The Le@rning Federation provides resources to fuel exciting and far-reaching change in the way teachers teach and students learn. But the initiative will realise its full potential only if a critical mass of teachers, parents and school systems continues to embrace its products and contribute to its development, writes Jillian Dellit.

The next five years will determine whether the establishment of The Le@rning Federation was foolish or farsighted. More importantly, these years will determine whether our schools embrace sufficient change to serve our countries as well this century as they did the last.

The initiative does more than provide content no State could afford alone. The only previous initiative that comes close is the provision of libraries and laboratories to schools. This changed the way schools operated, students learned and teachers did their work. The Le@rning Federation has similar potential, but unlike the rollout of libraries and laboratories, it is funded by ten governments, creating a new model of support.

This collaborative, networked, distributed model creates many openings for change.

Design matters

The Le@rning Federation integrates multimedia, instructional and pedagogical design to conceptually engage students. Design, a pivotal quality of high-end creativity, is focused on areas identified by teachers as hard to teach, on concepts that students find hard to grasp.

Design is at the heart of learning construction. Teachers design learning. We scavenge resources to motivate and extend students. Services like EdNA Online help by aggregating useful resources. The Le@rning Federation deliberately and explicitly brings the best available learning and multimedia design to curriculum areas of high priority and difficulty. It is high-end and educationally rich.

The learning gained by doing this has to achieve further knowledge growth and creativity for industry, teachers, educational administrators and researchers.

Users rule!

The Le@rning Federation relies on a cycle of user testing and feedback in the development process. Content is scoped by curriculum experts. As it is developed, the resulting content is continuously tested with students and teachers in schools. Their feedback determines direction and shapes final products. Even after the product is released, information about its use and impact is collected and analysed. The 'top down' aspect is the determination of priority areas for product development, and that is negotiated among ten jurisdictions. In every other aspect the users rule.

Learning flies

The Le@rning Federation is a window on the possible. Students, teachers and parents gain new ways of conceptualising and learning. The content captures a matrix of subject knowledge and essential skills (or new basics) using gamelike techniques to speak to current generations. It testifies that we can improve on the past. Just as medical technology has improved public health and life expectancy, educational technology must improve learning expectancy and capability. More of us can learn difficult things and learn them more efficiently.

It's legal

Teachers are great users of the interesting and improvisers with the available. Our focus is our students' learning, here, today. Copyright provisions have tried to accommodate this with fair copying allowances. It is an uneasy balance and the future is even less certain. In a digital environment copying is easy—but so is tracking. Intellectual property is as valuable an asset as bricks and mortar, or a share portfolio.

The Le@rning Federation content is free for use and re-use in Australian or New Zealand schooling. It is owned by all ministers of Education in our two countries. It can be mixed and matched, downloaded and re-used. It is not subject to audits or fees. You can't make a profit from it. It is yours to use as suits your students' needs.

Works anywhere

The Le@rning Federation develops content and delivers it electronically to participating governments in a form they can deliver to schools. Initially there was little technical consistency between jurisdictions, or in some cases, between parts of individual jurisdictions. Content is now built to agreed standards to be interoperable, relevant and usable within each jurisdiction's curriculum framework. It can be tracked to curriculum outcomes. We no longer need to change trains at Terowie, Albury or Mount Gambier.

This is not uniformity. An advantage of digital technologies is the capacity to disaggregate components, reconstituting them in different contexts, or in different media. The blocks can be reconfigured endlessly, not only in classroom settings, but also in communities and homes.

Systems learn

In the past, much content was developed by systems and provided to schools. Quality of education is at the heart of government provision. The requirement that The Le@rning Federation content be delivered to States and Territories in a form that could be then delivered to schools uncovered inconsistencies, flaws and gaps—as it was intended to do. In addressing these, education systems have developed and shared 'learning architectures'.

Bandwidth problems had to be faced consistently. As digital technologies are applied in the area of content, their potential to link other data becomes evident. While some systems might distribute online content on CD-ROM in the short-term, online delivery generates further transformations.

These changes would have eventually occurred without The Le@rning Federation. They have, however, been accelerated and supported by shared, fast-tracked learning.

Roles adapt

As schools take up The Le@rning Federation content they begin to see new possibilities for learning delivery. Online content, especially as it becomes available in quantity, enables teachers to tailor work for individual or group learning. It helps parents understand where learning is heading and to participate. Teachers see how they might adjust the role they play in the classroom, to design and manage the learning of a diverse group. Schools formulate how they might reconfigure their resources and organisation.

Students see their learning a little differently and parents have concrete examples of engagement.

The giants of the schooling world, education systems, have developed trusted collaborative structures. They have gained flexibility and benefit from joint research, procurement and scarce expertise. A population of 24 million down under the globe gets a better education system if some functions are shared and delegated.

Hardening and networking

The Chief of Australia's Army articulated a policy of 'hardening and networking' to describe Australia's immediate future defence strategy. This captures the idea of a narrower, focused, highly expert core with broader, deeper links and connections. There are parallels in this for schooling, in spite of our antipathy to defence analogies.

The Le@rning Federation is part of a future in which technology is deployed to help us with very specific and clearly articulated issues of learning. Problems for which individual teachers have sought imaginative solutions for centuries—for example, how the concept of fractions can be turned into an 'aha!' experience for all students—can be addressed combining our knowledge of pedagogy, brain development, multimedia, instructional design and classroom management. It can be shared and improved by practitioners and shared again. Our collective educational intelligence can be applied and grown.

None of us has all the knowledge. All of us have some of it. None of us, not even governments, have all the power. Our expertise is essential. It is not sufficient.

Carpe diem

This initiative, funded by ten governments, has to be user-focused or it fails. It is networked and collaborative or it fails. Its capacity to be top down is very limited. There are too many layers, too much interoperability, too many shareholders, too many stakeholders and too much distribution. It belongs to a new world of distributed power and participation, of Internet sharing and connectivity.

You might not like some of the content, but others do and there is plenty more to choose from. Or you can adapt it to suit your needs and join a community of interest to shape it.

Use the content; create a derivative; utilise the standards; engage your parents, students and community; link it to your program; learn from student use; use it to argue for computers in your classroom instead of a laboratory, or to try personal digital assistants or laptops; rethink your textbook budget, your network's storage capacity or your bandwidth. This tiny portion of education spending produces new, quality products cost-effectively. If enough teachers, students, parents and systems are enterprising enough to use the products as tools and levers, we can drive further local changes, building schooling capacity and strengthening our democracy.

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EQ Spring 2005 © Curriculum Corporation

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