Skills day: Ray Robertson: experience from the frontline

Learning Technologies Manager, West Suffolk College - 21,000 learners, post-16, rural college, credited as an outstanding quality provider, also a beacon college since November 2006

You can download the slides that accompany Ray’s talk from the wiki

2004, created a virtual learning environment but usability and functionality was terrible, dull interface, difficult to navigate etc. With implementation did everything wrong: lack of planning, top down thinking, little understanding of VLEs. Users felt a lack of ownership, little understanding of purpose, also felt threatened and it had little useful content.

Not an unusual experience but we knew it was a disaster and had to think again. But advantage was that we admitted it had gone wrong and realised that had to think about what it is that we wanted to do. We set objectives:

We were dealing with a new generation of students - couldn’t dictate notes or expect them to take notes. What we think they are looking for is 24/7 access to learning material, variety of delivery channels, reflective of lifestyles and use of technology.

Wanted to improve communication across whole college, cross college groups, within faculty etc.

Realised that web 2.0 technology would get us there quickly ather than going back and trying to do another VLE. Trying to buy something wasn’t the answer. We needed a variety of different solutions and web 2.0 provided that: blogs, podcasts, wikis, social software.

We could see that by using thse tools we could give people ownership and flexibilty rather than monolithic VLE - we could give them freedom: you want a course blog - have it! had to ask IT to stop filtering everything. We said that it’s fine to do it but if you abuse it we’ll jump on from you a big height. And we haven’t really had any problems ith abuse so we have no restrictions whatsoever. Would recommend that to any college - take the restrictions off.

First blog was E Learning News. Decided that if we (me and my colleague) started using a blog rather than newsletters, bits of paper etc, then it would set an example. Use Blogger at the moment but looking at alternatives too. Use it to disseminate information. We keep it up to date and also have the college blogroll. Blogs far more popular than the VLE ever was as they have ownership, do not need to have the college logo on it, do not need to have anyone else read and check it first. we had some problems with comments so we do moderate those first but in general it works very well. We also people to host their own websites.

Podcasting

Also working very well - it’s cheap! Doesn’t need much training. I’ve pushed the idea that you don’t need to sound like the BBC. As long as the people can hear it and can download it as an MP3 it does not need to be BBC quality. Can use free software such as Audacity.

Podcasts used by some tutors simply as a means of providing a listen again facility for learners to revisit a session or catch up if they’ve missed it. Others used to share good practice and aimed at staff rather than students.

Social software

Some courses use MySpace to share their work and promote themselves.

We’re also investigating the VLE again but this time there’s no compulsion.

So where are we now?

Retention - trying to make sense of it all. Driven by the learner experience. We know we can’t force them to give up Bebo, Facebook etc to head for the VLE. How do they want us to use the technology? Utility, 24/7 delivery, flexibility. Traditional methods - face to face stuff - is still important, you can’t do it all by technology, the traditional methods have been tried and tested and do work. Plus VLE, web 2.0 and learning technologies such as whiteboards…next stage is to bring it all together.

September 5, 2007 | Filed Under skillsday2007 

Comments

Leave a Reply