Conor Murphy | Features Editor
In response to a government budget freeze a few years ago, The City College of San Francisco pondered the idea of selling naming rights for their individual courses, and specifically the endangered courses or the unusual ones. It was suggested that courses that the college might not otherwise sanction could get a start under this program as well. It was viewed as a bit unbecoming for universities at the time and never went ahead, but it gained a lot of traction at the time because it was part of the larger conversation about how third-level education was going to be funded in the future.
Unusually, Ireland seems to be facing this sort of proposition far sooner than expected. Announced in October and already underway, the Postgraduate Certificate in 21st Century Teaching and Learning is a course paid for completely by Google, and aimed at secondary school teachers. And although Google do invest in not-for-profit education initiatives, this is much more direct than we’ve seen before.
As part of Googles not-for-profit work in Ireland, they have already bought several thousand Raspberry Pi computers to help teachers and their students learn to code, students can also couple these machines and their course education with some of the best places to learn to code online too. These sort of “investments” are quite common because they are easy once-off hardware purchases that don’t require significant effort on part of the company, and it’s obviously beneficial for their image. The certificate, however, is very different because Google are not only involved in its set up but will be a much more constant presence throughout the three years of the project.
they hope to get a thousand [teachers trained] under this program over the next three years
Google is providing €1.2 million in funding to cover the costs of the course, part of a €1.5 million package Trinity launched with Google in 2013. This covers completely the new lectureship of Dr Joseph Roche, a man who a year ago was making news as the Irish “Mars One” candidate. Yet he says he’s enjoying this much more down to earth – but still peculiar – job.
This peculiarity is emphasised by the fact that this was completely led by people in Trinity and not as part of some larger Google plan. People inside Trinity decided when they were setting up this postgraduate certificate to approach Google with a fleshed-out funding plan to see if it could come together. Evidently, they made the right decision: this course has started its first year with a hundred students taking the course. With a hundred teachers doing it full time every year and many more doing small parts of it, they hope to get a thousand taught under this program over the next three years.
The Course
The course is designed to touch technical areas of education that affect Google quite heavily, namely the quality of technical education Ireland is providing its young and is basically a certificate in modern education techniques. When I casually asked a few teachers what they thought of the project, there was a slight hesitance on whether it was another face of technology utopianism. That’s where you take a standard problem like education and throw technology at it in hopes of solving issues that are centuries old. Dr Roche doesn’t have any of these worries and calls it a very “progressive course”.
Although there is a major maths and programming side to it, there’s also a big focus on more holistic methods of education
Although there is a major maths and programming side to it, there’s also a big focus on more holistic methods of education. Modules deal with managing change in education, a module on diversity issues and modules on gaming and how to get students interested in research.
Dr Roche himself focuses on the “STEM Pedagogy”, a term he thankfully broke down as bringing science, technology and maths to students. The program is particularly focused on less privileged kids who might not have easy access to technological learning resources. That’s where TAP, the Trinity Access Program, comes in. They have a well-developed network of under-funded schools already, and working with them, this course is offered – heavily subsidised – to the teachers in these schools. This is all with the end goal of getting a few hundred teachers in TAP schools bringing technological methods and modern teaching into disadvantaged areas in a very short space of time. If the certificate has any effect on the methods of the teachers, it’ll have a large effect on education in these schools in less than three years.
The Google Issue
The cloud hanging over this course is the rather dominating form of Google, or rather, the idea that a company is sponsoring, completely, a Trinity postgraduate certificate. There are obvious worries that immediately pop up about the idea of an international private company directly influencing the education provided in Ireland’s third-level colleges. Dr Roche can understand the worry, but says he has no such qualms about that happening here. He says that if Google “like you and like your idea”, they will “trust you and support you” to continue doing the work they liked in the first place. Indeed it might have helped any nerves about it that he’s been part of a Google non-profit activity before, when he worked under the equally large sponsorship Google gave the Science Gallery to expand internationally.
it’s not hard to see that… these gentle [Google] meetings could easily turn into indirect control from any company
While Dr Roche says that he doesn’t directly report to them, he does meet with a team from Google regularly to update them on general progress, so it’s not completely hands off. Dr Roche says that Google never try to affect the educational direction in these meetings but it’s not hard to see that under these exact same conditions how these gentle meetings could easily turn into indirect control from any company sponsoring a course like this. And in a sense they’d be perfectly right to, they did just give over a million of their money and surely good philanthropy includes making sure your money is well spent. From Googles side it’s pretty obvious the benefits to them, as a Google Education representative Claire Conneely points out, they have set up in Dublin for the long haul and if Dublin is to stay a vibrant tech hub they need more and more tech literate workers. “Students in some Irish schools have limited exposure to computer science and technological learning. This creates a ‘digital divide’ in the student experience of education and limits the digital literacy of, in particular, disadvantaged young people. The programme developed by Trinity College with funding from Google will help address this digital divide in our schools.”
Even though among the people working on this it is known as a “GoogleCert”, that is most certainly not an official title. Indeed when they asked Google about whether they needed their name on it, they just asked for a footnote on the certificate saying it was funded by them. There are also a few classes actually held in Google which, as well as providing some nice free lunches for the students, might just help evangelise those students on Google’s behalf.
In the end these sort of things will only become more common. So far, this test pilot seems to be working and there are a lot of companies that might want to mold some of the workforce to their particular needs. So these things will inevitably occur again and increase in size and pervasiveness. Probably one of the bigger issues this brings up is something neither Google nor Trinity can help, and that’s if more of these privately funded courses start cropping up, it becomes easier for the Government to justify the slashed funding of the last few years.
Illustration by Laura Finnegan
