In a presage of the future, last month the New Zealand government outlined legislation that will allow any school-age students to enroll with an accredited online learning provider who will have the responsibility for determining whether their students will need to physically attend for all or some of the school day.
The radical change that allows any registered school or tertiary provider such as a polytechnic or an approved educational body to apply to be a 'community of online learning' (COOL) has met with an equally cool response from the primary teachers’ union.
Online learning is hugely important in making available subjects that schools could otherwise not offer, or for those unable to access school or university, for social, health or geographic reasons.Yet while a part of everyday life, its extensive use in schools, particularly primary schools, has been greeted with caution. Not surprisingly, therefore, the suggestion that children not be required to attend school for part or all of their learning has been seen as having huge ramifications for families concerned with the monitoring and supervision of their children.
While one assumes commonsense will prevail and that the government will insist that most remote learning takes place in a supervised physical community - perhaps dependent on age - it invariably poses the question about what will be the role of schools in the future as more and more subjects and courses, delivered with increasing levels of sophistication, will become available online.
Schools will argue, rightly so, that they are not only about learning, and the imparting of knowledge and skills, but provide a holistic view of education, with other equally important priorities, mainly linked around the socialisation of pupils, developing their EQ, social and communication skills and team work and community.
And yet, clearly the idea of a school offering ‘blended learning’, where students spend part of their school time accessing specialist subjects online, already well-established and growing exponentially, needs to be managed.One finding that is reassuring for the teachers’ union and teachers generally is that evidence from New Zealand suggests that students learning remotely do worse than those learning in face-to-face environments, suggesting that the role of the teacher will continue to be pivotal in the future, even if significantly changed from that of today.
There is an inevitability about change per se that highlights the need for more forward planning and a review of what we are doing now - including whether continued innovation through technology will negate the need for more selective schools, as schools become providers for all according to their needs and stages of development.
The provision of education will continue to change dramatically in the years ahead, with more and more learning delivered remotely, even if under the auspices of a teacher or facilitator.
However, we still need to be careful that we manage such change appropriately and don’t hand over our children to the VLE for their academic sustenance without considering what our schools do for their social, physical and emotional well-being.