Cool Australia’s Education Resource Hub 2.0

An innovative online platform that empowers students to reach their full potential and become active leaders of the future.

Today, we are confronted with the question of how we can best prepare our youth for an uncertain future, where they can keep pace with ongoing technological advances and adapt to an ever-changing environment. As our society rapidly evolves, so too do the learning needs of our young people. In Australia, 25% of young people are increasingly dropping out of school before their final year, and in low socio-economic areas (many of which have a high indigenous population), this figure dramatically increases to 60% (Lamb et al. 2015). What’s more, teaching is a low-paid industry in Australia and attrition rates are high, with numerous researchers estimating 30-50% of teachers leave in the first five years of their career.

Students need personalised learning experiences based on individualised needs and the opportunity to partner with their own learning (Gonski et al. 2018). Cool Australia recognises that in order to thrive in the twenty-first century, teachers need to challenge their students, engage them in real world issues, build life skills and resilience and ensure they feel ready to act on issues they care about. Teachers also need conditions that enable them to effectively engage in and benefit from professional learning. We believe that upskilling teachers to plan and deliver Cool Australia lessons embedded in issues of environmental, social and economic sustainability (40% of which are STEM-focused) will help switch on students and give them the autonomy to identify and solve these challenges.

Currently, we serve more than 86,000 teachers and reach 2.1 million students in Australia. The target is to enhance our online platform to increase the number of actively engaged educators using our materials to more than 200,000, facilitate self-guided learning for students and increase parental engagement. By increasing our capacity to reach teachers and students across Australia, despite their geographic location or socioeconomic background, will help to address the widening gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. This will ensure we can reach the 3.8 million children enrolled in Australia’s education system, from Early Learning (our fastest growing audience) through to Year 12. Once embedded nationally, the Education Resource Hub 2.0 can be scaled and replicated to suit various international frameworks and adapted to different cultural contexts. Preparing the next generation to thrive in the future knowledge economy is a huge responsibility, but possible to achieve.

Cool Australia is committed to promoting high quality, student-centred learning and feel confident that the Education Resource Hub 2.0 will help to reignite young people’s passion for learning. It will help students develop a clear purpose, a growth mindset, greater responsibility, resilience and entrepreneurship. Students will experience transformational change in their capacity to take action on real-life issues, actively participate in their learning and feel challenged to reach their potential. This will lead to a generation of empowered young people with twenty-first century skills who become socially responsible citizens within a global environment, and provide a strong foundation for positive health, social and educational outcomes.

The Education Resource Hub 2.0 is a re-imagining of our existing platform – it will be the first of its kind and contain lesson plans, professional development material, educational videos, micro-education courses, interactive units, and the latest research, resources and literature on lifelong learning. The Hub will also include discussion forums, wikis, customisable bulletin boards and announcements, together with surveys, quizzes and assessments.

Users will self-identify as a particular audience (e.g. educator, student, parent, community member) and will then be quickly able to find the education resource that is appropriate for their need.

This innovative online platform will consolidate an enormous range of educational resources, making it a one-stop-shop for teachers, students and families. It will be accessible on any device and users will be able to browse and search for content and, when appropriate, use a chatbox that is complete with the latest AI technology to conveniently search for resources.

The technology will enable us to maximise our impact, deepen our engagement with members and dramatically increase our outreach. Keeping up with society’s technological advances ensures Cool Australia continues to deeply engage students in their learning and the world around them.

• Increased web development capacity and enhanced online presence, leading to increased resource downloads and web visits, and an efficient and well-maintained online infrastructure.
• Every child in Australia can access Cool Australia’s curriculum and has the skills, knoweldge and confidence to take action on issues they care about.
• Students have increased skills and lifelong learning opportunuties that are relevant to jobs and livelihoods of the future.
• Teachers have increased knowledge, confidence and capacity to deliver curriculum on social and environmental issues and are better able to access resources they need.
• Parents are more engaged in their child’s education.

Once implemented, the Education Resource Hub 2.0 will be self-sustainable and manageable within Cool Australia’s capacity, with improved internal capabilities enabling us to provide more effective support to teachers. Increasing the active involvement of teachers will lead to a significant increase in usage of Cool Australia materials by students and parents, maximising our impact over the next three to five years.

As previously mentioned, the Hub can be scaled and replicated to suit various international frameworks and adapted to different cultural contexts and languages. It therefore has huge potential to reach students, teachers and families across the globe.

This platform will increase our overall web reach and capacity, providing more teachers, students and families with access to our free-to-download educational materials.

To date, our teacher membership has grown largely due to word-of-mouth and probono support from GoogleAdwords, with 2,000 new members joining each month. We anticipate that this demand will continue to grow as we broaden our suite of resources.

Increasing our capacity to reach teachers and students across Australia despite their geographic location or socioeconomic background will help to address the widening gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

Currently more than 86,000 educators (representing over 82% of schools in Australia) use Cool Australia’s resources to teach approximately 2.1 million students.

It takes a teacher approximately five hours to research and create a lesson – with 230,000 lesson plans downloaded in 2017, Cool Australia saved teachers more than 1,150,000 hours in class preparation time. With the average hourly teacher rate at AUD 28 (ABS 2015), this amounted to a saving of AUD 32.2 million.  

In 2015, Cool Australia’s website was ranked as the most effective tool for teachers to engage with students about sustainability (Australia Education for Sustainability Alliance).

By September 2019:

• Developed 500 new curriculum materials focused on social, economic and environmental issues;
• Added 120 new courses to our suite of professional development offerings;
• Increased our teacher membership by 26,000;
• Reached three million students;
• A 200% increase in parental engagement.

By September 2020:

• 155,000 teacher members, who download curriculum materials from our enhanced online platform five or more times per year;
• 3.8 million students using our educational materials as part of their self-guided and classroom education by 2021. This will require uptake from 60% of teachers.

• Jason Kimberley, Founder/CEO: Jason has formed ongoing relationships with key national stakeholders in education, all of whom value Cool Australia’s work in democratising quality education. Jason has blended real world learning into the classroom through partnerships with business for students to build twenty-first century skills.
• Thea Stinear, General Manager (Master of Instructional Leadership): Experienced educator passionate about evidence-based teaching and learning, ensuring educational content is best-practice.
• Chris Vella, Education Content Manager (Bachelor Fine Arts, Secondary Education degree): Ensures content is published to an exceptional level.
• Matt O’Toole, Head of Digital, Data, IT (Media and Communications/Journalism degree): Leads the digital department.

60% of Cool Australia’s revenue comes from our fee-for-service businesses by working with third party organisations to development educational resources to support their programs. Growing our teacher membership will not only increase our outreach to students across Australia, it will also contribute to increased fee-for-service revenue through our professional development offerings.

While our professional development fees represent great value, making it accessible to all teachers, ongoing income through this source will continue to contribute to the organisation’s financial stability and play a significant role in securing Cool Australia’s long-term sustainability.

Solve understands how technology can magnify the work of teachers, not replace it, and support them in being catalysts for change. Solve can help us make STEM relevant and meaningful to students, by embedding STEM learning into real world contexts and equipping students with the skills and capability to collaborate, think critically and creatively, and take action on issues they care about.

Enabling individual students to grow at their own pace, our materials help them develop a clear purpose, growth mindset, greater responsibility, resilience and entrepreneurship, leading to a generation of empowered young people who become socially responsible, global citizens.

1. Risk: Selected web platform architecture is not fit-for-purpose.

Mitigation: Engage with Solve for advice and consultancy to provide insight into possible options.

2. Risk: Online resource development requires maintenance beyond the period and amount of funding.

Mitigation: Seek advice and support from Solve as how to incorporate resource maintenance into business-as-usual funding.

3. Risk: Limited interest and engagement from end-users.

Mitigation: Seek ongoing feedback and advice from Solve and apply learnings to improve the web platform; provide instructions/training for those who may not be comfortable accessing online platforms; seek ongoing feedback.