Welcome to Grok Academy

Where we came from and how we got here.

In The Beginning

Grok Learning and the Australian Computing Academy (ACA) were two separate organisations with the same mission: to improve computing education by supporting teachers with classroom resources, professional development, and expert curriculum and pedagogy advice.

After many years working together to achieve this mission, it was an obvious next step to join together and become one unified organisation.

There are lots of overlap in what we do and we work closely together on many things, such as the NCSS Challenge and DT Challenges. Many ACA activities are hosted in the Grok Learning platform. Some people (like me!) have worked for both organisations.

However, there are areas where each organisation works independently. For Grok Learning this includes running competitions and creating new technology for improved interactivity and automated feedback. For the ACA this includes running PD workshops, creating unplugged activities, and the roll out of the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies (AC:DT).

We share a passion and talent for creating engaging, self-paced, curriculum-aligned classroom activities with automatic marking in the Grok Learning platform, including: DT Challenges, Cyber Challenges on the ACA side and NCSS Challenge, Web.Comp and courses on the Grok Learning side.

Bringing all of that together in one organisation allows us to produce one set of truly integrated products that are designed specifically for teachers to teach the AC:DT, or the international computing or computer science equivalent.

Grok Academy is a Not For Profit

We started Grok Learning as a for-profit company, not because we were planning on making a fortune, but because it gave us flexibility to adapt while we were still working out the most effective models for engaging schools and teaching students about coding and related technologies.

Since we started, we never returned a profit to our shareholders. Any profit went back into growing our impact. I have often referred to myself as a reluctant capitalist because my goal for Grok Learning was never to make money, it was to improve computing education for all learners.

Since then we have matured as a company and we know our purpose and how we will carry it out. So now is the perfect time to make the move to formalise our not-for-profit philosophy.

Where to next?

Like our new organisation, everything we create in Grok Academy will be a much more integrated product, designed to support teachers throughout their teaching of Digital Technologies and computing.

More cohesive content

Any teacher exploring the resources we have developed has to make sense of the fragmented collection of activities. It is often unclear how the different activities can fit together into a coherent teaching programme.

We have not always been able to give a clear answer for this, because both organisations were independent and the content was not designed to fit together. Now we can align all of our content and give the best possible advice and support as one single organisation.

Breaking down the borders

Despite working very closely together there were some things that could not cross borders. For example, if a teacher finds a typo in a DT Challenge course and notifies Grok Learning, instead of just fixing it up, Grok Learning staff have to send an email to the ACA staff and get them to fix it, and this went in both directions.

Better support

For privacy reasons, ACA staff do not have access to user data in the Grok Learning platform and so can’t help teachers with problems with registering and accessing student data in the system at events and PD workshops.

And similarly, Grok Learning staff will now be able to assist teachers with enquires on ACA products and advise on the full offerings on the platform.

Better curriculum alignment and reporting

Grok Learning customers can expect a great alignment with the AC:DT and better mapping of resources to the curriculum. One of our plans for Grok Academy is to extend mapping of the curriculum to all courses and competitions on the platform.

In the longer term, we want teachers to know what curriculum knowledge and skills each student has developed over a period of time, no matter which activities they have completed in the platform.

Doing a better job of automatically reporting against the curriculum is one of the primary goals for the new organisation.

New and improved content

Grok Learning has focused on content that could be auto-marked, but the new organisation will branch out to produce a wider range of activities, such as open-ended projects with manual marking rubrics.

We know teachers want something that supports a full teaching programme right across the year in Digital Technologies, not just the coding skills. So Grok Academy will provide greater curriculum coverage and support for activities across all of Digital Technologies, not just those that can be auto-marked in the Grok platform.

We will expand on the ACA’s cross-curriculum activities, such as courses that tie in with maths, science, or geography — learning areas with many opportunities for collecting and analysing data that integrate easily with Digital Technologies.

Stronger connections with our community

One of the great joys for both teams is working directly with teachers, e.g. in professional development or getting hands-on feedback about new courses.

We have a strong community of teachers who have engaged with Grok Learning and ACA. We want to expand our community into every school and we need your help to do that. We will engage with you even more to create new resources and features based on what YOU ask for.

We are really excited by what the future holds for Grok Academy and hope you will join us for the journey.