I am glad to be here this morning to have the opportunity to give as much information as I can to the committee about any matter it may wish to raise. By way of background, I wish to comment about Hibernia and its mission. I also wish to comment about e-learning and its importance in terms of the future of Ireland's higher education services. I will then comment on the teachers' programme and briefly describe what is at issue.
Hibernia College was established almost four years ago to bring the benefits of e-learning to Ireland. Its mission is to provide wider access to high quality third level education for the many hundreds who do not have the time, money or flexibility to attend so-called "bricks and mortar" educational institutions. E-learning is the most revolutionary and transforming development in education since the invention of the printing press. It has the capacity to widen access to a higher level of education for the great majority of the population. It makes a wide world of knowledge available in peoples' homes and offices in their own time and at an affordable cost. Its technology is now so far advanced that it has become a highly interactive medium that no longer leaves the student feeling isolated. Regular voice contact with other students and tutors is now possible through this medium, in addition to web browsing and e-mail.
E-learning has been the great missing dimension in Irish educational services. Despite its great contribution to computer science, Ireland has failed to exploit the benefits of information technology in education, notwithstanding its urgent need to extend educational opportunity. Recent OECD reports have shown that Ireland, despite its declared goal of reaching the top quartile of OECD countries in terms of educational attainment, still languishes in the bottom quartile. It has a seriously under-educated workforce in comparison with other countries, with upwards of 750,000 people with no third level qualification whatever. It also lacks a national strategy for the growing area of postgraduate professional education.
These problems of adult and continuing education which are extremely serious in a knowledge-driven economy such as Ireland's will not be remedied without the aid of e-learning. People cannot withdraw from work to attend on-site fixed schedule courses. They must have flexible access near their homes or places of work. The primary goal of Hibernia is to provide high quality programmes to meet this need.
Hibernia brings a range of exceptional resources and expertise to this task. It has developed, in conjunction with leading world experts such as Professor John Williams at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an advanced technology platform that exploits all the latest technology advances. It has a range of prestigious international partners and highly qualified management and academic teams. It has developed a variety of courses centred on its core areas of interest, adult education and postgraduate professional education. These include: public administration; criminal justice; hospitality management; legal studies; and a number of executive programmes. Other courses are in development. The college is also in the process of developing a bachelor's degree in the history and culture of Ireland and a master's degree in pharmaceutical medicine. Currently, however, its best known course is the higher diploma in primary education, a postgraduate professional course that fits well into Hibernia's central mission.
The course arose from the difficult situation identified by the INTO in 2002 when it was found that over 40,000 pupils were being taught by unqualified teachers. At that time it was estimated that an additional 1,600 teachers would be required in the short term. The situation worsened in 2003. One of the solutions suggested by the INTO was the establishment of a conversion course on a modular basis with IT involvement. The colleges of education were offering a graduate diploma but numbers were limited and courses were held on campus, with a fixed scheduled programme that obliged students to leave their jobs and, in many cases, their homes to pursue the qualification. With these restrictions, many well qualified candidates currently teaching in schools were unable to pursue the postgraduate diploma and a great deal of talent was being lost to the education system.
It is important for the committee to know that the candidates taking the higher diploma in primary education offered by Hibernia are among the highest academic achievers available to the teaching profession. All of them have primary degrees and all have obtained excellent results in their degree examinations in order to be accepted into the course. These are intelligent, motivated and dedicated people of the highest personal commitment and calibre.
The higher diploma for primary teachers offers eligible candidates the opportunity to benefit from access to a postgraduate course, while giving them the flexibility to remain at work and incur far lower costs. The addition of these cohorts of highly talented, highly educated teachers from diverse academic backgrounds to the body of primary teachers will greatly enhance the range of skills and talent in the profession and will raise, not lower, quality.
In previous presentations to the committee, serious questions were raised about the suitability of e-learning for teacher training. There has also been some unfair and unjustified comment directed at the quality of the course offered by Hibernia and the process for accreditation. I am more than happy to deal with these issues.
The higher diploma has been vetted through rigorous assessment and accredited by the Higher Education and Training Awards Council, which process has just been described to members in detail. The course was also subject to a thorough assessment by the inspectorate of the Department of Education and Science. These authorities will continue to have open and free access to monitor the conduct and development of the course and the high standards that it will achieve. In addition to its HETAC accreditation, Hibernia also has a detailed quality control system which was recently subjected to rigorous and independent scrutiny by a key international panel and won approval. Hibernia's examination system and the performances of its students are monitored on an ongoing basis by external examiners to provide for a continuous check on standards. The technology used to deliver the programme is state-of-the-art and, as mentioned previously, has been designed with the assistance of leading experts such as Professor John Williams of MIT.
Hibernia College's academic staff are highly qualified and, in many cases, leading experts in their field. One of the key benefits of e-learning is that Hibernia can draw its course directors and authors from a worldwide pool. Consequently, it has a range of choice that traditional colleges with a fixed staff complement cannot emulate. Hibernia has management and academic teams led by people with impeccable credentials. The higher diploma in education course has been in operation for one year and the feedback from students, schools and principals has been tremendously positive.
With regard to the on-line medium and teacher training, it must be emphasised that the Hibernia course is a blended format, with 45% delivered on-line and 55% delivered on-site. What is delivered on-line is the academic or theoretical content, as is the case in many professional degrees relating to areas such as medicine and law, but all of the practical elements of the course are delivered in a face-to-face format. There are regular on-site classes at education centres throughout the country, a week-long on-site physical education programme, a three week intensive programme in the Gaeltacht, and 14 weeks of teaching practice in the classroom which is supervised and inspected by supervisors and Department of Education and Science inspectors. I emphasise that the course overall, while not requiring students to give up their jobs, in terms of the breadth of its curriculum, the workload of the students, the outcomes demanded, and the overall standards, fully matches the equivalent programme in the colleges of education. It provides the same academic course work, teaching practice and in-school probationary inspections and examinations provided in all the other teacher training colleges.
The course also covers educational technology, teaching methodologies, the psychology, sociology, philosophy and history of education, physical education, and arts education, along with professional modules dealing with the law in education, and parent-teacher relationships. It does not provide any less content, quality or level of scrutiny, examination or inspection than the courses in the other colleges. Students who fail to meet the required and necessary high standards, through their course work, practical work, inspections and ultimately final examinations, will not graduate.
The Hibernia course has given talented and dedicated students from even the remotest parts of the country the opportunity to achieve a teaching qualification that would otherwise be impossible for them. Hibernia has students from every county on this course and their dedication, commitment and enthusiasm have been an inspiration to all of us who work in the college. Perhaps the best testament to the course comes from one of our students from Ennis, County Clare, who wrote to the Irish Examiner in January 2004 as follows:
I am a parent who is 100% in favour of maintaining Ireland's high education standards. I have met the requirements, passed the interview and have accepted the offer of a place in this course. More importantly I am prepared to commit my time, effort and money to gain this qualification. This Diploma will enable me to apply for a permanent position as a primary teacher. Like many others, including those teaching without a qualification, I welcome this Diploma and I look forward to completing it.
Committee members have raised many questions with both the Department and other groups which made submissions before it. As far as those questions relate to Hibernia, I would be more than delighted to deal with queries that members of the committee may have in relation to the course or on-line learning in general.