Practical solutions

5 Organizing one's studies 5.3 Network We live in an era of technical advance and we should make full use of it. Data can be stored en mass and can be searched by an unlimited number of criteria. Information can be transmitted fast and smooth yet maintaining a high quality. These possibilities present a powerful tool for a modern society in terms of schedule coordination, exchange, research and storage of information and furthermore collection and organization of poll data or other forms of public opinion. 5.3.1 Coordination and databases As messy as it sounds to have subjects divided into practically thousands of modules and to list and evaluate each and everyone of them in a students certificate, it is far from impossible or inconvenient if everything is kept in a hard drive. In terms of coordination, a global network will help to generate search results for classes that are offered and search them by the following criteria: - subject(s)/keywords - teacher - geographic location (that is which is thee teacher's home school and in which city is it) - the date of the first lecture (as exact aas available) - prerequisites - number of places still available (if a grroup of friends want to apply for the same course)/alternatively number of persons cueing to get a place - maximum and minimum number of students alllowed (if a student wants to take something in a smaller class after doing some modules in big classes) - average amount of time it takes students to finish the module (if a student has a gap to fill out before some event that is already fixed) - jobs that require knowledge in that partiicular subject Employers can submit their requirements to the database and students can thus look for a job that is suitable for them. All student's results are kept in a database which will keep track of which of the basic compulsory modules have not been taken yet and will store in formation about those modules taken; this information includes the point of time it was taken, the period of time it took to fulfill it and the location. If an employer needs a certificate of the applicants results, the applicant can grant him admission to view all or specified criteria for all or for specified modules. The only person who, besides the student himself, has full access to the results is a students current daycare group leader since he or she is supposed to know the student very well and needs to detect any difficulties the student experiences in meeting his academic targets. Any person or entity can be granted full access by order of the police or government though if necessary due to a student being suspect of crime or similar cases. The database will of course manage a student's holiday resources. 5.3.2 Information transmission Easy and cheap transmission of information will be essential for coordinating timetables within one class and to distribute homework to and collect answers from students. As is described in section 6.3 ('Maintaining/withdrawing grades') below, a constant exchange of exercises submissions between the student and a teacher or a computer is necessary. With electronic file transmission this is no big deal. The student can simply log into his education account once per day and he will find a list of exercises waiting for him. Most of them will be solved on the computer and the answer submitted the same way as the questions came in. Students thus do not need to find the teacher in order to get or submit their homework, submission will be done in no time at all and the workload of correcting all incoming submissions can be evenly distributed to teachers that are free at the moment so that it can be done as fast as possible. Furthermore the student's education account will, much like present day email accounts, provide features such as a calendar, bookmarks, email and chat rooms, the latter in one customized version and one version for each module currently taken to function as a class roaster and provide convenient ability to organize place and time of lectures and to ask fellow students or the teacher for help. It is also an easy way of transmitting the latest articles or course readings to the whole class for both the teacher and the students (no more hard copies need to be made; I remember it was ever so irritating when there were to few copies or when paper was wasted because of leftovers). It is understood that in this way the computer will play an essential role in a students life and it will be just as given that a student owns his own computer with network access as he now owns pen and paper and a schoolbag and shelf to organize his books and working papers. I would like to mention the National University of Singapore at this point of time which makes a very good effort to equip every student with a computer or at least wide access to one (16 to 24 hours a day) and that has network plug ins virtually everywhere on campus, (even in the canteens) plus free user support. We have already come a long way in the age of personal computers and I believe that by the time the educational system proposed in this paper will be of relevance, one will be just as sure to own a computer as one will have a telephone in these days. However, I want to make a point that computers can open up many doors to more efficient ways of education. 5.3.3 Discourse Another area where computers (and lots of competent manpower to keep the network running) will be indispensable is the discourse about education as well as other political and social issues. Information once stored electronically can easily be tagged, categorized, searched, compiled, stored, transmitted, reprinted etc. The public opinion can be gathered in the form of free text as well as poll data (possibly with password to ensure that every person submits only one entry; in the ideal case of a success of this education system, hackers should not be a big problem) and I believe that this can be used to create an extended version of democracy. As far as education is concerned, it will provide an easy means of discussing updates in the system which are essential to keep it efficient but which must be evaluated not only by politicians as it works today, but by as many of the people concerned as possible, yet for this purpose, more powerful tools for discourse are needed than just TV and newspapers (which for individuals provide some, if though in comparison inconvenient and slow access to input, and have only little room for output) 5.1 Modules/moments 5.2 Options 5.4 Counsellors 4 Following a child's growth 6 Grading students 7 Refreshing the system