The ultranet and school management: Creating a new management paradigm for education

Abstract

The Ultranet is a form of extranet set up by the Victorian Education Department and designed to allow students to access personalised learning activities and to keep an ongoing record of these activities. It is intended to facilitate teachers in creation of curriculum plans, collaboration with other teachers, monitoring of student progress and providing for convenient student assessment. The idea is also that parents are able to access the Ultranet to see information that would keep them up-to-date with their child’s learning. While the Ultranet has many of the features found in learning management systems such as Blackboard or Moodle, it also has many other features intended to inform parents about their child’s education and about the school they attend. Powerful tools like this will change the ways that education managers can operate. The Ultranet appears to be one of the first attempts to include all these features in order to inform parents of school children about their school and to provide their teachers with facilities to work collaboratively. The Ultranet is a very large state-wide system involving access to half a million school students (along with their parents and teachers).