Schools tend to focus heavily on end of Year 12 exams (e.g. HSCs and the ATAR in Australia) that will enable students to progress to university. However, most students do NOT go on to university and of those who do many do not rely on an ATAR to get their place. It is time that schools focussed on the success ...continue reading "Starting to think about Additional Routes To Success"
Category: Opinion
From F2F to Online Courses – models of provision
NB I've posted a new (improved?) version of the models of provision.
For over 20 years I worked at the Open University (UK) which is a world leader in online distance education. Over the last few years I have had the privilege of spending time at a number of predominantly face-to-face universities in Australia that were at various stages of developing their online provision, including over the last few months when most courses went online due to COVID19. I have been struck by the vast range of different approaches to online course provision I have seen, and thought it would be useful to try to categorise them. ...continue reading "From F2F to Online Courses – models of provision"
Home schooling or home education?
By Roger Broadie
Whatever other impacts the COVID-19 virus may have on education systems, there will be a big impact on parents which is likely to change attitudes.
Children going to school has allowed parents to ...continue reading "Home schooling or home education?"
COVID-19 and the future of schooling
Around the world governments are taking action to contain the spread of COVID-19, often in ways that are quite revealing about the purposes and practices of schooling, and the scope to which unchallengeable norms in education can actually be overthrown. ...continue reading "COVID-19 and the future of schooling"
Blog posts vs journal articles
As an academic who is focussed on having an impact on education policy and practice I struggle with whether to concentrate on publishing in journal articles or blog posts. Do both I hear you say, but that is also problematic. Here are the issues: ...continue reading "Blog posts vs journal articles"
Why traditional schools can never be effective
I have argued elsewhere that (human) learning is the process of becoming part of an enduring collection of people who are mutually engaged in a shared endeavour, they have shared purposes and shared ways of working. In this context, I argued that teaching should involve inducting young people into such communities. However, this clearly creates a problem for schools. ...continue reading "Why traditional schools can never be effective"
Radical change strategy
In previous posts I have talked about why school is a problem, how people learn and hence how we should teach, what should be learnt in school, and that we need to think more radically about the design of schooling. In this post I suggest a strategy for achieving this sort of 'disruptive innovation'. ...continue reading "Radical change strategy"
We need schome
In a series of earlier posts based on my OU inaugural lecture I outlined why school is a problem, how we should teach and what young people should learn. This implied far reaching changes to schooling as we know it today. However, I suspect that I didn't go far enough. In this post I suggest that we need to think even more radically about schooling (see Figure 1). ...continue reading "We need schome"
Moving to Australia
After nearly 24 years working at the Open University in the UK - most recently as Professor of Education (Futures) - I have decided to move to Australia (as Professor of Education (Innovation in schooling and educational technology) at the University of Newcastle (in NSW). Several people have asked me 'Why?'.
What should be learnt?
During my inaugural I asked participants to rank how important they thought a number of different possible 'learning outcomes' would be in 2033. The results are shown in Figure 1 below. As you can see the highest ranked item was ...continue reading "What should be learnt?"