Online Student Centres

We're encouraged! Learn-Now has entered new territory yet again. This time, the theme sees us now also working alongside the development of student-driven online student centres, in schools.

There are thousands of online student centres in existence, but few (maybe if any) are built by students, for students. Why are the sites like Facebook & MySpace etc so popular with their users? The freedom to create & present.

What's with the demise of so many school sites? The teachers typically control the 'systems administration' rights - they load their intention and students 'through duty calls' participate if we're lucky. Learn-Now used to be like this... Now, 3 years on from 'risking' a mess and allowing students to also have top-level systems admin rights, we have students who no longer just come on during their allocated timetable time at school... No longer bound by teacher loaded material, their creative bents and love of an audience has produced stunning results...

So what's in an Online Student Centre and how's it created? To start with, no one centre is the same. In the case of those facilitated by Learn-Now though, several common themes prevail. A group of students need to be enrolled with us and as a team, they break into 'departmental' groups or partnerships, taking on specialist design areas. All that is created is for 'their school' - though openly encouraged to consider adopting participants from other schools too - the biggest challenge to go international. To start with though, they focus on creating an interactive site for students at their school.

Some members of this design team believe that having online clubs would be cool. Others decide a Science Discovery area would be 'hot stuff'. One student decided to create a debate/discussion around the need for a 'house competition' to exist in the school - and succeeded. Some run weekly maths challenges, others create online ebook compositions... Another's planning to feature a music arena, which includes one student teaching others how to read music, share podcasts etc. All up, it's a site by students, for students, with continual student assessment, suggestion and evaluation.

Frustrations & Jubilations...

After recent Learn-Now discussions left us with a rough taste in the mouth, we reflected our state of play yet again.

Much revolves around two factors.
1) browsers perception of what's seen
2) our user pays operational existence

However, this is nothing new. Just frustrating... We spend most of our time parting with an enormous amount of time and detail with interested parties, where much comes to nothing. One of our accountability partners strongly believes we should invoice work done, regardless of any enrolment outcomes. We shy away from this, yet who else do we know whose service of any kind is free these days? One might-be client (but we doubt it), should apparently see us invoice them for a good $1200 worth of time...yet free to date.

Passion, commitment, reassurance and huge encouragement from many to keep going, keeps us operating. We know we're sadly judged like a maths teacher can be judged by a student's maths book... or like a primary/elementary teacher can be judged by the 'look' of their classroom... Sadly, all like the cover of a book, or in the same way one teacher once viewed an incredibly clever story as terrible because it was riddled with spelling mistakes - it went on win a $1500 composition award, thanks to the persistence of an 'aunty'.

Yet when a browser calls for a login, for an indepth look at the site, this is what happens. When so much of our programme runs through 'live' environments - workrooms & skype in particular, no - evidence of all the learning won't exist. Only perhaps 20% of the actual work will 'show'. Just like in a classroom - that project stuck to the wall in the traditional classroom, won't announce the 'teaching or learning' done, beyond the text shown. That one of our students is creating a website and 7 months on she has a tiny handful of things showing...7 months doesn't note that the reality is really only about 25 hours worth of work...about an hour a week...much in discussion and learning - far more significant than what's 'to see'. Perception, or the saddened tail of it is our greatest challenge.

And then come the cost... A private tutor we know, who tutors a 10 year old for maths afterschool, charges out NZD$20 an hour. That same tutor charges $35 for a 13 year old and $45 for a tertiary student. The work we do with students sees us meeting online at least once a week - in one case, there's a student who has 4 half hour sessions a week, 'live' with us. If at $35 an hour we charged a term's tuition for a 13 year old, the fee would be $350.00 - the student with 4 half hours a week would be $750 per 10 week term. One $120 fee which turned into 4 hours work a week, was seen as 'too expensive' - a rip off... Interestingly so - that's $3 an hour. Sadly, mindboggling. Yet, one 'tough love' situation via a stance we once took, had one school most enthusiastically grab our $3000 a term business programme for 20 students. They had to fundraise the funds, but they returned for more - word of mouth snowballed and we were once re encouraged and no longer felt used and abused as often felt by others reactions... :)

We are saddened by many, yet remain encouraged by the very few... Perhaps it is time therefore to take note of another accountability partner of ours - that it is indeed time to stop running a cut-price $2 shop offering the high quality 'Harrods-like' products. It'll cut out a huge proportion of the market, but like one did - if professional trust is really adopted, a way is found to fund and enable us to do what we do best: working with those who wish for their students to enjoy some cutting edge styles and programmes, in an online world - whether or not they (the teacher/payee) fully understand it.

Phew - a tough thing to blog!! Transparency has a lot to answer for...