Information Technologies & Education Quality
Our Investment into the Future
Background
To improve education quality and the construction of an information infrastructure are two initiatives crucial to the economic competitiveness of the Hong Kong SAR and our quality of life. In his policy speech delivered on 8 October 1997, our Chief Executive, Mr. Tung Chee Hwa highlighted the significance of these two initiatives to our success into the next millennium.
It is a firm belief of many leading professionals in the fields of education and information technology, that the improvement of our education quality and the construction and our information infrastructure are two issues with deep rooted mutual interdependence:
At the threshold of a new era, our manpower policy must play a proactive role in ensuring that we have a competent and competitive workforce to cope with a continued economic transformation. A population who not only enjoys but also contributes to an information-intensive economy is necessary to sustain Hong Kong's continued success.
One of the characteristics of the Information Age is the explosion of information. Much of this information, however, has a relatively short useful life span. We must not permit our education process to be reduced into the teaching of the trivia and the accumulation of disposable skills. We should start reviewing our education programs and school curricula in order to avoid spending our limited resources in producing a workforce having a gross mismatch with the demands of our time.
In the information age, we need a workforce capable of life-long learning, an intelligent workforce in possession of renewable, self-refreshing skills. Against such objectives, the existing education system is clearly not delivering what a transforming economy is desperately in need of . We may have to be prepared to go back to basics and review the fundamentals.
IT in Education and IT Education
Let us not confuse IT Education with IT in Education and be a little more precise with these terminologies.
In a narrower sense, some maintain the view that IT Education is possibly the preparation of secondary school students to enter into the information technology related disciplines in their future education or to become IT practitioners. In contrast, IT in Education gives the exposure to students the use of IT through their learning experience, with the objective to develop their abilities in harnessing the power of IT and the use of information resources in whatever disciplines they choose to enter.
IT in Education and IT Education are intricately related in the education process. However, a clear differentiation of their objectives and their methods of execution are important for us to design comprehensive programs to address the real needs of our community. We must not confuse the teaching of IT as the use of IT in teaching. Professionals in the education and information technology disciplines will need to work together to design programs balancing these two sets of needs in our primary and secondary education systems.
We believe, IT in Education and IT Education are equally important directions that we have the responsibilities to further develop so that the future workforce will be in possession of the necessary pre-requisite for our continued economic success.
In the past few years, IT Education, and often referred to as Computer Education, has received some degree of attention in the Hong Kong primary and secondary education systems. There is a widely publicized program under the Education Department for equipping a good percentage of the Hong Kong primary and secondary schools with personal computers. What one needs to ask, however, is whether the provision of personal computer hardware sufficient for most of the primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong to exploit the benefits of IT? Or, is it necessary for all these schools to integrate IT as a subject into the curriculum? Are these schools ready to do so? Are there sufficient number of teachers and trained staff in these schools to manage and to benefit from the use of the computer hardware resources? Have these personal computers become useful tools in teaching and learning? Or, are they simply expensive items of furniture, but not delivering any benefits before they become obsolete?
These are questions we need to ask and get answers to before we commit more public resources to IT in Education, or the more narrowly focused IT Education programs.
Experience from the United States
(Sources: US Today Editorial, October 8, 1997, Benton Foundation Report)
During the past few years, in the United States, schools nationwide have rushed to spend billions of dollars installing computers. A growing number of researchers and educators begin to question whether this expensive endeavour is paying off in improving student performance. The problem is that rosy and unrealistic expectations are crashing against the cold realities of under-estimated budgets and over-simplification of issues that one has to address for the effective integration of IT into the education process. Schools buy computers, then fail to retool the school's teaching facilities, the teacher training and the curricula to take advantage of them.
In the United States, the success in integrating IT into primary and secondary school education has been limited to only a small percentage of the more resourceful and better prepared school districts. It is the belief of many educators and community leaders that , without remedial action, the US$4 billion being spent annually to equip the U.S. primary and secondary schools with computers and networks will be wasted. There will be many well-stocked computer laboratories with too few teachers and students ready to put them to effective use.
A study conducted by the non-profit Benton Foundation tracking the social benefits of technology, identifies that only very few schools in America have enhanced their curricula and education quality by using computers. And only 13% of teachers surveyed this year believed the Internet was helping their students.
What are the causes of these big gaps between popular belief, expectation, reality and perception? Many educators in the United States admit they are partly responsible and should shoulder their share of the blame. They had too easily bowed to the pressure of parents and politicians who pushed computers as a quick fix for ailing schools in spite of nagging questions about how best to use the new technology to improve learning.
There are also showcases of success in the use of IT in education in American schools. Mathematics students in the Mendocino School District used programs downloaded from a Virginia college to study the local population changes. Detroit chemistry students used computers to help them to understand water quality testing and had subsequently seen great improvements in their standardized test scores.
Through National Science Foundation grants, Northwestern University and University of Michigan are working to help other school districts turn computers into more effective classroom tools. The U.S. Department of Education has revised their plan to channel part of its US$2 billion budget for wiring up the schools to funding teacher training.
Some Suggestions on the Integration of IT into our Primary and Secondary Education Systems in Hong Kong.
We firmly believe that the integration of IT elements into our education processes in the primary and secondary schools is an important step that we must take for the Hong Kong SAR to face the challenge of the 21st century. We must not, however at the same time, under-estimate the effort required or over-simplify the issues involved to implement such an education re-engineering program. Lessons learned and experience gained by other countries should be analyzed and the uniqueness of our own situation must be carefully identified and studied to ensure that such an important program will succeed.
We are encouraged by the Chief Executive's policy speech outlining the direction for the integration of IT into education; it will be one of our most important investments into the future.
On this important direction and initiative of our community, we are keen to offer our suggestions and we are prepared to commit time and energy, as a professional group, to turn this vision into reality.
Quality before Quantity - To allow this program to succeed, we must not allow quantity to substitute quality. Our measurement of success must not simply be quantitative figures such as: the number of installed computers per student versus the number of computers in effective use; the percentage of schools connectable to the Internet versus the extent to which network connection has been sustained for meaningful educational purposes; the number of schools equipped with computer versus the number of hours each computer has been put to use by students and teachers....
Statistical claims can often be simplistic to the extreme in gauging the true success and the accomplishment of our true intentions. A set of metrics must be devised from the outset to provide quantitative as well as qualitative measurements of the program. Bureaucratic processes in most governments tend to use simple quantitative figures as their measurement standards. They are non-controversial, easy to achieve and in many case, "success" can be purchased by throwing in more money.
In his policy speech, Mr. Tung pointed out that twenty schools will be selected to participate in the pilot program. This is a decision in the right direction. The Hong Kong Computer Society is working closely with other professional organizations, private sector companies and various government departments on ways to speed up the implementation of this pilot project and to ensure its success. In support of this Pilot Project, suggestions to be included in the upcoming Report that the Hong Kong Computer Society will include criteria on how the pilot schools can be selected. It will also identify the type of assistance these pilot schools should be given during the pilot exercise, the duration of this pilot and ways to monitor the success of the pilot. We will also comment how this group of pilot schools can become the catalyst to speed up the adoption of the IT in Education program in the other schools.
We must not repeat the mistakes committed by other countries or that of our own. Providing computer hardware to unprepared schools which have not committed to making the conversion a success, asking the schools to proceed without the needed supporting resources have time and again proven to be wasteful exercises here and elsewhere. One must not habour any illusion that quality education can be procured by the stroke of a pen.
Implement the needed technical support infrastructure - An infrastructure with at least the following capabilities will be needed to support the introduction of the Program:
With today's technology, a good percentage of this type of services can be provided through the network. When the schools are properly wired, the centralized network management facility can monitor the configuration of each piece of the connected hardware. It can perform routine diagnostic checks on the equipment and execute scheduled preventive and corrective maintenance in a proactive manner. Software can be installed and upgraded from the centralized network management center or the resources center. Help desks can be part of the function of the network management facility. Technologies are available to track the calls into the Help Desk. We will also be able to analyze their patterns so that a knowledge database can be constructed to facilitate a faster identification and resolution of similar problems in the future.
A support team consisting of specialized staff, trained to assist teachers in the use of IT in teaching is just as important, if not more so than a support team deployed to support the equipment installed. The technical support to be built as part of the infrastructure should be more people-oriented than equipment oriented. Technology can be used to automated much of the work involved in the support of the equipment. We strongly recommend that the support team be given the responsibilities and be used more effectively to assist teachers in the understanding of IT, the integration of IT into the teaching of various subjects and to work with the teachers in the design of teaching tools using IT. This type of resources are of a higher caliber than those used in the support of equipment. We suggest that a small group of this type of experts be retained in the Resources Center. They can be assigned to assist designated schools and teachers with a set of well planned objectives.
We further recommend that the Central Network Management facility should be established to provide the hard-skills in the support and management of the network and equipment. The Resources Center outlined in the Policy Speech shall be given the charter to provide the soft-skills needed to support the teachers and schools for integrating IT into their education and teaching processes. There is no benefit to combining the soft-skills and the hard-skills into one single center.
The hard-skills and services provided by the Network Management Center are mostly process oriented and involved well defined routine procedures. This type of skills can be obtained cost-effectively through outsourcing.
The soft-skills needed in the Resources Center is to provide one-on-one assistance to teachers in the design of teaching tools using IT and for the integration of IT into course materials. They are of a higher intellectual caliber. In addition to experts trained for this discipline, this group will consist of teachers under short-term assignments from participating schools or schools with a record in the successful adoption of IT into their teaching processes. A good percentage of the work involved will be of a developmental or even be of a research oriented nature. There will be some advantage to closely affiliate the Resources Center with an university or to put the Resources Centre under the guidance of an university. Improvement in the collaboration between tertiary and secondary education sectors has been identified as a critical success factor in enhancing education quality.
In due course, the concept of the Resource Centre can be further expanded to provide support beyond IT to subjects where the Education Department may see a need in providing added support to teachers on subjects which the SAR considers as crucial and yet the general prevailing standard may leave much to be desired, such as the teaching of the English Language.
The recognition for the need to separate the hard-skills from the soft-skills will be crucial for the success of the Program. In many of the discussions in the area of support that we have been privileged to have been participants of, almost all of them are focusing on the hard-skills needed. We were alarmed to find that the need for technicians in schools to install and to maintain the computer hardware has been heavily and repeatedly emphasized. It reflects a complete lack of self-confidence and the lack of understanding of what more modern day computer hardware and software are all about. It is a dangerous over-simplification of the real issues involved in integration IT into education.
We maintain that when technologies are properly used, the hard-skills to be used to support the Program can be managed effectively by a centralized resource pool put together by the private sector. For example, banks are some of the most committed users of information technologies, their business will not function without computers. But banks do not see the need to hire technicians to work at the branch level to support their computer hardware equipment.
We cannot over-emphasize the importance to provide the soft-skills identified above. Without this type of soft-skills, we risk the adoption of IT into our primary and secondary schools systems as experimentation to be conducted by individual schools. The success of the Program will be dependent on the capabilities of the teachers in these schools.
Encourage the development of education contents to meet our cultural, social and economic needs - Without appropriate education contents in electronic form made available to teachers and students inexpensively and conveniently, the introduction of IT into our primary and secondary education systems will be a hollow and expensive experiment. Today's network technologies can provide every effective means in building connections between people of different time, of different cultures and geography. The availability of information resources and services over the network will determine the usefulness of the network itself. While we are investing in the building of the education network and its support infrastructure, it is equally important that we invest the right proportion of our resources in the development of the needed education contents.
For many of the pioneers in the business of developing educational contents for the Hong Kong market, the nagging question is the relatively small size of this market and the uniqueness of its education syllabus. The development of education contents to reflect the unique syllabus adopted in the primary and secondary education systems of Hong Kong can become a costly and not very rewarding business proposition.
When the education syllabus of these schools remain under the supervision of the Education Department, the Education Department must then assume the responsibility of creating a competitive environment to encourage publishers of school text books and teaching material to engage in the development of a percentage of their education contents in electronic form. The Resources Center discussed earlier can be equipped to advise those publishers committed to publish their contents electronically. When the right skills are developed and with the adoption of a set of more open methodology, these content developers and publishers can also engage in the packaging of electronic education or entertainment contents for the national and international markets.
Information Technologies are quickly changing the business model of the publishing industry of the world. The high cost associated with printing, inventory keeping and the physical distribution of the products from the paper era will be greatly reduced through digital printing and network distribution. Under this changed business model, forward looking publishers will be able to re-direct some of these cost savings to invest in the development of contents to be distributed electronically.
This paradigm shift opens the opportunity for local publishers to engage in publishing contents regionally and internationally. The business constraints of publishing are no longer the costs of printing, inventory keeping and physical distribution. Much of the these cost-savings can be re-appropriated into the content development and personalized content packaging to meet the needs of a broader and more diversified market.
The Resources Center shall also be given the responsibility to review and recommend some of the electronic education contents available from the mainland and from the international arena for adoption into our educational system.
It is worth noting that Information Technologies can be used to broaden our learning experience substantially. Learning is no longer confined within the perimeters of the schools and the libraries. Through information technologies, networks, databases, on-line education contents and services, teachers and students can engage in learning and educating activities outside of the traditional classroom environment.
One can browse through on-line electronic libraries to complete their research work without leaving home. Students can interact with each other or with their teachers and tutors through networked computers. All these will bring very profound changes to the way that our education contents can be developed. Contents with a rigid adherence to established syllabus will not be able to satisfy the appetite for knowledge of the new generation of students and teachers. At the same time, students fed on this type of rigid and highly structured syllabus will become less equipped to deal with the demands of an information and knowledge intensive society.
One of the most important benefits of the integration of information technologies into our education processes is to allow the students and teachers to venture out, to go beyond their familiar territories, to extend their experience, to form the habit of continuous learning, to step outside of the rigid syllabus of the subjects they are being examined on. The educational contents we need to develop must reflect this characteristic and to encourage this type of behaviour.
Invest in teacher training - Teachers training is one of the most important factors contributing to the success of this Program. Some of the Information Technology training programs which have been suggested to teachers are heavily focused on the training to use personal computers and to use some popular software packages for word-processing, spreadsheeting and presentation material preparation. These suggestions are too narrow minded and short-sighted.
In the traditional classroom environment, teachers are expert-oriented and is the ultimate source of information and knowledge. The image of a school being the place where students can receive knowledge handed to them by their teachers is slowly changing. Student will soon discover through on-line networks that they are able to get advice or information from sources of expertise often more superior than those from their teachers. Teachers may also find themselves in very uncomfortable positions when their students are able to adopt to the information technology and make effective use of it more quickly than they can. As this process continues to evolve and without proactive measures to correct it, teachers and students will soon find that the old roles that they expect to play in a traditional classroom environment are no longer sustainable. This teacher-student tension will lead to the crumbling of the effectiveness of the education process.
In addition to the learning of basic information technology skills, computer usage skills, teachers will need to understand the dangers and opportunities that IT is bringing to their profession. They must be emotionally and professionally prepared to accept the new challenges. As Mr. A Rogers, a leading educator and the founder of the Global SchoolNet puts it:
"Today, more than ever, we need teachers who are able and willing to become side-by-side learners with their students. Teachers who are not afraid to acknowledge, 'I don't know', and then can turn around and say, 'let's find out together.' These teachers need to know how to use various technologies to shape and process and manage information, to look for relationships, trends, anomalies, and details, which can not only answer questions, but create questions as well. We need teachers who understand that learning in today's world is not just a matter of mastering a static body of knowledge, but also being able to discover the rapidly changing ideas about that knowledge itself." (A. Rogers, the Failure and Promises of Technology in Education http://www.gsn.org/gsn/articles/promise.html ),
The arrival of the Information Age and the adoption of information technologies into our teaching and learning processes will force teachers to find their new roles and students to accept them into these new roles. An important part of our investment in teacher training will have to be directed to help teachers in identifying their roles and to become comfortable in them.
The teacher training program designed to support the introduction of the Program must not be so narrowly focused on the teaching of teachers to use the computers as some proposals may have suggested. The teaching of computer usage to teachers is necessary, but is far from sufficient in the creation of a successful education environment which makes effective use of information technologies.
These teachers will need to accept that their old roles are also changing with the introduction of new technologies into the teaching-learning process. Teachers can no longer be the deliverers of the knowledge that they have previously learned to their students. They will need to slowly shift themselves into the role of a learning companions, a guide in the knowledge exploration by their students. They will also need to be mentors capable of helping their students to distill information into knowledge and to turn knowledge into wisdom.
In addition to making available formal training and re-training programs for the teachers to develop the needed skills and behaviour for the successful introduction of the Program. The Resources Center discussed earlier can be designed to provide the necessary support to the teachers, or groups of teachers, to develop their teaching tools and new contents using information technologies. It should be obvious that teacher training designed to support the introduction of the Information Technology usage in schools cannot be limited to the formal classroom teaching through structured courses. The teachers will be challenged by the opportunities to put into practice the principle of lifelong learning through the support system created by themselves and through the Resources Center. This learning experience will be outside of the traditional classrooms.
Encourage private sector participation from the outset - We believe this Program will have a better chance to succeed when it is not engineered as a top-down, purely government-funded initiative. Social re-engineering programs which are too public-sector focused or government-centric, lacking private sector and commercial sector participation from the outset can become ineffective and slow in implementation.
The Hong Kong SAR Government having identified this pressing need has clearly declared a direction and its intention to move ahead with the Program. The business opportunities which can be made available to the commercial sectors should be very obvious. To speed up the implementation, the government shall take steps in creating a fair, conducive and encouraging atmosphere for the private sector to contribute their ideas, skills and talents into the implementation of the Program.
For a program of this nature, Government's traditional tendering approach to "buying things" can suffocate the free flow of ideas and is not conducive to private sector contributing their experience and creative talents. It has been proven elsewhere that the use of simple tendering procedures for the buying of computer equipment for schools can turn into the nightmares of turning these schools into dumping grounds for out-dated equipment.
The integration of information technology elements into our primary and secondary education systems is more than the purchase of computers to stock the computer laboratories and classrooms. Past experience has clearly identified some of the ineffectiveness of the traditional tendering process for buying this type of equipment. There is a long cycle time required for the preparation and issuance of the tender, collecting the responses submitted by vendors, evaluation of these responses by the Government Supplies Department, awarding the tender and ultimately the delivery of the goods to the parties with the needs. Occasionally, when the entire procurement cycle is completed, the equipment supplied is already obsolete due to relatively short life cycle of computer products and technologies.
For the successful implementation of this Program, the government must not treat the commercial sector merely as the supplier of goods non-perishable commodities.
We suggest that avenues be opened to allow the commercial sectors, the professional groups, parents and individuals to share their ideas, and for them to contribute their time, skills or money to the Program. This type of private sector involvement will give the Program extra momentum. Quality Education is not just the business of the government, the private sector has the responsibilities and the desire to actively participate in its making. A progressive and proactive government can channel this type of energy and enthusiasm into good use.
The Hong Kong Computer Society is currently in active discussion with other professional groups, private sector organizations and commercial companies for the design of a program to support the pilot project. We clearly see the importance of the Quality Education Program and the needs for the integration of Information Technologies into our primary and secondary schools. As a group of IT professionals, we are willing to contribute our time and skills to support this pilot effort.
Summary
We have expressed the strong support of the Hong Kong Computer Society of the Chief Executive's policy speech in the area of IT and Education.
For IT to be successfully integrated into our primary and secondary schools, we have put forth a number of recommendations. They are recapitulated here:
The integration of IT into education is one of the many measures that we will need to implement for the improvement of our overall education quality and to ensure that we produce a workforce who can productively participate in the future success of our community. However, we must not harbour unrealistic expectations and self-importance to the extent that we might mis-guide ourselves into believing that information technologies can become the panacea of all our problems in the education area.
Some roosters insist on the belief that their loud singing every morning will bring out the sun. We must not become those roosters.
The Quality Education program is a most important investment into our future. We must not allow information technologies to be used as the substitution for better trained, highly qualified teachers and administrators. How we teach cannot be more important than what we teach. A review of our curricula to better reflect the needs and the values of our time is just as important as introducing IT into the teaching of these curricula.
IT cannot be used to solved the problem in the overloading of our teaching staff. IT cannot be used as a substitution for time that our teachers need to spend with their pupils and the care that they need to extend to them. Bringing IT equipment into the classrooms cannot be of a higher priority than building proper classrooms and schools to house the increasing number of newly arrived school age children in the new population centers of our community.
We have said a good deal on the use IT in Education because we feel it is our obligation, as a group of IT professionals, to do so. However, we do not feel we have said enough on our support of the Quality Education program that the Hong Kong SAR is committed to implement.
With the resources and collective talents of our community, with the determination, leadership and commitment of the Chief Executive and the SAR government, we are confident that the people of Hong Kong can make a difference, through the Quality Education Program. We will be able to build a better tomorrow for our children. The Hong Kong Computer Society, with the support of its professional members, is committed to offer its services and skills in implementing this grand vision.