EC Premium is a new professional learning approach for Australia described as the ‘Spotify’ of professional learning. It’s a solution that quickly helps school leaders solve many of the challenges they face when managing the professional learning of staff.
“Looking back on my time as a principal I wish that we could have had a ‘Spotify’ for professional learning,” says Dave Faulker, EC Premium Co-Founder. “So, in 2022 we finally decided to build it ourselves.” Since formally launching at the Queensland Secondary Principal’s Association in May of this year, EC Premium has spread rapidly across Australia, providing subscribing schools with unlimited access to thousands of professional learning courses and pieces of content from some of the world’s best K-12 providers.
With the platform, learning can be very easily differentiated and aligned to the many needs and wants of a school team. EC brings more than a decade of real-world knowledge around quality PL to their digital platform, after more than a decade of experience
running professional learning programs for organisations across Australia including The Academy (VIC), Professional Learning Institute (TAS), Orbis (SA), the education departments of NSW, WA, ACT, QLD, and Catholic and Independent networks.
AGGREGATING THE WORLD’S BEST PROFESSIONAL LEARNING
EC Premium offers a powerful new professional learning solution to schools across Australia. Once subscribed, schools receive their own customised online professional learning platform, tailored to the school’s own branding. The platform is instantly populated with thousands of K-12 focused professional learning courses, with the option to add any of more than 100,000 wider adult learning courses from the larger Go1 learning library, all for the same flat subscriber fee.
Within the EC Premium portal each user has their own personalised login and learning journey, with content tailored to them. EC’s Education Success Managers work with each school to refine playlists to support alignment with strategy, assist with content surfacing and curation and can respond quickly to questions that arise (customer service is 24/7). Schools can also create their own professional learning content in the platform to share internally. To support differentiation, content is made up of videos, podcasts, and written blocks ranging in length from five minutes to five hours.
EC’s Chief Learning Officer Madelaine Scott-Jones brings her three master’s degrees in education and experience as a teacher to her work leading the curation of the professional learning content in EC Premium; “We are thrilled to have brought together some of the best PL providers in Australia and around the world and love that the library of content is growing every week,” says Scott-Jones who is excited by courses such as leadership from Harvard University, literacy from the Story Factory, play-based learning with Parent TV’s Maggie Dent, restorative practice with Real Schools, child safety with the Cyber Safety Project and an exciting new partnership with ACEL.
Scott-Jones stresses the importance of helping to share new voices across Australia’s schools, “I just finished the Maths courses from Michaela Epstein from Maths Teacher Circles and loved them, and the new content coming out of the Wellbeing Distillery I am already applying in my own life,” she says. The EC team are committed to bringing in the names and voices that Australian educators love, resulting in content blocks from Dylan Williams, Tracy Ezard, Joanne McEachen, Michael Fullan, Kath Murdoch, Andy Hargraves and the late great Ken Robinson to name a few.
DEMOCRATISING ACCESS TO QUALITY PROFESSIONAL LEARNING
Aaron Tait and Dave Faulkner are the co-founders of EC and have dedicated their careers to creating and growing high impact education solutions.
Aaron Tait’s experience running schools in African townships, and Dave Faulkner’s career as a teacher and principal in some of Australia’s most remote communities catalysed their respective passions for doing what they can to help every child access a quality education. ”I’ve agreed for a long time that your post-code should not determine your future,” says Faulkner. “EC Premium was created from the idea that every teacher in Australia should be able to access quality professional learning, anytime, anywhere. Particularly now when we see the challenges for teachers, support and easy to access upskilling is more important than ever.” Tait, a Cambridge graduate with research and efforts focused on scaled social impact solutions is quick to stress the power brought by the Go1 technology; “EC became part of Go1 in 2022 as we wanted to be part of one of the fastest growing learning companies in the world, a proud Australian technology success story and the home to the world’s largest adult learning library.” With 14 Go1 offices across the world, EC by Go1 is an Australian idea that will be spreading across the world in 2023. “We are proud to have launched at home in Australia, and in time to share the best Australian PL voices with the world,” says Scott-Jones.
AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS GETTING SET TO POWER THEIR PROFESSIONAL LEARNING INTO 2023
With the subscription price of $150 per staff member equating to less than the cost of half a day of teacher release, schools across the country are signing up to launch the platform now to full effect in 2023. Faulkner stresses; “EC Premium hasn’t been built to be your whole PL solution, instead it’s just a very compelling part of your solution to continually improve the practice of staff across your school.”
For further information visit, ec.inc
This article was first published in Education Matters Secondary Magazine, September 2022. To read the issue download it here.
