TECHNOLOGY
campusreview.com.au
UniSA steps up
University to help SA schools
transition to online learning.
By Wade Zaglas
The University of South Australia has
confirmed it will assist the state’s
schools to transition to online
learning, after an announcement by the
South Australian minister for education,
John Gardner.
Professor Shane Dawson, UniSA’s head of
school for education, contends this period
of school closures due to COVID-19 will be
“a challenging time for teachers, students
and parents”, but adds that the “broad
ambition” of providing an online curriculum
for the majority of the state’s students
is achievable.
Dawson said UniSA staff will provide
their online expertise to all South Australian
schools and staff.
“The educational technology already in
place is sufficient to support this transition,”
Dawson said.
“While we still need to sort out the
specific details of support that schools and
teachers need, UniSA has a lot of expertise
in this area, and we will be reaching out to
government, Catholic and independent
schools, just letting them know that we’re
here and available ... to support them in
every way we can,” Dawson said.
“In many ways, we have already started
this process, as UniSA’s Professor George
David Lloyd at UniSA’s
Adelaide campus. Photo:
Kelly Barnes/The Australian
Siemens, director of the Centre for
Change and Complexity in Learning, has
been running a MOOC (massive open
online course) on transitioning to online
education, in partnership with the University
of Texas at Arlington, and the University of
Wisconsin–Madison in the US.
“We will aim to transition some of those
materials over and see where they fit for
some of our teaching colleagues locally
as well,” he said.
“There are many platforms and tools
available that can support teachers in
creating learning activities, questions,
quizzes and interactive elements that
children and parents can work through.
“The difficulty, though, is that the
younger the children, the more supervision
they require when doing online lessons.
Schools, teachers and families are going
to have to work together to develop the
right structure for educating children while
respecting that many parents will need to
be working from home at the same time.
“Human dimensions of the transition
pose the biggest challenges,” Dawson
said, adding that all stakeholders, including
government, schools and families “will need
to be patient and supportive throughout
the process”.
“My thoughts at the moment are with
the teaching profession, who have taken
on a huge amount to try to transition to an
online environment within a short period of
time, especially in primary school and early
years education, where there is a strong
face-to-face interactive element and the
development of social skills is paramount,”
he said.
“The community at large is going to need
a lot of patience and an understanding that
everyone’s trying to do the best they can in
a situation that is changing every single day.”
Associate Professor Debbie Price,
a colleague of Dawson, added that
online models UniSA are developing
with SA schools play a dual purpose:
they “recognise and respond to both the
educational and social dimensions of the
teaching process”.
“A key priority around the development
of online learning is supporting young
people’s wellbeing and their need
for connectedness and socialisation,”
Price said.
“Online learning offers opportunities
to think innovatively and creatively about
how to facilitate such environments for
promoting both wellbeing and learning,
and, given their technological skills, there
may be opportunities for our pre-service
teachers to support designing such creative
approaches.”
But while Price, Dawson and their
colleagues believe that collaboration
between a range of stakeholders will
result in a “satisfactory online learning
environment for SA students”, they have
warned that even the best outcome will
fall short of normal educational quality,
mainly due to issues relating to connectivity,
IT access, supervision and encroaching
widespread poverty.
“Schools, teachers and families will
need to make some added educational
accommodations to best support our
children. The delivery system might be up
for the job, but not everyone will have equal
access to the technology,” Dawson said.
“There are areas around the state
where connectivity is unreliable and slow;
there are households that may not have
computers, or may have more students
than computers; and, given we are also
facing the potential of widespread job
losses, there may be many families that will
no longer be able to afford the luxury of
internet connection.
“All of these factors are going to come
into play, so in addition to the major
delivery platform, we’re going to need
to look at a lot of different scenarios on
a case-by-case basis to ensure schools
and teaching staff are able to cater to
individuals for an uncertain period of time
working remotely.” ■
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