CRN Summit: The classroom of 2020

CRN: Westley, what about your five year plan?

Field: A difficulty we have in education is teachers being confined to four walls. That's the old industrial model where they owned all the power. Figuratively, literally, we have to break those four walls down.

It's about getting those teachers out to collaborate, to share, to expose what they're doing. You can do that by knocking all the walls down, having team teaching; you can do that by moving them out of the school and making them work in teams, but you can also do that in e-learning. As soon as you expose teachers to other teachers, in any way, they will improve.

So I see a need to move to e-learning to facilitate that collaborative approach to teaching. Schools are going to have issues with staffing, as different online systems come about. They are going to want quality online text materials developed, so they will be stealing the best teachers to develop that.

So you have more and more of a shortage of high-end teachers and you have to upskill your teachers to deliver that online learning, but come up with systems that can manage it.

When students want to do certain subjects in school but the timetable doesn't work, they can't do it. But they can do it if you have an e-learning course where you have a blend between online and face to face and maybe the students can do the science course during the week and meet up with the science teacher either via Skype or videoconferencing.

That mix opens up new opportunities. You can offer more to your student body internally and you can look at different models to move even beyond the school.

CRN: How far off are you from using Skype or other video-conferencing internally?

Field: We use it all the time.

Paxton: How do those courses sell to year 11?

Field: We've got everyone working in their own top subjects to set up the learning. It's not to work on a computer all day; it's to go away, do something, come back and report on it. Our focus this year is to work out what is good online pedagogy. Once we do that with 10 teachers we will then look at a model where some students do one full course online, and that will grow into the future.