Week 4: Changing Curriculum and Pedagogic Design

Adopting a Rigorous Outcomes-based Curriculum.

My organisation is a secondary school with a 160+ year old history. As can be imagined, change is not easy. Rather various cycles of change have come and gone through the decades; present day stagnation was yesteryear’s innovation.

Currently, National plans to promote the use of ICT in Singapore Schools (http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2008/08/moe-launches-third-masterplan.php) aims to:

• strengthen integration of ICT into curriculum, pedagogy and assessment to enhance learning and develop competencies for the 21st century;
• provide differentiated professional development that is more practice-based and models how ICT can be effectively used to help students learn better;
• improve the sharing of best practices and successful innovations; and
• enhance ICT provisions in schools to support the implementation of mp3 (http://ictconnection.moe.edu.sg/cos/o.x?c=/ictconnection/pagetree&func=view&rid=665)

School has adopted the use of technology in the teaching-learning process. Some may argue that this policy was top-down and not bottom up but the jury is still out. For example, many teachers have adapted the use of IT and brought in their own flavour in its application in the classroom.

School conducts various ICT based programmes, the largest being the school-wide e-Learning Day where students do not come to school but rather access e-learning lessons from home.

Besides specific programmes, school has also weaved in most student, parent and teacher information accessibility online. Information dissemination is done through level and class websites. For this to happen seamlessly, the BYOD (Bring your own device) programme was launched in 2013 as a tool for the educational process to happen (http://www.sji.edu.sg/subpage.php?id=453).

Critique

Using the RASE model (Churchill, King, Webster, & Fox, 2013) to critique these innovations in ICT, it can be noted that there is a positively strong skew in Activities, Support and Evaluation/ Feedback. What seems to be lacking, is providing Resources for students’ learning. This may be viewed in a positive or negative light. I view it as being indicative of an invitation for students to do their research and find solutions to specific problems connected to learning. Often however the nature of the student can be overlooked and a negative effect may be the outcome. For example, faced with a many assignments and quizzes etc, a student might simply ask a friend for the quick answer. While this might be permissable in a formative task, the objective of achieving deep and explorative learning is an issue that should be addressed.

Besides curriculum design shortcomings, technical support is also an issue frequently taken for granted and overlooked.  For instance the system has crashed a few times with a few hundred students logging in at the same time to access the same subpage in order to complete a task by a specific deadline.

For further consideration

Viewed against the Blended Learning concept, how is change in Curriculum and Pedagogic Design effected and implemented? Have enablers acquired sufficient skills that empower them to implement Masterplan 3 successfully while adapting the curriculum with a view of NARCMO (O'Neill, 1979; Blaikie, 1998)? What value is ICT in summative assessment, bearing in mind that most summative assessments are often a paper-pen exercise?

References

Blaikie, J. (1998). My philosophy of education: A synthesis project – The history and         philosophy of education. (unpublished project paper). Nairobi, Kenya: CTIE.

Churchill, D., King, M., Webster, B., & Fox, B. (2013) Integrating learning design,interactivity and technology. In H. Carter, M. Gosper, J. Hedberg. (Eds.).Electric Dreams. Proceedings ascilite 2013 Sydney. (pp.139-143).

O'Neill, J. (1979). Accountability as an individual mission. (Unpublished Doctoral thesis). Columbia University, USA.

Singapore Ministry of Education. (2008, Aug 5). MOE Launches Third Masterplan for ICT in Education. Retrieved fromhttp://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2008/08/moe-launches-third-masterplan.php 

Singapore Ministry of Education, Education & Technology Division. (2010-2011). Masterplan 3. Retrieved from http://ictconnection.moe.edu.sg/cos/o.x?c=/ictconnection/pagetree&func=view&rid=665

St Joseph’s Institution. (2009). Bring your own device (BYOD). Retrieved from http://www.sji.edu.sg/subpage.php?id=453