a barrier to adoption. Partnership with community access programmes and academies will be one mitigation strategy. |
Building Awareness & Initial Deployment
Building national flagship ‘virtual’ academies and national initiatives. In addition to partnership with physical community and educational access programmes, the Virtual School programme will aim to establish a flagship ‘virtual’ academy to encourage active participation and foster an online academic community that will lead to the on going development of cutting edge learning tools and resources. |
Motivation and Engagement
Building learning pathways, measuring and encouraging progress. The initial focus of adoption will be upper primary to senior secondary school foundation courses. Whilst the end goal is to provide for education in an alternative environment from the outset to the end, we anticipate beginning by providing access to the virtual school to supplement in class lessons and provide alternative explanations and learning tools. As the content and reputation grows we hope to be able to provide for a full alternative education. We hope to be able to provide students access to Open University credits to count towards their college degrees for advanced placement courses, providing that they pass assessments relating to the content that they are taking. |
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Feedback and improvement
A key benefit of a social learning platform will be the ability to feedback on content and assessments through online discussion forums, built-in ranking and ‘equity’ metrics and the tracking of student progress.
In addition to these tools, we will have periodic reviews of progress, content and achievements through the Virtual School Steering committee, which will be charged with the overall direction of the platform and content of the virtual school as well as the governorship of the first virtual academy school.
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