Summary Highlights 2021

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NetNZ continues to mature as an organisation and this is reflected in a number of highlights in 2021

The full Statement of Service Performance can be accessed here. This contains all useful data related to our services

Growth and Sustainability

  • 2021 was another year dominated by covid-19. While the pandemic has renforced the role a networked schools model should play in building reslience into our education system, it has also created an even more financially challenging enrvironment for our schools.
  • We incurred a small financial loss, although this has largely come about through the investment into our new 'Journey' platform. Journey has been developed to enable and broker a far more diverse and flexible curriculum and was used for the first time. It had further development to come, but its first iteration enabled us to not only advertise all our programmes in one central place, but also manage the full enrolment process.

  • Our size enables depth and breadth in the curriculum we provide. Certainty in curriculum creates sustainable long term membership and possible external revenue streams

  • 2021 was also the first year of the Ministry of Education Agreement we held for the Virtual Learning Network Community. While this didn't develop in the way everyone would have wanted, it did establish a partnership with the Ministry that they seem very intent to develop further. The vision for a national learning exchange remains in place for 2022.

Curriculum

  • 66 full year programmeswith a further 19 accessed through a reciprocal arrangement with the Online Learning Community (OLC). This creates a broad curriculum for all member school students and ensures their needs and interests can be met.

  • Schools are gradually accessing programmes in their modular form. This allows greater flexibility for students to shift between pathways where necessary and ensures we meet the now varied needs of our schools. Programmes are  available by term, semester or for a full year. These can be viewed on Journey

  • The provision of languages remains a key focus for us, largely because many of schools cannot provide full pathways. We can now ensure pathways in French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Spanish, and Te Reo Maori. Korean in particular is the only full pathway on offer across New Zealand schools.

  • We continue to develop programmes in niche areas that many of our schools are not able to provide internally. These include Psychology (very popular), Computer Science and Programming,  Art History, Philosophy, Senior Social Studies and Creative Forest

Learning and Teaching

  • Our schools continue to develop their systems of onsite support for their NetNZ students. 

  • NCEA results continue to excel with 89% of achievement standards entered achieved by students, while 64% were achieved at Merit or Excellence level (39%). 

  • We trialed NetNZ teacher Microcredentials. We envisage a version of these fully integrated for 2023.

  • The VLNC report written for the Ministry of Education in 2020, Towards Networked Learning was published and publically release for the first time in 2021. This report articulates our pedagogical model for the first time.

  • A group of teachers successfully trialed a new online environment known as Mattermost. Mattermost is open source and can therefore be hosted on our servers free of charge. It is very similar to Discord and Slack and is used by the IT industry (although it has been deployed for education). It is more closely aligns with our learner and community focused approach to learning online than LMS's.

  • We held our networked hui in Christchurch and Dunedin in November. As usual this was an invaluable exercise in bringing everyone together (despite obvious challenges). We greatly appreciate the support of all our schools in enabling this event.