Yacapaca

This morning’s TES came with no fewer than three heavy job supplements. The staffing crisis is now so bad that the Secondary Heads Association has had to issue an edict against schools poaching each others’ best teachers.

Costs are going through the roof

• the TES is making a mint out of all this advertising, all money that’s now not going to pay for teachers
• top teachers can now write their own paychecks. I’d argue that’s a good thing as it encourages the best to stay in the profession, but again it costs…
• where positions are going unfilled, expensive and ineffective agency supply teachers are being used instead.

It’s in dealing with this last problem that there’s a huge opportunity for elearning systems to prove their worth. Supply teachers are primarily used to provide short-term sickness cover. They don’t know the class and are frequently not familiar with the course being taught. No matter how good they are as teachers, with those disadvantages they cannot deliver good value. Frequently, they spend only a little time teaching and a lot of time simply trying to keep the class quiet.

If we separate the teaching from the classroom management, a new possibility emerges. Let a computer handle the content of the teaching. Because the content is relevant to the students’ courses, they will be more engaged by it. That makes the classroom management easier and allows you to combine two classes. What’s more, you can now use a classroom assistant instead of an agency supply teacher.

Under this scheme, we’ve replaced two supply teachers at £150 each with one classroom assistant at £100, thus reducing our costs by two-thirds. I saw this done successfully in a school in Milton Keynes two years ago, using an early MLE. Now we just have to get enough courseware written and we can roll this out nationwide.

Yesterday I was invited to look through the work of a class following our Applied Business GCSE scheme. Privacy rules normally prevent me from doing this, so it’s a real privilege to be allowed to have a root around.

One thing I discovered was a pattern of two students who often got the same marks for multiple-choice assignments. Looking further, I found that they had answered each question the same and had worked at the same time – generally after school hours.

Kids colluding on their homework has been going on since the time of Aristotle, so this is no great surprise. What is interesting, though, is the differences when it happens online:

• automarking means that the teacher is less likely to notice
• automated tools can detect it automatically (Paperless School doesn’t currently have such tools, but they would be easy enough to incorporate)

But there’s a deeper issue. Is this good or bad for the students’ learning? When I’ve watched ‘cheating’ behaviour in the classroom, I’ve seen two distinct patterns. Making the issue even more complex is the fact that they are generally gender-specific.

• Boys: the dominant boy tells the subordinate boys in his group what answers to give.
• Girls: each question is discussed and a consensus reached. I’ve even seen groups of girls test an answer on one computer to see if they’ve got it right, then modify it for others.

Clearly, the boys are drawing the short straw here. They are cheating to their own detriment. The girls are gaining more from the exercise than they are losing. Teaching both genders under the same rules doesn’t seem to be working in this respect. This will come as no surprise to proponents of gender-segregated schooling.

Social engineering is outside my remit; software engineering is not. I’m now speculating about how elearning systems can differentiate for gender (or more generally personality) differences, in the same way some already differentiate for attainment level. Are collaboration and individual learning the only alternatives? What about competitive learning? I’d love to do a joint project with a games publisher!

Whilst the roots of elearning lie in the US military, current developments are driven by a very diverse international group that collaborates under the auspices of the International Standards Organisation’s Joint Technical Group SC36. I keep a watching brief on this through my membership of the BSI committee (IST/43) that feeds British contributions into the international effort.

The JTC’s committee on elearning (SC36) is voting today on the adoption of a standard for collaborative learning systems, (SC36 N0643 – PDF). It’s very early days for this, but the underlying idea is very exciting. You may find the initial proposal (PDF) more digestable.

Imagine wanting your Spanish class to do a collaborative project with a matched English language class in a Spanish school. Let’s suppose that they are going to investigate the weather patterns in each others’ countries, report on it in each others’ languages and then edit each others’ work and give feedback.

You can set that up through exchange of emails, but it’s very time-consuming for the teachers at each end. In practice, such projects are fairly rare because of the hurdles setting them up. But what if a publisher like Chalkface had done all the setup for you? I can envisage a system that would

• match up interested schools
• provide detailed role notes for each student
• move the information (text, diagrams, meteorological data) from student to student in an appropriate sequence
• provide the teachers with a suitable overview

What’s missing from this is that Chalkface doesn’t sell in Spain, so we’d need a publishing partner. This is where having an international standard comes in. If we have an off-the-shelf way of describing what we are doing to each other, it becomes much easier to create a joint project.

NO643 is pretty lightweight, and not very specific as standards go, but it’s a great start. We designed collaborative learning into Paperless School from the start, but so far we’ve not implemented it. Perhaps this will give us boost we need to turn the plan into a product.

Update: The very day I blog this, Rebecca Singer at Becta passes along this advert for a research fellowship in in Collaborative eLearning, right here in Cambridge. This area’s hotting up faster than I’d realised!

Reuters – wild cheering today greeted the official launch of SCORM 2004 (the excitingly-renamed SCORM 1.3) amidst all the pomp and splendour of the ADL court. World leaders got themselves interviewed in front of national monuments about it, Romania declared today a national holiday and the Royal Mint minted a special commemorative coin.

The most wonderful thing about SCORM 2004 is the inclusion of content sequencing rules by incorporating the IMS Simple Sequencing specification.

What this means, to schoolchildren who are being taught through SCORM-compliant systems, is that death by mouseclick now comes in instalments.

Hurrah!

According to Ananova this morning, the CBI is still stuck in the “Vocational education is for thickies” belief system that even the notoriously right-wing IOD grew out of two years ago. I’d invite the CBI to investigate whether they still have a sign on their door saying “tradesmen use rear entrance”, and if so whether that might be colouring Digby Jones’ attitude.

Curiously enough, I was talking last night with a group of friends, all employers themselves, about what we needed in an educated workforce. The consensus that emerged was that compulsory education should consist exclusively of:

• literacy
• numeracy
• driving
• touch typing

Po – in the De Bono sense.