schools

Do women learn differently from men online?

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It’s not like I’d even thought of this but if you had asked me what online learning meant for women and men, I’m sure we’d have had a good natter about how great it is that all this stuff is out there for everyone. Unless you already knew access for all hasn’t meant women accessing all, I doubt we’d have mentioned it. But it’s true.

If it’s on a website or iTunes U or any digital spot, there is zero difference between a man”/ ability to access online learning and a woman’s. Yet there is difference. Great difference:

…dismally low numbers provide a reminder that “access” to education is more complicated than simply throwing open the digital doors to whoever wants to sign up. So how can we turn the mere availability of online instruction in STEM into true access for female students?

One potential solution to this information-age problem comes from an old-fashioned source: single-sex education. The Online School for Girls, founded in 2009, provides an all-female e-learning experience. (A companion institution, the Online School for Boys, is opening this fall.) It appears to be doing an especially good job of educating girls in STEM: Last year, 21 of its approximately 1,000 students were recognized by the National Center for Women in Technology “for their aspirations and achievements in computing and technology.” And over the course of the 2013-2014 academic year, the Online School for Girls prepared 30 female students to take the Advanced Placement exam in computer science. To put that number in perspective: 25 American states each prepared fewer than 30 girls to take the AP computer science exam.

Do Girls Learn Differently Online? – Annie Murphy Paul, The Creativity Post (20 October 2914)

I went to a comprehensive school and I’d say its sole value to me – no, wait that was where I learnt authority could be having a nervous breakdown and I had to fight, both of which helped me later in journalism – but otherwise its sole value was that it was a mixed school. I loathe the idea of single-sex education because I think it damages your education about two sexes. Men, at least, can end up as permanent schoolboys unable to talk to women. Look at the UK government.

Yet Annie Murphy Paul’s piece does make compelling arguments. I’d rather we didn’t have single-sex education but we’ve got to have education that works. Read the full piece. And take a look at the Online a School for Girls, well, online.

The best idea wins

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I’ve been contributing to a Royal Television Society project in the Midlands where schoolkids are asked to pitch ideas to a TV company. (It’s for real, too, this isn’t some paper exercise. I love that the RTS arranges this.) I think I’ve popped in to perhaps five schools, I think the RTS has worked something like ten.

The groups of school kids vary quite widely in number; I went to one that had 150, yesterday I was at one where there were 30. So yesterday’s one had fewer kids and it is quite late on in the process, if I’m right about there having been ten schools in total, I think this was number nine or maybe even number ten. So there have been a lot of schools, a lot of kids, a lot of ideas.

But there was a new one yesterday.

A new idea I hadn’t heard from any of the other schools, a new idea that the RTS told me they hadn’t heard anywhere they’d gone.

There were a lot of good teams in this school and there was one I was rooting for very early on because I thought they were working together very smartly, very professionally. But when I heard this one new idea, I was sold.

The teams had to devise this idea and the perform a pitch. The pitch matters. By the time they get to that stage in the day, I and everyone else has been around every team and every table, we know all the ideas. So I suppose we could huddle in a corner and I could lob in my thruppence. But we sit there like proper judges at the end, watching the kids present their pitches.

There are always some that are good and some that are very poor. Yesterday’s was perhaps a better than average run in that the presentations tended to be good. But a good presentation coupled to a new idea, that is a killer.

The team presenting this new idea had an unfair advantage: the idea was so new that they would have had to really mess up the presentation not to win.

They’ll now be going on to a final contest with that idea next month and it’s then that I’ll hear whether they’re going to get on the telly. But the reason I’m telling you this today is just that one about the idea giving them an advantage. After eight or nine other schools and certainly hundreds, maybe a thousand pupils before them, one team came up with something genuinely new.

I tell you, I was inspired. And as soon as I can tell you their idea, I will.