Virtex - A Success Story

How did this future unfold ? What could have lead to outcomes unthinkable before the 2004 election ?
The first indication that things in John Howard’s self-professed last term were not going to be just business as usual was his personal involvement in key decisions within the education portfolio. Close consultation with the minister of education was often followed by joint press conferences to emphasis the personal importance Mr. Howard placed on progress in this area.

The second surprise was in the federal control and concentration on key transformational projects rather than using state funding. These projects did not attempt to achieve change through the army or “Sir Humphrey’s” in state and even federal education bureaucracies as so many Commonwealth programs had before them. They created momentum centrally in a way that so challenged state governments, schools and teachers that nearly all realised that they needed to “get on board” to have some input. Within 18 months international bodies were either copying or joining some of the developments.

What were these projects ? How could so much rapid change come from projects remote from the classroom funding ?
For decades, commonwealth and state education authorities spent million upon million on curriculum development. Where did it go ? If you asked Australian teachers around the country in the fist years of this century, they would tell you about the mountains of guidelines, blue prints, exemplars, models, sample units that gathered dust even before they were distributed. If you asked them what they used in the classroom and they would have shown you a smorgasbord of commercial classroom materials.
The materials tried to pitch themselves somewhere near one states guidelines or another’s framework. Very few were recommended by any government. Many needed to be purchased by every school to meet the diverse needs. All came with strict legal guidelines preventing their improvement, alteration, and sharing among schools. Most publishers understandably structured their materials to prevent teachers extracting or even finding parts from within these courses. Most online materials were only accessible to those who bought access, even then, they were only designed to enhance not deliver.
If you stayed in those classrooms for more than a day, you would see that most programs were patched together “on the fly” with passionate but often chaotic creativity. In the hands of an expert in curriculum design as well classroom teaching, this worked until the teacher promoted or burnt out. These teachers were continually trumpeted as models for all. Most teachers were best at curriculum delivery and did not have the expertise, let alone the time, to develop or even select materials from the library or from the unlimited chaff left in the contracting free areas of the internet.

What did the many national projects do ? They nearly always focused on development of new resources (supposedly an easy daily task for the average teacher) with no attempt at comprehensive coverage of even one subject. Most projects aimed to create products to sell to schools as exemplars or units with consequent fame and return for the individuals and organisations that sold them. Just one more option to wade through before preparing tomorrow's lesson.

Sucked into the Virtex ! Boffins, State governments and unions agreed that a single national curriculum is too restrictive ! Perhaps fascist ! The national government was frustrated at the lack of any guarantee of classroom improvement even after with bucket loads of cash. Mr. Howard’s fourth term proved the circuit breaker when he announce the fast track development of Virtex as the mechanism of making his election promise of honest educational reporting a reality.
Virtex was going to make a national curriculum available to all students – not just guidelines, but sequenced courses of classroom activities with associated assessment and reporting standards.
The idea would incorporate any materials and their associated standards that State Governments wanted to put their name to. There was no restriction on diversity. Online storage allowed the “text” to be as large as the nation’s diversity. Yes - Sequences had to be recommended through the materials so that students and teachers knew how to cover skills, knowledge and attitude development required for the national standards - but alternatives can be easily stored for every unit of work or lesson. This would not be confusing if choice was limited to materials approved by at least one government.

State governments could produce guidelines in spades. Their problem was not wanting to be blamed for the hard choice every teacher makes every day – what lesson will I teach ! There was no problem with materials. Teachers were up to their eyeballs in curriculum resources. The problem was in choosing the materials to match the changing, vague and contradictory “guidelines”, “frameworks” and “standards”.

The Federal government took the lead. It quickly integrated all the materials under the control of a variety of QANGO’s into Virtex using EDNA as a basis. It then sought donated resources from all groups interested in quality national curricula such as subject associations and universities. Initial reluctance over loss of control (copyright on everything in Virtex is owned by the national Government) was overcome by the desire to be recognised as someone involved in setting the national standards. State governments were challenged – “Where are your materials ? Contribute them to the national database and actually help teachers. Are you sure that your imaginary state courses are better than the realities that that the federal government has openly shared ?”

Teachers and Parents voted with their mice ! As soon as the first courses of study and their associated national assessment & reporting standards were published, teachers rushed to try them out. Virtex provided real assessment instruments (e.g. tasks and tests and how to grade them) so that teachers around the nation could assess the curriculum. They couldn’t resist the desire to compare their student’s performance with the national data that was flowing in voluntarily at an increasing rate. Parents began to pressure their teachers and schools to use materials at the “national standard”. State governments found that they had to contribute to the standard or their schools would just end up following it.
Huge volumes of materials were submitted and incorporated. Courses were added more slowly as governments made the difficult decisions about what would fit and what had to be left out. Even within a single course, there were always a growing number of lesson contexts and approaches available to deliver the course objectives.

So what’s the difference ? All materials in courses must be recommended for inclusion by a government. The overwhelming bulk of materials in Virtex have yet to be integrated into any course. Many may never be. They stay there as examples of someone’s creativity - perhaps to be discovered as relevant to some future not yet visible. A much smaller price to pay than a library shelf !
Teachers are thus assured of the quality and appropriateness of any materials in courses and the acceptability of the assessment and reporting standards associated. They can concentrate on teaching to the best of their ability !!
International interest grew as commercial publishers realised that they needed to sell at least part of their materials to Virtex or lose credibility as standard bearers and money in lost sales. Indeed the government bought large collections of high quality content from publishers in part to compensate for the huge impact the initiative would have on the market for classroom materials.
Foreign governments began the process of negotiating such issues as access to the resources, the right to duplicate the database, information on the process of creation and management. Translation of materials began in some countries, local independent systems grew in most. The underlying assumption of access to accredited educational programs was recognised as a part of the international rights of the child. The United Nations became involved in the promotion of the approach and ….. the rest is history.

No one invented Virtex. It was an existing idea whose time had come. It was a demonstration of technological readiness as well as the continuing role for government in managing a liberal democracy rather than just being a passive victim of whatever product or service the market evolves.
It did take a person of power and vision to ensure that it was realised so quickly and implemented in a way that ensured more effectively than many aspects of direct school funding, that Australian children had equal access to the best educational materials in the world.