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When is a school not a school? (Australia) This curious item was spotted a month or so back on the distancelearning discussion group managed by Arun Tripathi, although its origin is the News - Education page of the BBC Online Network , via the CSS Internet News site managed by John Walker. It underlines how far online education has yet to travel before it will be able to stand alongside conventional face to face teaching and learning, and take its due share of the resources available. |
The courts will have to decide if a school needs to have classroomsAn online education company in Australia is in dispute with a local authority which is refusing to allow it to officially register as a school.
The "school" wants to use the Internet to teach the two-year Higher School Certificate to students in Australia and elsewhere in the world, but the New South Wales Board of Studies says that without classrooms it does not count as a school.
As online education grows, regulatory disputes are likely to grow alongside. The company behind the online project, Net Grammar, wants to provide fee-paying courses, using Websites and e-mail to allow pupils and teachers to communicate.
Net Grammar says it meets the criteria for starting a school, including an approved curriculum and qualified teachers, but the school registration authority says it is not enough.
The question as to what constitutes a school will be put under legal scrutiny this week [May 18 - Web Editor], when an appeal court will decide whether Net Grammar qualifies.
"One of the criteria for registering a school is that you have school buildings and premises that are suitable. The board has interpreted those words as meaning you must have buildings," says the chair of Net Grammar, Chris Birtinshaw.
"We have said we don't have buildings because our mode of communication doesn't require them. So there's a bit of a legal argy bargy going on."
The growth in the use of the Internet as a teaching medium could raise further regulatory disputes. While conventional education has been regulated and accredited, the move into cyberspace raises the prospect of institutions working outside local or national education systems.
Universities in the United States and in Europe have already begun to use the Internet to deliver courses, with colleges developing teaching materials specifically for use by students online.
The US-based Virtual Online University Services International offers purely online courses for companies, undergraduates and school pupils.
Although the lack of classrooms is part of the disagreement in the Australian dispute, the expansion of Internet teaching is in part being driven by the economic advantages of selling courses without the overheads of university buildings and student accommodation.
Have any WAOE members encountered issues like this in your own part of the world? If you have, or if you would just like to comment on this article, use the Your Say section of WEB to ... well, have your say!
The issues and other matters raised in this section of WEB are intended to derive from membersā concerns and suggestions.
Input to WAOE-Views during the recent Annual General Meeting showed us that members are looking for opportunities to engage with important issues and ideas affecting the Web-based delivery of teaching and learning, but also that we need to do more to spell out to our members details of the organisational procedures through which they will get to know more frequently and reliably what goals the Association is pursuing, what action is being taken to realise these goals, and - most importantly - how members may make the most effective contributions to WAOE.
As a result, a new column, WAOE Policies and Procedures, has been split off from WEB Ideas and Issues. This will free the WEB Ideas and Issues column to be taken up more and more by topics of interest arising from the thinking of the members at large about their own professional practice in online education, and the role that WAOE as a whole and the sub-groups in which members are most actively engaged might play in lifting the standards and quality of Web-based teaching and learning.
If you have a concern to express, an idea to suggest, a question to raise, a point to make about online education in general and about WAOE's work in relation to online education in particular, write a short item for the WEB Ideas and Issues column and send it to the WEB Editor. On a smaller, less formal scale, you might prefer to air your views first of all in the Your Say section of WEB. Depending on the nature and volume of early responses to the Your Say item, matters raised may spark an article in the Web Ideas and Issues section of WEB, a free-ranging discussion on WAOE-Views, or a structured debate or online chat via the WAOE WebBoard.