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The online education opportunity the Church must grasp

  • ALISON FARNELL from The Stapleford Centre lays out the challenge to Christians to help provide digital resources for schools

Loadsa money! Virtual money! And now, electronic money! Schools have just received a £50m windfall of electronic money from the Government. It’s in the form of electronic Learning Credits (eLCs), or e-credits, to be spent on electronic learning resources for use in the classroom.

Curriculum OnLine, or COL as it is known, is becoming a reality. In the last few years, £1 billion has been spent in schools on improving computer access and connections. COL is now emerging as the DfES service providing electronic content for teachers to use.

COL has inevitably had a few teething problems due to the complexity of the technology. Providers have to work through a complicated registration and approval process. Their resources have to be 'tagged' to fit in with the sophisticated computer search facilities which COL uses. But, once it is really up and running, COL will provide an electronic shop window for both free and priced electronic resources for schools. And the eLCs just given to schools are to be spent on purchasing those resources. Sounds like an Aladdin’s cave of treasure!

So just how good is all this? The BBC is wading in with £150m worth of free digital resources to be available to schools through COL. Other publishers, particularly the small ones, know that they can’t compete with all those free resources. Will schools choose to use just what is free, rather than what is possibly better, but which also costs?

In the current world of school resources there is a wide range of products from which schools can choose. And Christianity is a required part of the taught curriculum. Good resources which present the Christian faith are readily available for those who choose them. That’s because Christians have seen this as an essential part of mission. Some have invested a lot of money to bring the truth about Jesus to young people through what they are taught in schools, young people who will probably never engage with this message elsewhere.

So how will schools spend their e-credits? What choice do they have? Not much, unless Christians invest a lot more money in providing excellent digital resources. Given that the BBC’s massive free digital contribution is likely to disseminate a secular humanistic worldview, the Christian Church cannot afford to miss this opportunity! If we fail to invest in this new mission field, the next generation will grow up encountering only the gospel according to COL!

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