Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Establishing a National Curriculum in Australia has proven to be an elusive goal for the past forty years, for a variety of reasons. The Federal Government has decided to go ahead with establishing a National Curriculum, and has established the National Curriculum Board, to make it a reality [EDIT: now under the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)]. The Board’s work is well underway: the Shaping Papers and Framing Papers for the curriculum, in the priority areas of English, maths, the sciences and history, have already been subject to stakeholder feedback and revised. The Board is now embarking on the work of scoping, sequencing, and filling in the curricula proper, and aims to publish the curricula after national consultation, in June through September 2010.

Although there has not been a national curriculum in Australia to date, there has already been agreement among the States as to the broad goals of national education, as affirmed by MCEETYA; these include the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians in December 2008, and the 1999 Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century before it. The National Assessment Program, benchmarking student performance in Literacy and Numeracy, has become nationwide in 2008, but national benchmarking of State tests has already been in place for a decade before that. Independently, MCEETYA has adopted nationwide Statements of Learning for English, Maths, Science, Civics, and ICT since 2003, and these have served to bring the State curricula into at least some alignment. So there are already foundations in place for the National Curriculum Board to build on.

Curriculum objectives and outcomes are stated in prose paragraphs. The entire K-10 or K-12 curriculum can end up being quite a weighty book, given the detail to which a student’s thirteen years of education need to be laid out, and even the broad Foundation Statements . By way of comparison, take the examples of mathematics:

• NSW, K-6
• VIC, P-10
• QLD, 3-9

Even the broad, Foundation Statement summaries of desired outcomes are groups of multiple paragraphs per level. Compare:

• NSW Foundation Statements
• VIC, Standards Table [DOC]
• QLD, Assessable elements and descriptors

But as teaching is transformed in the Information Age, the paragraphs need to be leveraged to maximise their use, beyond the realm of PDFs. In particular, teachers will not want to be guided by the curriculum just to plan what they will teach this semester. They will also want help in working out what resources they can use, to teach those curriculum objectives. With the quantity of resources available to them, and increasing all the time, teachers do not expect to have to sift through the descriptions of the resources one by one, to work out which fits the curriculum objectives best. They quite reasonably expect someone to have done so for them already, wherever the resources were registered and their metadata crafted. Given a curriculum objective, they should be able to search for resources which match it.

The expectation that curriculum objectives should drive resource discovery holds, whether there is a national curriculum, or lots of different state curricula. A single set of curriculum objectives makes things much easier for realising such discovery, because resources need to be searchable against only a single set of objectives, rather than eight. But the most critical requirement for resource discovery is not to have a single set of curriculum objectives per country: there is no national curriculum on the horizon for the States, to take the most obvious example. The critical requirement is to have the curriculum objectives be machine readable. Once the paragraphs of learning objectives can be distilled into assertions to tag content with, content can be discovered through those tags.

If those assertions are machine readable, then the capabilities of the Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing can be brought to bear, to automate the tagging of content as much as possible. Making the tagging efficient is in itself a powerful argument for a consistent national curriculum, since it needs only deal with a single authoritative set of assertions about what students should learn. The efficiencies to be gained are obvious for the publishers and registry providers, who make the content available, as well as the teachers and administrators looking for the content.

Machine readable curriculum objectives have been a long running concern of the e-learning community. The disparity between State curricula, and the need to make content searchable against each state’s objectives, led to the development in 2003 of a Curriculum Organiser component, incorporated in the Basic E-Learning Tool Set (BELTS) tool by The Le@rning Federation. The challenge has been particularly acute in the US, as seen, and has led to initiatives like the Gateway to 21st Century Skills and the Achievement Standards Network. The ASN contains, as a resource, all 51 US curricula and several national curricula in machine-readable form. Based on that resource, members of the Gateway network can build tools to better navigate the assertions in resource discovery and learning pathways, as well as curricula. This leads to the paragraphs becoming active and flexible building blocks: they can be sequenced differently, broken down differently, and matched across streams to the same content, leading to more creative and responsive learning.

As the National Curriculum sets about its work of creating a new set of assertions, there is an opportunity to make these assertions dynamic, integrating them into the ICT-driven workflows that enable 21st century learning. This is especially timely with a national curriculum, which can drive the efficiencies required in those ICT-driven workflows most effectively.