Why it matters if you can't read this

by Tanja Bastianic
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Adults who lack basic skills – literacy and numeracy – are penalised both in professional and private life. They are more likely to be unemployed or in precarious jobs, earn lower wages, have more health issues, trust others less, and engage less often in community life and democratic processes.

Basic skills are not complicated. What we measure in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the ability to process the information needed to perform everyday tasks – to read the instructions on a bottle of aspirin or to know how many litres of petrol are needed to fill the tank.

In Australia, around three million working-age adults – one in five – currently have low basic skills and are living with the consequences. And if Australia doesn’t tackle this problem, it risks being left behind by countries investing more successfully in the skills of their people, especially in a world where work is undergoing a rapid technology-driven change and people have to adapt to new circumstances (See figure).

Many Australians with low levels of education have low skills – this comes as no surprise, as they often quit education at an early stage. Perhaps more surprising is that a higher level qualification doesn’t guarantee advanced basic skills. The OECD study published today, Building Skills for All in Australia: Policy Insights from the Survey of Adult Skills shows that 17% of Australians with a vocational Certificate IV, Advanced Diploma or Associate Degree still have low levels of basic skills. 

Australia’s post-secondary VET (Vocational Education and Training) system is inclusive and caters to adults with different needs, including those with poor basic skills.  This is a real asset to the Australian education sector. But the OECD argues that providers of post-secondary VET could do more to help those students with poor basic skills.

The study also highlights specific weaknesses in the numeric skills of young women in Australia, indicating that far greater attention should be devoted to ensuring that young women participate fully within Australia’s wider efforts to strengthen mathematics within secondary education. Opportunity exists, moreover, to better support young people who are Not in Education, Employment or Training (the NEETs) to reengage in learning whether through the development of pre-apprenticeship provision or access to better childcare for young mothers.

The OECD Australia review follows a number of similar studies on low basic skills conducted in the United States, England, and Finland. The OECD’s work on adult learning and skills is designed to help countries identify where skills-related challenges arise among adults, and then offer them an opportunity to redirect their skills policies and investments. The review of Australia is part of this work.  

Helping adults to improve their basic skills remains a challenge nearly everywhere and there are no easy answers. But the alternative – of doing nothing – is even worse. So each of these studies help us all understand the challenges better and offer a menu of interventions to help countries tackle the issue. 

Links

To read the report, visit Building Skills for All in Australia: Policy Insights from the Survey of Adult Skills

To read a literature review about the problem of low basic skills, visit Adults with Low Literacy and Numeracy Skills: A Literature Review on Policy Intervention

Figure: Share of adults with low basic skills (literacy and/or numeracy level at or below 2)

Photo credit: @Shutterstock 

Education reform in Wales: A national mission

by Kirsty Williams AM
Cabinet Secretary for Education, Welsh Government

It’s an exciting time for education in Wales.

This was noted by the OECD earlier this year, when it recognised that government and sector are working closely together with a commitment to improvements that are “visible at all levels of the education system”.

This week, as Wales’s Education Secretary, I published our new action plan for the next four years. Entitled ‘Education in Wales: Our national mission’, it builds on the strong foundations already in place in our system. But we are setting the bar even higher, ambitious as we are in our expectations for our young people, for our teaching profession and for our nation.

As a relatively small country and a still-young democracy, we have too often seen these as challenges rather than opportunities. Through the OECD, we have had the opportunity to learn more about other systems and their reform journeys.

It is true that no two countries or systems are the same. However, as a bilingual system committed to both equity and excellence, we are not only learning from others, but our innovative approach is in fact attracting international attention. And Wales will remain open to ideas, visits and co-operation!

It is our approach to curriculum reform, within a reformed system, that is often of most interest. Work is well underway on this, led by a group of pioneer schools who are working in partnership with government, regional education consortia, international experts, universities, business and third sector, and right across the education profession. It is not the product of secret meetings in some Government back-office.

The OECD said in its recent review: “To support the realisation of its education objectives and ultimately its vision of the Welsh learner, Wales should continue its curriculum reform… ensuring that its reform journey is comprehensive and effective.”

Therefore, as we continue with our reforms, we will bring a renewed focus to four key ‘enabling’ objectives.

Education in Wales

Firstly, ensuring a high-quality education profession. We will support teachers in being lifelong professional learners through new standards, a national approach and reformed initial teacher education.

Secondly, identifying and inspiring leaders to raise standards. We need to address a previous lack of emphasis on leadership. Therefore we will establish a national leadership academy, reduce bureaucracy through business managers and improved communication and co-operation, and revise the qualification for school leaders.

Thirdly, ensure that our schools are inclusive, dedicated to excellence, equity and well-being. We will extend our targeted support for learners from disadvantaged backgrounds, provide dedicated support for our ‘more able’ learners, and be innovative in identifying and measuring well-being alongside attainment.

And fourthly, improved assessment, evaluation and accountability within a self-improving system. We will be consistent and clear about the things we wish to value and measure through a new annual national education report and report card, formative assessments and a new assessment & evaluation framework that focuses on improvement all levels.

The OECD report and advice was unambiguous: hold our nerve, stay the course, but do more to communicate, clarify and ensure coherence in our programme. Focus on leadership in delivering a much-needed new curriculum in a timely manner.

‘Education in Wales: Our national mission’ responds to those recommendations and sets out our collective responsibility to raise standards, reduce the attainment gap and deliver a system that is a source of genuine national pride and public confidence.

Links
Education in Wales: Our national mission
The Welsh education reform journey: A rapid policy assessment (OECD)
Curriculum for Wales blog

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #EducationMissionWales

Photo credits: Welsh Government Education

Advocating for equality among schools? Resources matter

by Rose Bolognini
Communications and Publications Co-ordinator, Directorate for Education and Skills

Disadvantaged students don’t have as many resources at home as their advantaged peers so ideally schools would need to compensate by providing more support. However, often schools reinforce social disparities rather than moderate them. The latest PISA in Focus brief  reveals that students in socio-economically disadvantaged schools are less exposed to learning environments and educational resources that matter most for science performance.

In fact, the latest round of PISA is telling. In 50 of the 72 countries and economies that participated, advantaged schools have more access to educational resources specific to science classes. And PISA finds that students perform better in science when schools have qualified science teachers, and high-quality laboratory and other materials for hands-on activities in science classes.

What's more, disadvantaged students benefit more from being exposed to extracurricular activities than advantaged students. But yet among the majority of countries that took the PISA test, the range of learning opportunities beyond regular classes is much narrower in disadvantaged schools.  Disadvantaged students taking the PISA test reported that the schools they attend don’t offer options such as science competitions and clubs, sports, music and arts activities.

The latest PISA in Focus explores this topic in greater detail showing that allocating resources more equitably across schools is an indispensable first step if schools are to compensate for inequalities in family background. But there are other measures policy makers and school leaders can take to promote equity. Among others – ensuring access to various educational resources, and the capacity of school staff to make the best use of those resources, is one way for schools to help students. These measures are imperative because PISA continuously shows that school systems already combining high performance and equity demonstrate that it is possible to offer high-quality education opportunities to all students.

Links

PISA in Focus No.76: How do schools compensate for socio-economic disadvantage? 
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Follow the conversation on twitter: #OECDPISA

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

Photo credit: @Shutterstock

Schools at the crossroads of innovation

by Dirk Van Damme

Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

In a not so distant past, it was seen as one of the defining features of schools that they isolated learners – and the learning process itself – from the surrounding environment. As so brilliantly described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his account of the modern machinery of discipline and power, schools must be secluded time/space settings, far away from the impurities of the contemporary world which would poison the minds and character of children. But also in a more enlightened and emancipatory sense, separating young learners from an often depressing environment was perceived to be the best way to guide them to higher levels of knowledge, skill and wisdom.

Schools and schooling have changed a lot in recent years, but they are still well-defined in terms of the time and space boundaries that separate them from their environment. Some modern progressive pedagogies have gradually opened up schooling by moving children out of the school and into the surrounding natural and social environments, introducing a new learning process based on realistic and relevant challenges. But in most cases, schools are still isolated spaces, defined by concrete walls and iron fences, where life is dictated by the rhythm of the school bell.

How different this mindset is from the realities of today‘s world! The separation of school time from the wider world, characterised by borderless networking and communication, may seem rather alienating to young people. Isolating schools from their environment does nothing to help the process of incremental change, nor the innovation of education and learning. No modern institution changes solely from within, but rather does so in reaction or interaction with an environment which continuously challenges its processes and outputs. In today’s world, these pressures challenges and demands towards schools seem to accumulate, be it in the form of employers asking for more relevant skills and offering workplace learning arrangements to move learners into the reality, or in the form of citizens and civil society claiming all kinds of changes in the curriculum in order to align education with what they perceive to be the common good.

These issues are further developed and expanded in a new OECD/CERI publication Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions, and will be discussed with education ministers, high-level policy makers and industry leaders in the upcoming Global Education Industry Summit, which takes place in Luxembourg on 25-26 September, hosted by the OECD, the European Commission and the Government of Luxembourg.

Too often the answer from the world of education is defensive and self-protective. It is time to radically rethink schooling in terms of openness and networking, or in other words, as nodes in wider ecosystems of innovation and learning. Schools are among the most important knowledge institutions of modern societies and they have such great potential to play a critical role in processes of knowledge production and dissemination, vital to innovation in the local and regional economy. Many accounts of innovation would agree that human capital plays a crucial role, but they tend to look first at the knowledge and skills of educated individuals, and not at the active engagement of schools as learning environments where innovation also occurs. Similarly, schools can – and should –play a very important role in building the social capital of local communities, by offering services that improve the well-being and social cohesion in local communities.

By developing an ecosystems view of schools and opening up schools to the surrounding economies and societies, many important stakeholders would feel empowered to support and contribute to them. Local employers, who already play a role in apprenticeships and workplace learning arrangements in vocational education, could easily expand their role towards other dimensions and sectors of the educational system. Opening up schools will generate a completely different governance system for education, one where vertical command-and-control steering and accountability is exchanged for more horizontal relationships and a networking system made up of various stakeholders. Such developments would strengthen the relevance of what is learnt in schools, and contribute to the social and emotional learning that is essential for fostering good citizenship and engaging human beings.

Innovative schools challenge the boundaries – in time, space, and also in curricula and learning processes – that tradition seems to impose on schools today. They often have different approaches to the learning process and especially how its pedagogical core is organised. It is true that deep learning sometimes requires concentration, silencing the noise from the surrounding environment. And a networking world can be a very noisy world. But the era when isolation and separation were necessary to define the learning environments for our children has passed. Schools are at a crossroads of innovation: they are becoming partners and actors in processes of innovation in the surrounding economy and society, and taking benefit of the world around them to innovate their own existence.

Links
Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions
3rd Global Education Industry Summit, Luxembourg, 25-26 September, 2017

Follow the conversation: #GEIS2017

Photo credit: The Global Education Industry Summit

Entering the “black box”: Teachers’ and students’ views on classroom practices

by Pablo Fraser 
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills
Noémie Le Donné
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

“What happened in school today?” is a question that many parents across the world ask their children when they get home. Many parents also attend school meetings in order to understand how their child’s learning is developing. They talk with both children and teachers because they know that they are the best (and often only) source of information about what is happening in the classroom. At the same time, many teachers would like to know about how other teachers teach, both in their own country and abroad.

The truth is that what happens in the classrooms still often remains an open question for those outside it.  Research has shown that the practices used in the classroom are the most important factor affecting students’ outcomes. In other words, it is the interactions between teachers and students that, ultimately, shape the learning environment. Thus, it becomes crucial to know, “What are the teaching strategies that help create quality classroom practices?”

However, classrooms are often described as a “black box”; we know that certain things go into the box (e.g. learning materials, time and human resources, school tests) and we expect certain things to come out (e.g. the development of students’ skills, the reinforcement of their well-being, and an increase in teachers’ job satisfaction). But what about the complex interactions that take place within the black box that are responsible for the alchemy that transforms inputs into outputs? Who better than teachers and students to tell us about these interactions?

Teachers with their professional training and knowledge are experts on various instructional approaches, methods and lesson features. Since students are exposed to a variety of teachers in different subjects over an extended period of time, they can also be considered experts on different modes of teaching. Both opinions provide a rich and complex picture of what happens in the classroom… and can be seen as two faces of the same coin.

The TALIS-PISA link data present a unique opportunity to enter the “black box” by listening to the voices of teachers and students. The latest Teaching in Focus reveals some enlightening findings.

Almost all mathematics teachers use clear and structured teaching practices, according to both teachers and students. On average across participating countries, at least 97% of teachers report either explicitly citing learning goals, letting students practice until they understand the subject matter, or presenting a summary of recently learned content. Since these structuring practices aim to deliver an orderly and clear lesson, they could be seen as the necessary foundation to the development of other, more innovative, practices, such as student-oriented practices and enhanced activities. This would explain why they are so predominant in the teaching strategies implemented by teachers and that, contrary to widespread ideas, they are not used by Asian countries alone.

Student-oriented practices, such as giving different work to students depending on their understanding or having them work in small groups, are less often used than structuring practices, especially according to students. They are still commonly used, with around 90% of teachers and 60% of students reporting their use. However, teachers do not use these practices to the same extent across countries, and one type of enhanced activity, having students work on week-long projects, is subject to particularly large cross-country variations: 20% of Finnish teachers report using this practice versus 86% of Mexican teachers. The same pattern is found when looking at student feedback.

In all participating countries, mathematics teachers tend to report, more often than students do, that they use a given practice in their classroom. However, the gap between what teachers and students report is relatively small; it is largest when pertaining to the use of student-oriented practices. This may be because teachers find these practices particularly efficient and have a tendency to over- report their use, or that, because they are less conventional and more innovative, students fail to recognise them. Either way, further support of teachers’ and students’ engagement in student-centred activities is needed to ensure that a variety of practices are used in the classroom. PISA results have shown that students benefit from teachers applying a range of different practices, so it is crucial to help teachers acquire those that foster a quality learning environment.

Links
Teaching in Focus No. 18: How do teachers teach? Insights from teachers and students

The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

Photo credit: @Shutterstock

Which careers do students go for?

by Marie-Helene Doumet
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Career decisions are wrought in complexities. Many students start by looking at their interests, selecting a career in line with their personal affinities or aspirations. They will consider their own self-beliefs in their capacity to perform and succeed in a given career, and then factor in labour market prospects, employment, earnings, and the possibilities to progress in their chosen profession over a lifetime.

But career decisions are not only about students’ choices: they also interact with a number of public policy objectives, such as making education systems more efficient, aligning skills to the demands of the labour market, and helping improve social equity. Some countries have sought to promote certain fields or pathways over others through financial incentives or by opening access. Conversely, other fields impose highly selective admissions processes. As students are confronted with more possibilities, it is essential to ensure that they have the proper guidance to navigate through the wealth of pathways open to them. That will ease the sometimes bumpy transition from education to the labour market.

This 2017 edition of Education at a Glance focuses on fields of study – who studies what across different education pathways . Results show that the most common field of study for tertiary students is business administration and law, whereas the fields of natural sciences, mathematics and statistics or information and communications technology (ICT) are the least attractive. Gender differences in enrolments are striking: 24% of entrants into engineering programmes are women compared to 78% in the field of education. The law of supply and demand determines the employment prospects of tertiary graduates. For example,  although they are among the smallest group of tertiary graduates, ICT graduates enjoy one of the highest employment rates. This signals a shortage of supply in the labour market. Data from a new indicator on the national criteria to apply and enter into tertiary education shows that, as tertiary education expands, some countries have turned towards regulating access to certain fields of study in order to link them more strongly with the needs of the labour market.

However, while educational attainment has been expanding over the past decade, there is no guarantee that everyone will progress smoothly through it. In fact, upper secondary graduation is still a challenge for some. A new indicator on upper secondary completion rates shows that almost one in four upper secondary students does not complete the programme within two years of its theoretical end date – of which most drop out of school entirely.

This is not the only area where equity remains elusive. Education at a Glance dedicates a full chapter to the Sustainable Development Goals, analysing where OECD and partner countries stand in their progress towards achieving “inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all”. Results show that while progress has been made, there is still a long way to go on the road to equity and more inclusion in education.

Want to learn more? Education at a Glance 2017 analyses 28 indicators relating to participation in and progress through education, the financial and human resources invested, and the economic and social outcomes expected across OECD and partner countries.You can access and download the data from the OECD Education at a Glance Database; visualise main results for your country from our Compare Your Country interface ; and better understand the methodology underlying the indicators with the updated OECD Handbook for Internationally Comparative Education Indicators.

Links
Education at a Glance (EAG) 2017
OECD Education at a Glance Database
Compare Your Country
OECD Handbook for Internationally Comparative Education Indicators

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #OECDEAG

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

Building trust in exams

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Quality high-stakes exams have always been one of the most reliable predictors of the performance of an education system. They signal what matters for educational success and they ensure fairness and transparency in the gateways to the next stage of education or to the workforce. But getting the design of exams wrong can hold education systems back, narrowing the scope of what is valued and what is taught, or encouraging shortcuts, cramming and integrity violations. 

So if you are searching for promising practices in this area these days, it is worth having a look at Russia. Surprised? True, for a long time Russian’s had lost trust in exam scores and degrees because of fraud and misconduct in examinations. But for well over a decade, Russia has worked persistently on addressing these issues and its unified state exam now offers one of the most advanced and transparent ways of assessing student learning outcomes at school.

For a start, Russia has not fallen into the trap of sacrificing validity gains for efficiency gains and relevance for reliability that is so common to many exam systems. So you find no bubble sheets and few multiple-choice tasks. Instead, the tasks are open-ended and often involve essays, focussed on the acquisition of advanced knowledge, complex higher-order thinking skills and, increasingly, on the application of those skills to real-world problems. Many of those tasks probe for understanding and prompting for further thinking, by asking students questions such as: Who is correct? How do you know? Can you explain why he or she is correct?

But the biggest accomplishment of Russia’s unified state exam has been in re-establishing trust in education and examination. Trust cannot be legislated. And trust doesn’t just happen, it is always intentional and it is at least as much a consequence of the design of an exam system as it is a pre-existing condition for its conduct. So how did Russia go about that? For a start, it has invested in state-of-the art test security that is now available across the country. The exam papers are packaged and printed in real-time at the point of delivery, in the classroom under the eyes of the students and the examiners - and under the eyes of a 360-degree camera that monitors and records the entire exam process.

At the end, the exam papers are scanned, digitised and anonymised, once again under the eyes of the students. Where more complex responses to essays cannot be scored automatically by machines, they are marked centrally by independent and specially trained experts, with extensive checks for inter-rater reliability. Of course, there is always some judgement involved in scoring essays. So how can students trust that they were graded fairly? Actually, they can have a look for themselves. The fully-marked exam papers are posted online and all students can review their results. And they can contest the markings if they are not happy, something which a few percent of them do each year. Schools, too, can see and track their exam scores. So if Russian students, teachers, school leaders, and also employers are now much more confident in schooling and examination, this has not come about by chance.

Has it led to improvements in outcomes? Not yet, the exam results were flat lining over the last years. Which shows how much Russia still has to do to feed data back into helping students to learn better, teachers to teach better, and schools to become more effective. But it also shows that the exams proved resilient so far against one of the most common diseases of assessments - grade inflation.

Links:
www.oecd.org/russia 

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

Photo Credit:  © Shutterstock Kazan, Russia - March 26.2017. Trust is best sculpture of the 2016 competition

Back to school time: “Think beyond grades – to life”

Facebook Live session with Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

by Marilyn Achiron, Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

This back-to-school moment is a great time to grab a few minutes with Andreas Schleicher, head of the Directorate for Education and Skills, to get his thoughts about preparing for – and succeeding in – the school year ahead.

In our Facebook LIVE interview yesterday, he said that “there’s always something interesting happening in school”, and suggested that students “think beyond grades – to life”. Schleicher said of teaching that “there’s probably no tougher job today”.

What is common to the best-performing countries in PISA? According to Schleicher, these countries “believe in the future more than in consumption today; they make an investment in education”; “they believe in the success of every child”; and “they can attract the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms”.

We also talked about student anxiety, class size, homework and the kinds of skills students today need to acquire.

Schleicher also hinted at some interesting data, to be published next Tuesday in Education at a Glance 2017, on who studies what, and what that means for employment and earnings later on.

Take a look!

Links

Education at a Glance (EAG) 2017 will be launched on 12 September 2017 at 11:00 am, Paris time
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

#OECDEAG
Join our OECD PISA Learning Community on Facebook

Awarding – and imagining – teaching excellence

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Tonight, the winners of the Higher Education Academy’s newly launched Global Teaching Excellence Award will be announced. The award is a milestone in advancing the higher education agenda. It’s time for teaching excellence to attain the same status and recognition as academic research, which still seems the dominant metric for valuing academic institutions, whether we look at rankings published in the media or research assessment frameworks or at performance-based funding for research.

There are compelling reasons to change this, and the award makes a start.

Tertiary qualifications have become the entrance ticket for modern societies. Never before have those with advanced qualifications had the life chances they enjoy today, and never before have those who struggled to acquire a good education paid the price they pay today. There are always those who argue that the share of young people entering higher education or advanced vocational programmes is too large. But they are usually talking about other people’s children. In the past century, they would have probably argued that there are too many children in high school.

The evidence is clear. On average across OECD countries, men with at least a bachelor’s degree earn over ÚSD 300 000 more than what they paid for their education or lose in earnings while studying, compared with those who only have a high school degree. And taxpayers too realise a return of over USD 200 000 per tertiary graduate in higher public revenues and lower social transfers. It is hard to think of a better investment at a time when knowledge and skills have become the currency of modern societies and economies. And despite the burgeoning number of graduates, we have seen no decline in their relative pay, which is so different from those with fewer qualifications.

But it’s also clear that this entrance ticket to the knowledge society is expensive; and people are generally allotted just one. That makes it so important to get it right. And this is where teaching excellence comes in. We all know that more education alone doesn't automatically translate into better jobs and better lives. We might know graduates who can’t find a job even as we hear employers lament that they can’t find people with the skills they need. Teaching excellence is about ensuring that the right mix of knowledge and skills is delivered in effective, equitable and efficient ways.

And the value of teaching is only bound to rise as digitalisation unbundles educational content, delivery and accreditation in higher education. In the digital age, anything that today you call your proprietary knowledge and content is going to be a commodity available to everyone tomorrow. Accreditation still gives universities enormous power to extract monopoly rents, but just think a few years ahead. What will micro-credentialling do to this system? Or think of what happens when all employers can see beyond degrees to the knowledge and skills that prospective employees actually have. That leaves the quality of teaching as perhaps the most valuable asset of modern higher education institutions. It becomes harder for universities to hide poor teaching behind great research. We are living in this digital bazaar and anything that is not built for the network age is going to crack apart under the pressure.

Future jobs are likely to pair computer intelligence with the creative, social and emotional skills, attitudes and values of human beings. It will then be our capacity to innovate, our awareness and our sense of responsibility that will harness the power of the machines to shape the world for the better. That means faculty need to look for outcomes that are fresh and original, that contribute something of intrinsic positive worth. Achieving these outcomes is likely to involve entrepreneurialism, imagination, inquisitiveness, persistence and collaboration.

As a result, universities’ previous priority of preparing a select few for research has given way to providing up to half the population with advanced knowledge and skills. The result has been the rapid expansion of the higher education sector and the establishment of more diverse types of higher education institutions. There are now over 18 000 higher education institutions in 180 countries that offer at least a post-graduate degree or a four-year professional diploma.

This historic shift has been accompanied by changes in funding regimes. The rising costs of higher education are increasingly borne by students themselves (see, for example, the United Kingdom). So it follows that students are becoming more discriminating consumers. And in choosing between universities, they are also thinking ahead about securing future employment. In response, institutions are competing to provide more relevant knowledge and skills through more effective teaching.

These sweeping developments in the higher education marketplace are intensifying competition. Indeed, a global education market has emerged. In 2015, there were 3.3 million students travelling across OECD countries to study. Others look to the new, internationally available, digital platforms to provide or supplement their learning.

Taken together, these developments have created an urgent demand for data to measure and improve the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Institutions need data to build on competitive strengths and address weaknesses. Governments need data to determine policy and funding priorities. Employers need data to assess the value of qualifications. And, perhaps most important, students themselves need data so that they can make informed decisions about their preferred place of study and show prospective employers evidence of what they have learned.

But these demands are still often unmet. Without such data, judgements about the quality of higher education institutions will continue to be made on the basis of flawed rankings, derived not from outcomes, nor even outputs, but from idiosyncratic inputs and reputation surveys.

Everyone knows how important data are to me, but I’m also well aware that throwing data into the public space does not, in itself, change the ways students learn, faculty teach and universities operate. We need to get out of the “read-only” mode of our education systems, in which information is presented in a way that cannot be altered. To really change education practice, we need to combine transparency with collaboration.

I am always struck by the power of “collaborative consumption”, where online markets are created in which people share their cars and even their apartments with total strangers. Collaborative consumption has made people micro-entrepreneurs; and collaborative consumption is fuelled by building trust between strangers.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of technology is not only that it serves individual learners and educators, but that it can create an ecosystem around learning. Technology can build communities of learners that make learning more social and more fun. And it can build communities of faculty to share and enrich teaching resources and practices. Imagine the power of a higher education system that could meaningfully share all of the expertise and experience of its faculty.

What if we could get faculty working on curated crowd-sourcing of best teaching practice, and perhaps even across institutional and national borders? Technology could create a giant open-source community of faculty, unlocking the creative skills and initiative of so many people simply by tapping into the desire of people to contribute, collaborate and be recognised for it. And we could use technologies to liberate learning from past conventions, connecting learners in new ways, with new sources of knowledge, with innovative applications and with one another. Maybe that’s something for next year’s teaching excellence award.


For the latest data on tertiary education, look out for Education at a Glance 2017, which will be published on 12 September.

Links

Global Teaching Excellence Award

Education at a Glance 2016: OECD Indicators

Photo credit: @shutterstock