I was reading the Australian Financial Review Monday 2nd Feb here in downtown Adelaide (yes I am travelling again) and the Education section rang a bell with me. (in a past life I was a education sector IT boffin) and I noted a number of things in the article by Joanna Mather on Real World Skills worth funding.
It was not so much the sentiment or the goal, as the time frame being suggested and is it worth funding on that basis.
The outcome of 8 months of research in 2008 culminates in the winning of a grant... "The work-integrated learning study was funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council in partnership with the Australian Collaborative Education Network..." etc.
Based on a Canadian example (like we do not have enough ideas in this country?) is due to 'go live' in late 2010... ! What tha!
Its January 2009 (ok its really Feb 2 but..) given the current economic situation and the known issue with IT projects scheduled against Moore's Law timing, I would expect that this will be another dismal failure. 18 months in the unknown future against unknown external factors we will deliver a system to assist youth in the future with skills.
So what about today ? and todays youth who within 2 years will be implicitly 2/3rds of their way through todays general 3 year courses to attain their qualification. A late 2010 delivery does nothing for today and is potentially a wasted effort as a consequence.
Given that we can deliver prototype websites in 24 hours, have domain names created within minutes, and be pushing traffic to sites a week after they are first born, why on earth do we persist with the concept of delivery in 18 months for any project, much less one that is meant to be fixing issues now.
What will the project do for the next 18 months ? Discover that they have planned the last failing website? Confirm that any IT project scheduled over 12 months is doomed to failure? (a particular favourite opinion of mine!) or that if we wait long enough and spend $400k that we can appear to have done lots without really achieving much.
If we really want to address the issues for todays students we should have started in October last year, developed on an incremental basis, delivered at least a starting point and not be reporting about what we intend to do 2 years hence.
If they are really serious about doing this now, then the time line could be to deliver something in 2009 for real benefits in 2009, stealing a complete 2 year march on other influences.
End of my education rant for this week!
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