ACER could nurture a national curriculum

Stephen Digby, Dec 2003 in response to the launch of 2003-12-01 iAchieve at home - ACER

Although ACER is an "independent not-for-profit educational research and development organisation", it nevertheless charges for its products (rather than donating them to the educational public in an attempt to encourage and ficilitate best practice).
There is no costing mentioned for iAcheive at home in your letter or on the site.
Is it a free service ?

I think that there is an enormous potential for this type of service and that ACER is ideally placed to deliver it on a national basis.
I have tried to suggest the same to the Curriculum Development Corportaion and, repeatedly, to the Victorian Governemnt.

The benefits to Australia would be include :
a.. development of national curriculum by default (as more and more students, parents and schools came to use it and rely on it, ACER's influence over the national curriculum would grow). The concept of ensuring free public domain materials is crucial to realising this opportunity.
b.. development of national curriculum database.
Currently, the nation is flooded with guidelines and frameworks which are government attempts to describe the characteristics of a good classroom program in and attempt to encourage teachers to design curriculum materials to match individuals and class groups.
The fact is that teachers are often not good at curriculum design, and when they attempt it they use time that would be better spent on prep (physically preparting materials and the environment for the learning process, planning their delivery style), correction (carefully evaluating the students work to guide the next lesson prep and to be able to respond individually and appropriately to each student) and reflection (reviewing all the above to seek improvement and look for unexpected opportunities).
Teachers in Victoria are sick to death of frameworks that encapsulate all possible "parenthood" statements in the expectation that teachers will magically create a year of lessons armed with this wish list and a few exemplars. We currently face another round of this wasteful and demoralising approach as the Government has just instructed the VCAA to commence another project.
Teachers flock to coherent learning programs embodied in commercial texts and their increasingly diverse and creative support materials. Here teachers increasingly have choice within a coherent program. If the materials are designed to acheive the objectives of the framework, all the better.

If ACER developed an online database of learing and assessment materials, ACER could
a.. offer teachers a credible national reference collection of learning activities and assessment tools
b.. collect materials from thousands of teachers who would be willing to donate their materials free and without copyright IF
a.. the materials remained attributed to the (multiple) authors even after they were altered
b.. the materials were not appropriated within ACER's copyright
c.. collect materials from past authors who would be happy to see their out of print work used productively rather than be forgotten. In many subjects (especially, mathematics, this could represent a huge and easily updated opportunity)
d.. collect materials from commercial publishers where they considered that copyright free samples within the collection could boost their company or product profile in the marketplace.
e.. collect materials from state systems that have already developed huge collections, and would want to influence the direction of the project, as well as be seen to have contributed.
c.. development of an international profile for Australia in terms of foreign aid. Instead of the current fragmentation and duplication of effort that has always characterised education (Originally due to technical limitations of communication and the ability to transform information from one paper source to another. Now due to the increasing stranglehold of copyright law on any culture of sharing)
d.. development of multiple courses (in the true sense of moving in a path from point to point) through the materials. Instead of completely different course materials being printed, there would be different pathways that would use many activities in common as well as some differences.
i.e. as well as a databank of learning activities that all stand alone, there are suggestions for
a.. "unit" length sequences to serve a wide variety of curriculum objectives e.g. content focused, integated projects (within a "discipline", across various "subjects" etc)
b.. "semester" length sequences to serve certain year levels in certain states. These could be created with or witout official state accreditation. States would eventually be pressured to contribute one or more courses or have their fameworks exposed as being unable to be realised in any day to day program.
c.. Special needs (e.g different countries, special learning groups etc. etc)

As a post-script, I have included and excerpt from one of my recent unsuccesful attempts to influence the development of the Victorian BluePrint.

I hope that your project is a ground breaking beginning to a comprehensive free national clearing house dedicated to improving the quality and cohernece of world education.... rather than a corporate attempt to gain a slice of the market for online education.

One can only hope.
Victorian EduLibrary – a free gift to the world that has really paid off !

Stephen Digby, Dec 2003 from An Alternate Vision of the Future.....What might success look like ? -
The Victorian government decided early against providing only general guidelines and relying on the hope that publishers would write quality materials for the small Victorian market AND that teachers would make the best choices for their classes. Recipes are a strategy to ensure that the average chef can make an excellent meal. No recipe could smother the creativity of teachers when presented with the vibrant mix inherent in any student group. The government commissioned publishers to work in cooperation with its curriculum writers to prove that the government guidelines could be translated into day-to-day reality. Before the project had got underway, a range of groups tried to join and broaden the task to global dimensions. The government stayed firm, believing that experience of building a real bridge is better than the experience of planning a thousand theoretical bridges. In the face of insistence that all EduLibrary material would be copyright free for all non-commercial use, gifted materials began to flood in from individuals, non-profit educational publishers as well as commercial sources willing to sell materials for a once only fee.

Within 2 years, the EduLibrary has grown to enormous proportions and was beginning to influence the course of educational publishing worldwide. The problems of selecting and sequencing the activities that would be recommended for a course took another 2 years as the debate raged as to what should be learnt. In the days of vague guidelines, this debate could in reality be avoided by different re-interpretation of the guidelines in front of each audience.

Today, the site provides not just one learning pathway, but a rich set of alternate sequences. Each sequence when selected provides not only a framework or study design, but also detailed activity scripts and final teaching materials for use with students. Individual teachers publish their own materials to the Ministry Website as additional resources for the subject so students can browse the core EduLibrary material as well as the additional materials provided by any teacher in the state. Secondary teachers now emulate the long-standing practice of primary teachers in maintaining a “daily work program record” – only now it is “on-line”. Ministry curriculum writers comb the teacher’s materials regularly, obtaining much new and creative additional materials for the EduLibrary. Attribution is carefully managed and highly valued. Copyright for any future non-commercial use (including the Ministry) is surrendered as soon as the materials are submitted to EduLibrary.
From Curriculum recommendations.....

Stephen Digby
Curriculum: Government should provide guidelines to schools in the form of rich and complete curriculum programmes in cooperation with commercial publishers.
q Curriculum Guidelines and Study designs are widely held in contempt by practicing teachers as theoretical ramblings filtered through political compromises and providing little help as to how they can be translated into practice in the real world of the daily classroom.
There is a presumption in DEET that all teachers are capable or happy to be curriculum developers as well as teachers.
There is a culture in DEET that assumes that all is needed is guidelines and teachers will construct a myriad of well balanced coherent teaching programs that meet all needs of every student in their class.
Confident innovative teachers that work considerably beyond their paid hours are often happy to spend time writing curriculum materials. The main problem in schools is limited time for teacher to “prep” and “correct”.
v E.g. if I have a wonderful guideline that suggests that I use real data to explore the concept of bivariate data, there is still a lot of work to “develop” curriculum materials that will allow the lesson to be taught. The teacher will then have to “prep” the lesson (i.e. duplicate the materials, find the resources, collect them ready in a suitable place for the lesson). After many lessons, students will create products or performances that will require feedback. The teacher needs to set aside time for “correction”. Of these tasks, the most time consuming is “development”.
Currently most teachers continually develop lessons especially in VCE where some subjects have no complete commercial teaching materials available. This results in a huge reduction in the time allocated to prep and correction. Thus, curriculum materials used in schools is of very variable quality and teachers tend to develop materials, which only require a photocopier for prep and are amenable to easy correction.
The end result is a vast statewide overuse of fill-in-the-gap photocopiable masters.
q The bureaucracy will not even give state accreditation to any curriculum materials. The best that publishers can hope for is mention as acceptable resources.
v The reason for this is that even with all the resources at their disposal they could not develop a complete course of curriculum materials in any subject at any level that would satisfy the myriad of demands listed in all the relevant “guidelines”.
q What schools need is high quality complete courses providing all teaching materials. Not as a proscription, but as an exemplar showing at least one way that the guidelines can be translated into complete daily reality.
v These exist in profusion in other countries such as the USA. The quality, coherence and completeness of the materials puts Australia to shame. Publishers would be most eager to develop materials to Australian specifications provided they were given access to a large market share through state accreditation.
q Innovative curriculum approaches would be much more likely to be taken up by schools if the government provided state accredited materials in support of them rather than just a few words in theory and a few samples that required teachers to develop the rest in their everyday work.