Learning Blocks Of The Future
The Age
Wednesday May 15, 2002
FOR teachers too busy teaching to think about taking their curriculum into an online environment, the Learning Federation may offer some hope.
In a city office, 20 people are setting up a framework and asking for tenders for a curriculum system of the future: online, interactive and educationally sound.
The Learning Federation: Schools Online Curriculum Content Initiative, started operation last June, and has $68.2 million to meet its goals. The Federal Government's Backing Australia's Ability technology development program kicked in $34.1 million, while the states and territories jointly matched the amount.
For their money, the state education systems from kindergarten to year 12 will get free access to the content as it comes online over the next few years.
That content will be in the form of what the federation calls ``learning objects" - discrete pieces of Webenabled multimedia curriculum.
But the project aims to do more than just create content for the handful of target areas (see box).
By creating specifications for the technical, useability and educational framework of schools, the federation hopes to stimulate freelance development of multimedia curriculum.
Chief operating officer Susan Mann says the specifications will naturally change over the next few years as technology and knowledge of online education changes.
It will be some time before actual Learning Federation content is available to schools. Although tenders have been released - four consortiums have already been chosen for the science - that's only the start of the process. Federation staff then work with the tenderers as they create the curriculum objects, which will then be tested at selected schools.
``It's not like normal education projects where you develop the content and it goes out to schools the next week," Ms Mann says.
When each state makes the objects available to its schools is up to them, she says. Part of the federation's work is to ``look into the future", to develop content for three to five years' time.
The federation is a joint venture of the Curriculum Corporation and Education.au, on behalf of the Australian Education Systems Officials Committee.
The Curriculum Corporation is run by all state and territory school education ministers to develop curriculum, while Education.au is run by those ministers plus higher education ministers, with a brief to promote the use of information and communication technologies in education.
Because the material currently available on the Web can be disjointed, and because the area is so new, Ms Mann expects that most of the material will be original.
Later this month the federation's website will be relaunched, including an area where schools and teachers can register to take part in the testing process to refine the learning objects.
The idea is that each object will be multipurpose; teachers will be able to pick them from the ``exchange" via their school systems, then reassemble them for classroom use, or in creating an online course.
The objects created for the federation will need to use the multimedia and interactive possibilities of computers rather than just being onscreen versions of existing material.
For example, an object for chemistry might show how colours change in a chemical reaction, or an earth sciences object might allow students to ``fly" over an area.
For the objects to be of use to teachers at a variety of schools, they will need to contain a lot of ``metadata" - information about what they contain - and will need to work with the computer systems already in place in schools.
To achieve that, tenderers will make their work compliant with the IMS (Instructional Management System) international standards, technical standards set by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a ``shareable object" standard called SCORM.
www.thelearningfederation.edu.au
IMS: www.imsglobal.org/
SCORM: www.adlnet.org
IEEE standard: http://lstc.ieee.org
Curriculum Priority Areas of the Learning Federation
Science P-6 and years 9 & 10
Maths/Numeracy P-9
LOTE Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese
Australian Studies P-10
Innovation, Creativity and Enterprise P-10
Literacy for students at risk, years 5-9.
© 2002 The Age