Learning and Teaching
New arrangements for the delivery of Semester Reports
Traditionally, students’ academic reports have been produced as paper documents, mailed to families at the conclusion of the semester. This practice will be changing from Semester One of this year. There are a number of reasons for this, leading to what is expected to be a more efficient and effective delivery of reports to students and parents.
End of Semester Reports detail the progress, achievements and areas for improvement for each subject a student has been in enrolled in for a semester. In addition, a Mentor Report describes the student’s involvement in the broader life of the College. Semester reports are one part of the communication of feedback about learning that happens throughout the year. Others include Parent/Student/Teacher interviews, email, phone conversations and progressive reporting through the College’s online learning management system, OLLIE.
Rather than printing and mailing out Semester Reports in June, as was previously the practice, this year, reports will be available to parents and students as secure pdf files through OLLIE. The benefits of this include a dramatic reduction in paper, printing, mailing and handling costs. Also, the reports will be available immediately to families who may not be at home at the time of postal delivery, as long as they have internet access. A step-by-step guide for accessing students’ reports via OLLIE was emailed to all parents recently, along with the College’s OLLIE Usage Guide.
The OLLIE portal is a completely secure repository. It is built upon the Schoolbox platform, configured for the needs of our school. Schoolbox is a large and established company, servicing schools locally and internationally. Their product is highly regarded across the education sector. Since our adoption of Schoolbox in 2016, there has been complete confidence in its in-built security measures and its alignment with our College-wide IT security systems.
OLLIE also has the capacity for us to provide new ways of handling communication about academic progress in the future. Results and other feedback may be entered on OLLIE, for students and parents to see, as things happen. The immediacy of this kind of feedback is most useful for the learning process. It provides information about progress during the semester, enabling quick understanding and action, rather than the need to wait for the end of the semester when it is likely to be more difficult to act on a set of results in the most constructive way. The College is in the process of reviewing the best way to further exploit the power of what is commonly referred to as ‘Real Time Reporting’. It is a method of communicating progress to students and parents that has been used in Victorian schools for over a decade and has since been adopted as the primary vehicle for reporting by many schools. There will be no significant change to Semester Report content and our use of Real-Time Reporting this year, however, the intention is to implement a new system sometime in 2020. More information about this will come in due course.
We are confident that the new method for delivering Semester Reports as PDF files via OLLIE will be an improvement on the previous one. Parents will be notified by email once their son’s reports are available to access via OLLIE. The reports will be uploaded on Friday 28 June.
Should parents wish to receive a report on paper via the post, they must contact College Administration Services. Please email dlsadmin@delasalle.vic.edu.au by Monday 17 June should you wish to receive a paper report for your son.
Mr Mark Gustincic
Deputy Principal – Learning and Teaching