Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, student teachers from the Monash Virtual School were offering online lessons to Ukrainian school-students studying in bomb shelters and displaced homes. The school helps to fill educational gaps – offering free tuition by the university’s student teachers and academics and providing a way for tens of thousands of disadvantaged school students in conflict-torn nations and in Australia to catch up on missing or poorly understood lessons.
“It provides an opportunity for that other really important part of schooling, which is social connection,” says Monash Virtual School director Michael Phillips. “To feel as though you’re not by yourself, that there are other people who you know that you can connect with, that there are people who care about you, that there are people who want to help and support you as an individual.”
Educational disadvantage is pervasive in Ukraine and Myanmar, and in Afghanistan where girls are officially not permitted to go to school at all. At the same time, young Australians in remote areas often have to deal with isolation, a lack of peer support and a shortage of practical back-up tuition for science, technology, engineering and maths.
Winner of the Australian Financial Review’s Higher Education award in the Teaching and Learning Excellence category, the Monash Virtual School was established in 2020 during Covid, both to provide student teachers with some real teaching experience and to give disadvantaged students a little help.
To date the school has had more than 100,000 enrolments from school-students both in Australia and in conflict-affected nations. About 200 student teachers have given their time to provide the tuition. Volunteering at the Monash Virtual School is not a Monash course requirement, and the Monash student teachers are not paid, nor do they get extra credit for their participation.
“They develop a broader sense of what it means to be a teacher,” Phillips says. “You certainly get one perspective of doing that in Australian schools, but being able to experience different education systems and different cultures and responses to education is a really valuable part of their development.”
All the Monash Virtual School participating student teachers are interviewed at the end of the year using a specific research analysis tool, which has found statistical growth in their professional capacity.
The university gives the Virtual School student teachers substantial coaching, mentoring and professional development. Supervised by academics, the student teachers team up in small groups of two, three or four to design lessons and then give the lessons on-line.
In Australia, all the classes are in the STEM realm: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and a couple of different maths subjects.
In Ukraine, the classes are based on the Ukrainian curriculum, along with informal classes designed to give the Ukrainian students a respite from the difficulties of daily life.
These have included a talk by a former commander of the International Space Station on life in space, and people teaching juggling and magic. “There are all sorts of different things that aren’t necessarily related to the curriculum, but are designed to allow young people to kind of escape the troubling situations that they find themselves in, even if it’s just for an hour,” Phillips says.
The Monash Virtual School’s international programs are delivered with partners to ensure there are no cultural missteps, and they are enduringly popular.
Each year more than 1,000 Afghan girls apply to take part, but the university’s Virtual School only has the capacity to accept about 50 at a time. Monash academics, rather than student teachers take care of these students, because the relationship requires the ability to work with and help traumatised adolescents, Phillips says.
“The work does have a burden on the educators,” he adds. “It’s emotionally draining work, so we have people who have a particular focus on what’s called trauma-informed education.”
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, many Monash Virtual School students cope with on-going armed assaults, death and loss, and battle with unreliable power and patchy internet supply in their desire to take part.
Participating Monash student teachers are regularly reminded that for many of the world’s teenagers, education is a privilege, not a burden.
In Australia, the school has a particular focus on girls in rural areas who might not be able to take part in various science, technology, engineering and maths activities and who might not have access to teachers able to teach high-level maths or science.
Last year, the Monash school offered 60 science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) revision classes, targeted at disadvantaged Australian girls and young women.
The school welcomes all Australian students, and there is no limit on the numbers who can take part. When the program began in 2020, the school offered 50 places. Last year, there were just over 40,000. Hundreds of Australian students might tune in to any particular class.
“I think it has such a mutual benefit, not only for the school students who participate, but also for our students studying to become teachers,” Phillips says.
Ranking second in the Teaching and Learning Excellence category is the University of Queensland’s hands-on first-year biology course for engineering students, Principles of Biomedical and Bioprocess Engineering (BIOE1001), which emphasises real-world learning.
Amongst other practical applications, these first-year students develop vaccines for a potent disease and use the university’s microbrewery equipment to brew beer (and taste the results).
Most first year university courses are intended to establish foundational knowledge, but in 2019, University of Queensland Associate Professor Gilda Carvalho saw that many of the incoming engineering students were disconnected and uninspired. “I guess they came already with a lot of foundational knowledge from high school and wanted something else,” she says.
So she and her colleagues began to include practical applications in the course, including pilot scale lab classes tied to industry site visits. The course has evolved from there, and Associate Professor Joy Wolfram says the current narrative-driven education has proved extremely popular.
One element in the course is based on a hypothetical pandemic – something every student has lived through in reality with Covid.
The students are told that a pandemic disease with cardio-vascular symptoms has emerged in 2030. They are asked to develop a response by first evaluating symptoms using engineered devices and identifying the pathogen. They then develop a novel mRNA vaccine, along with a vaccine delivery strategy, and work out the best way to explain the results to a potentially resistant lay audience.
“We made our own nanoparticles to demonstrate how the vaccine needs to be delivered,” Wolfram says. “You can’t just give the RNA itself because it will be destroyed, so we have to think about the delivery strategies.” This element of the subject entails students encapsulating the vaccine.
Supply chain issues including storage (potentially refrigeration) are also discussed and members of the teaching team even act as ill patients with cardio-vascular disease.
A director of international science equipment company Thermo Fisher Scientific, Kim Baker, gives the students a lecture on the length of time it can take for therapeutics to be clinically approved, and why it can be many years before a product has been fully tested and is market-ready. “We want to make sure it’s safe, and that’s a very important component of this subject,” Wolfram says.
Overall, students on the course are “really inspired”, she adds, and their enthusiasm has shown up in their student evaluations, which have jumped from 2.6/5 to 4.7/5, she adds. Industry partners have reported the students have been much more engaged and motivated, and this year the course had to move to a different campus building to accommodate burgeoning student numbers.
With the increased student enthusiasm came improved learning. Wolfram says it was important to measure learning gains, not simply self-reported satisfaction. Benchmarked to conventional teaching, the industry-driven course had increased learning of 32 per cent.
The pattern of hands-on tuition and learning has now been adopted by other faculties at the University of Queensland, as well as universities elsewhere. “With our publications, we’ve been able to reach a global audience in terms of how we can inspire students and show them career paths very early on in their degree,” she says.
Coming third in the Teaching and Learning category is Victoria University’s VU Online program, offering courses in health, education and business, with annual retention rates routinely exceeding 80 per cent and large year-on-year growth.
Active outreach to students at risk of failing or dropping out has been vital, says CEO Kade Brown. “It’s very proactive, very outbound, very data-enabled, and it’s delivering results.”
Students learn according to the VU Block model – one subject at a time, in four-week blocks, to focus effort and master skills before moving on to the next subject.
Growing from about 160 students in 2018 to more than 2,600 now, the VU Online program is geared to the world of work.
“We have to design learning experiences and degrees that are professionally meaningful that are going to actually deliver those career outcomes for our students,” Brown says. “It needs to be very applied. It needs to be very practical.”