POLICY & REFORM campusreview. com. au
Safety first
Digital technology serves to spread access to higher education but these benefits must be protected with safeguards for security and privacy.
By Matt Miller
A decade ago, the prospect of someone earning a graduate degree through distance learning would have seemed far-fetched and impractical. Fast forward to 2015. In today’ s highly connected world, it’ s no stretch to think of progressing a career or acquiring a second degree with the aid of online tools.
The internet is now the principal enabling mechanism by which students assemble, spread ideas and sow economic opportunities. And education data has become a hot topic in bids to transform the manner in which students learn.
Professor Steven Ross, at the Centre for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University in the US, says the use of data to customise education will be the key driver for learning in the future. Indeed, technology already has resulted in a surge of online learning courses accessible to anyone with a smart.
In fact, a two-year assessment of the massive open online courses( MOOCs) created by HarvardX and MITx revealed 1.7 million course entries in 68 MOOCs. This translates to about 1 million unique participants who on average engage with 1.7 courses each.
This equity of education is undoubtedly providing vast opportunities for students around the globe. With more than a half million apps to choose from, both teachers and students can obtain digital resources on any subject.
Excellence in education cannot be achieved without equity. Every student requires the means to access resources in order to excel academically or risk being left behind their peers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of technology. As education progresses in the digital era, here are some considerations for institutions to maximise the equity of education with the use of technology:
SCALE AND SECURITY The emergence of a smorgasbord of MOOC providers, such as Coursera and edX, has challenged the traditional, geographical and technological boundaries of education. Take for example Australia’ s OpenLearning, which has more than 200,000 students from 27 universities around the globe using its social and collaborative online platform. Expect this explosion of online learners from a wider array of geographical locations to continue in the near future.
The technological advancements in education offer new opportunities for government and enterprises. These efforts will be most effective if they can keep a close eye on security and privacy issues while they rapidly scale and adapt. For example, many educational institutions have just as many users as large multinational corporations do. Therefore, investing in network connectivity and having the infrastructure to accelerate the roll-out of the curriculum to users via applications is critical, as is securing traffic. The increased bandwidth provides educators and students with faster access to information and enhances communication.
ENSURING CONNECTIVITY This Gen-Y world demands a high level of convenience and speed from practically everyone and anything. In education, expectations from Gen-Y have brought about reform and revolutionised the way information is delivered to students. Furthermore, the internet of things has introduced a whole new raft of ways in which teachers can educate their students. Textbooks are no longer the primary tools in the classroom. This shift helps educational institutions better personalise the curriculum based on data garnered from students and their work. Ensuring connectivity to devices such as smart boards and iPads has never been more pertinent than now.
DUTY OF CARE As the cloud continues to test and transform the realms of education around the world, educational institutions are opting for a centralised services model, in which they can easily have what they want delivered to students to enhance learning.
Hence, institutions have a duty of care around the type of content accessed and how students obtain it. Enterprises can enforce acceptable use policies by delivering only content that is useful to the curriculum. For example, content delivered to a kindergarten would be more sensitive than that at a university. A level of discretion needs to be in place to ensure that students do not have access to nefarious data available over the internet.
Additionally, enterprises need to make sure educational institutions have systems in place to monitor who is on the network.
THE FUTURE It’ s hard not to feel the profound impact technology is having on equity. The integrity of the process demands that security, scalability and delivery of content remain primary concerns.
Equity of education means addressing barriers to access such as language, affordability and distance. The digital era has enhanced the capacity for students to approach problems and find solutions, undoubtedly creating a new level of personalised learning. It is through education that peace, tolerance and intelligence will emerge to solve many of the world’ s pressing issues. ■
Matt Miller is director Australia and New Zealand at F5 Networks.
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