One Education Foundation Ltd believes that measurement and evaluation of One Education is critical to the program’s continuous improvement. We are also committed to transparency in reporting our program results to schools, sponsors and the general public – for up-to-date information, visit www.one-education.org.
As part of our measurement and evaluation processes, we ask that schools participate in reporting and research projects.
Reporting
One Education uses salesforce.com to track all school account information, including contact details for principals and teachers enrolled in the program. Specific participant information is secure and is not shared outside of the organisation - One Education employees and partners sign a confidentiality agreement to enforce data privacy.
One Education tracks aggregate program data such as school participation by sector, geographic area, and socio-economic segment and publishes this in reports to sponsors and research partners. We may combine this information with publicly available data such as attendance and NAPLAN scores published on MySchool website (www.myschool.edu.au)
As well as this, we will request that participating schools provide extra data at a classroom level so we are better able to correlate program results with participating classrooms.
A feature of XO-system (XOS), the operating system of the XO is that all XOs collect basic usage statistics and report this back to One Education servers – information such as frequency of login and types of activities accessed.
Research
One Education Foundation Ltd has partnered with researchers from several higher education institutions including the University of Wollongong, Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Sydney to conduct research on the impact of the One Education program for Australian schools.
This research component of One Education is important:
- To promote and enhance student learning
- To support teaching practice and classroom management
- To improve student engagement and motivation
- To increase community engagement
- To promote professional development and
- To contribute to an online self-supporting community of practice
Research projects
Annual evaluations of the One Education program
From 2012 – 2014, University of Wollongong and Swinburne University of Technology have conducted research on One Education for the purposes of reporting to the Department of Education. That research drew on data collected by One Education Foundation Ltd, as well as National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) standardized test results, an online questionnaire, and phone interviews with teachers. The evaluations produced an academic publication co-authored by Howard and Rennie (2013).
Investigating the dynamics of digital inclusion
The current project ‘Investigating the dynamics of digital inclusion’ – an Australian Research Council-funded Linkage project – continues on from this earlier research.
Over a two-year period from 2015 – 2017 researchers at Swinburne University of Technology, University of Wollongong and Sydney University will analyse usage data from the One Education program XO laptops, collected through One Education’s network and software applications. Researchers will also analyse data from an online questionnaire administered 2-3 times across the duration of the project to teachers within the One Education network and conduct phone interviews with a sub-set of these teachers. The questionnaires and interviews will allow researchers to understand usage data from the One Education program XO laptops.
The project is also exploratory in that researchers are working with a new and large data source, and seek to use this to test and discover the value or limitations of ‘big data’ research in relation to school-based digital inclusion strategies. Researchers will model real-time use of over 15,000 school devices, and undertake sample surveys designed to reveal the underlying beliefs, ideas and understandings which may either facilitate or hinder digital choice. The project will be the first of its kind to model school-based user behavior across a large network.
Research Team: Associated Professor Ellie Rennie, Professor Julian Thomas, Dr Kathrin Schmieder (SISR/ Swinburne University), Dr Sarah Howard, Dr Jun Ma, Dr Jack Yang, Dr Jodie Martin (University of Wollongong), Associated Professor Karl Maton (The University of Sydney).
School participants may be contacted by researchers as part of this project.
Contact
If you would like to stay informed of the research we are happy to send you updates of the project and the findings. Please email [email protected] to be added to the mailing list. You may also find reports on the APO Digital Inclusion website as they become available: