Innovating e-learning Event

Last week was a busy one, wasn't very well for a lot of it and had Friday off to see mum in hospital (she is out now). I aslo participated with Mark Stiles and Richard Benefer in a JISC online conference, "Innovating e-learning", we were presenting under the Supporting LifeLong Learning Theme with the presentation based on how we promote work based learning (WBL) and how our project is looking to support wbl stakeholders. We had some interesting comments/ thoughts/ outputs including:

• Being able to point people to JORUM and SURF WBL outputs
• Communication is vital for WBL
• Institution tools (i.e. VLE's) are not suitable vehicles for sharing information with employers
• Understanding and Supporting the mentor role is still difficult for some institutions
• Ownership of Learner data - Employer or Learner owned?
• Getting the Employer to understand:
  • The role of the FE college outside of the more traditional context (16 -19)
  • Understanding the roles of HND against Foundation Degrees
• SME and bigger companies have different needs for training
• Difficult to access Work Based Learners access to computers
• Accessibility of tools being used is important
• Sharing good practice across HE and FE is vital

Engage

Thanks to our presentation at the Welsh conference we have become involved in a working group (WBL/Programme Delivery Group) for employer engagement, engage (a Higher Education Authority funded employer engagement project), I presented at the meeting held this week at Loughborough University and spoke about some of the experiences of the original WBL project, on the AimHigher report the WBL-Way project had commissioned and also on the experiences of project partners when talking about supporting work based learning at HE level in FE. Some interesting things were discussed at the meeting:

• Employer definitions of WBL are varied and confused


• Employers want students fit for purpose, interested in courses with accreditation at modular level


• Need to look at Change Management approach to learning, considering company strategies in developing courses for individuals


• Employers not interested in point in time qualifications but in capability and confidence in their employees (qualification output but not goal of training).
• Case studies are important to help employers, learners and mentors understand their roles in WBL
• Often large companies have outsourced Human Resources, IT etc so it is important for the WBL-Way project to develop a Staff Development Area rather than a personnel or HR area (this links back to the last WBL-Way project meeting)
• Templates and guidelines would be considered useful, this included the UfI's learning contract, there was an interest expressed about how Staffordshire University looked at mentoring (I need to sort out the last projects documents on mentoring and send them to the group).

The engage project has already created a number of useful outputs, including developing a WBL-Journey for the Employee mindmap which I have passed on to the WBL-Way project partners.

The WBL-Way project had a team meeting this week, still keeping to the first Thursday in each month, and we managed to get one partner senior manager to attend it - a real achievement! It is looking like this will lead to further meetings about how we can fit our project into their own strategies. Will keep you posted!

e-learning at the cusp

Went to an event held at Stoke campus yesterday, once again it raised the issue of the use of Web 2.0 in an educational context, and the idea of the student being in control of their learning - to the point one institution calls their learners "researchers". Another interesting presentation was Mark Stiles' 'Living with the Uncontrollable' his framework made me think about what tools should the institution recognise, embed in the learning and take control of.

This project has been looking at providing one point of access to a number of stakeholders of not only institutional information but information personal to that stakeholder (i.e. blogs / rss feeds/ favourites (del.icio.us)), this information would not be controlled by the institution but just displayed by lifeRay. This is the best solution to encourage stakeholders to use the access point as a single reference for those either unfamiliar with information available to them or for those who need one area for all of their information.

As stakeholders gain familiarity with the information we can provide to them the more I wonder whether we need to take this a step further and look beyond the project.....allowing the institutional information to be accessed through authenticated rss feeds? Or using standard widgets which would allow them to be plugged into those tools we are using for project management (Google homepage, yahoo!, Flock, MS Live)? I will have to revisit this thought once we have managed to have a (successful!) pilot of the support access point.

Useful Links
Google Gadgets (Personalised Homepage) : http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/
Yahoo! Widgets: http://widgets.yahoo.com/workshop/
MS Live Gadgets: http://microsoftgadgets.com/

Information Information Information

Well the course descriptions are looking like, that to begin with at least, the information will be at university level, with links to the college websites. In most cases it does not look like the colleges have a database of course information, or a single point of contact for employers trying to find information on local HE courses. This again can be a problem for the project.

Managed to attend a SURF meeting last week and disseminated information about the project, we have been asked to run an event for tutors on the ground in the near future. It is looking like we might be able to squeeze into an existing training day as it links to the QAA looking at FE's support for HE. Have found a hidden bonus database held at the university outside of the main corporate information which includes information on validation and foundation degrees and lets people know the status of the awards.

The project has been worried about the terms used in both HE and FE and are trying to build a glossary. Due to the university having a Portal we have started this off by saying as a project we are creating a "Work Based Learning Support Point" rather than calling it a portal. We have also made the decision that we will be going ahead with the use of lifeRay as the software to support the project.

Course Information

One of the things raised as a task is to look at Course descriptors and how they are handled at the different colleges and the university. This is interesting as a quick evaluation of websites shows the same foundation degree has two different course descriptors - depending which college is delivering it. When we look at putting this information into a link in a portal showing foundation degrees run by the consortium do we link to the course information held by the colleges or the information held by the university? From a good will point of view we could look at both - but that could get confusing. How do we handle this information? Perhaps a main link to the unversity generic descriptor then links to the local colleges information (but that would have to assume that the college information is held in a database with matching codes). Perhaps the colleges information (and the unversities) should be pushed to the repository before going to the portal?