What our classrooms of the future will look like
Imagine a future where students don’t attend school, and teachers never meet their pupils face to face. This idea of virtual learning is partly already a reality for students in one cutting edge Victorian school. Here’s what the future of schooling will like for the next wave of students.
Education
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Imagine a future where Victoria’s students don’t attend school.
Where learning is done not in a classroom filled with peers, but in a virtual world at any time of the day or night.
Where teachers — if they exist — instruct children who they may never meet. Where kids are taught personalised lessons from computers that use eyeball tracking and facial recognition to check if they’re paying attention.
In fact, some of this education future is already a reality for more than 3500 Victorian pupils.
“It looks more like a call centre than a school,” principal Bretton New says of his Virtual School Victoria.
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The Thornbury campus sits on a quiet dead-end residential street beside Darebin Creek, brown brick and streaked with LEGO-style panels of blue, red and yellow.
Inside, computer cables and phone lines twist through rooms to connect more than 200 teachers with students who could be on the other side of the globe or as close as the next suburb.
They could be in the United States playing tennis, sick in hospital, at home with crippling anxiety, or on Ramsey St as part of the cast of Neighbours.
But at the click of a button, they join virtual classes, chat rooms and Skype sessions from Prep to Year 12 in 274 different subjects.
Not that just anyone can study there: “It’s education for youngsters not able to attend school,” Mr New said.
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“They might be elite athletes or performers — we have youngsters in the School of Rock performing out of Sydney and Brisbane, and others who are with the Australian junior tennis squad.
“We also have a significant number — about 1000 — with medical, physical or emotional conditions.
“There are also about 300 youngsters on the autism spectrum. Many of them are here because bricks and mortar schools are not the place for them.”
In PE, students are told how to make an exercise yard in their garden or bedroom.
And food tech classes and science experiments use everyday items in their home kitchen.
Students can still have the physical contact with the school by working in the library, visiting their teachers, joining the Student Representative Council and attending excursions and camps.
There’s even swimming lessons for those who live nearby.
Enrolments are growing each year. An extra 500 students have been added to the roll since 2015.
And by 2021, rural and regional students will be able to take any VCE subject they like under a $22.6 million government expansion to virtual learning.
And while there’s just one online school to service the entire state, Monash researcher Professor Neil Selwyn says it’s a glimpse into the future.
“We have a virtual high school that is completely online. There’s no reason in 20 years why you wouldn’t have more of them,” he said.
Prof Selwyn is one of five people at Monash University’s Education Futures think tank, investigating and researching current and future priority areas in education — including the state’s only online school.
“Online classes really make sense,” Prof Selwyn said, pointing out that universities have run online lectures and courses for years.
“One of the shifts in 20 years (for schools) will be a blend in online and face-to-face learning.
“Primary schools I hope will still have face-to-face learning from 9am to 3pm, but the higher up the education, the more blended you get.”
At a time when the government’s school expenses are ballooning, there’s no denying the cost benefits in taking education online.
The population boom is expected to add 90,000 further students by 2022. Matching that with a boom of its own, the government will build an extra 45 schools with a $850 million price tag.
“We’re not always going to have this endless building of schools,” PricewaterhouseCoopers partner and expert consultant Zac Hatzantonis said.
Simply, there won’t be the space for them.
“We’re going to need to be more innovative, have partnerships and ways of sharing infrastructure,” she said.
Enter the new wave of vertical schools, where students study in high-rise buildings fitted out with indoor climbing playgrounds and activity spaces hemmed with nets to catch stray balls.
South Melbourne Primary was the first, opening last year over six storeys.
This year came Prahran High and Richmond High
And there are plans for another four — Dockland Primary, a second McKinnon Secondary campus, Fishermans Bend Secondary and a senior campus at Fitzroy Gasworks.
Meanwhile, the 1500 schools the government already owns are sitting on an ever-growing goldmine.
Ms Hatzantonis says Victoria’s schools make up 16 per cent of the value of the government’s assets. But they were also a liability.
“According to recent auditor general reports, maintenance funding is below industry standards,” she said.
“Approximately 70 per cent (of schools) are at or above good condition so we need to think about how we are going to maintain all these assets.”
One answer could be virtual learning. Not that it’s the only emerging technology Prof Selwyn says could transform our education systems.
Facial recognition has been hotly debated as Education Minister James Merlino weighed in recently.
Melbourne start-up LoopLearn was given almost $500,000 by the federal government to fine tune its software, using scanners that sweep a classroom to monitor attendance.
It’s being trialled in 100 campuses across Australia, including private schools Sacred Heart College in Geelong and Ballarat and Clarendon College.
The idea is to save teachers time in marking the role, and potentially saving thousands of dollars in administration costs.
Mr Merlino doesn’t necessarily agree. “Teachers are best placed to record student attendance, not robots,” he said.
Labelling it a “Big Brother style system”, the deputy Premier said no government school would implement the technology until his concerns were alleviated.
Prof Selwyn said facial recognition wasn’t just being investigated to track rollcalls.
It was also being used to look at security to quickly determine who was on campus, while eyeball tracking could note how students were reacting to lessons.
“The teacher can be alerted that five of their students are zoning out,” he said.
“When you talk to kids, the first word they use is ‘creepy’.
“There’s a reason data is going to be so big in the next few years — you can make a lot of money out of it.”
Every time a student logs on to a computer, they generate data.
“The data can create an adaptive curriculum, personal learning. Every kid will be doing their own curriculum. Everyone learns about the same thing but you take a different pathway.”
Prof Selwyn then ventures in to a more contentious area: “Why do we still need physical teachers? We can’t teach anything that can’t be automated.”
In Liberia, a controversial “school in a box” program funded by Silicone Valley is already taking over, with primary and pre-primary education outsourced to a private US company.
It comes cheap because it uses “scripted teachers” who don’t require a degree — only training through a five-week program to read the day’s lessons off a script from a tablet computer.
The other emerging problem area is robots, which are being developed to support teachers. But what if that technology develops into a replacement?
“Teachers have to try to speak up for what they bring, and that’s a huge amount for a child’s social and emotional learning,” Prof Selwyn said.
“The other thing real teachers bring to the party is they’ve learned these things as a human.
“It’s much easier to convey to another human.”
The Australian Education Union’s Victorian branch president Meredith Peace said the relationship between students, their teachers and their peers was vital.
“Those relationships are increasingly important in helping students learn and learn effectively — someone who understands the social and emotional needs of the student they see everyday,” she said.
“We’ll lose something significant if we move to a model online or teaching by robots.
“We might save money, but there is a huge cost in diminishing education for our young people.
“Having those positive relationships with people has a direct impact on education.”
While she said “there is absolutely a place for technology” in schools, and that it was having a positive influence, it was an important debate that should be held between parents, teachers and governments.
“Technology moves so fast,” she said. “We’re not caught up on what type of impact that is having on young people and the community more broadly. Is it detrimental or not?
“A lot of work needs to be done on the impact it’s having on society and in young people and their learning.”
The concern for Prof Selwyn is — at a time where education is shifting more and more online, technology is growing, populations are expanding and space for physical schools is shrinking — that it could create the perfect storm for a class divide.
“My worry is you will get a more elite system,” he said.
“An elite system where those people go to a physical school with physical books and physical teachers who know your name in a class of 15,” he said.
“Face-to-face learning could become more elite. We have to be worried that’s the possible end game.”
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