Shock horror! Over already?

The Suffolk E-Learning Service ended 30 April 2007 after 16 months of operation during which time it delivered or hosted 39 training and awareness raising events involved over 600 participants from across the post-16 sector in Suffolk. We would like to thank friends and supporters in JISC, BECTA and the local post-16 and schools community for all their help and involement. The final evaluation report for the project will be delivered to Suffolk LSC (our main sponsors) on 30 April 2007.

There have been a number of outcomes and findings from the project, impossible to list here, but perhaps importantly we should emphasise:

• E-Learning is still relatively poorly understood, and perhaps the term itself is not helpful. Perhaps we should go back to talking about ILT - or as someone recently defined it to us - teaching which involves anything with a plug attached.
  

• E-Learning skills and awarenessness are unevenly distributed within and across institutions and sectors. There is still a considerable training and development job to be done.

• Cooperation and knowledge exchange across the educational sector works - if there is sufficient commitment to it and an agent to facilitate it - and it can save individual providers both a lot of time and money (as tax-payers we should all be interested in this)

Netskills Workshop - 23rd April 2007

As part of the efforts of the E-Learning service to raise awareness of VLEs in Suffolk we recently purchased a Netskills workshop for teachers in the FE and HE sectors. The workshop, which was designed by Steve Boneham, focussed on managing and enhancing content in Blackboard, but also featured examples using WebCT and Moodle.

The training was delivered by Simon Fitzpatrick who did a great job in raising awareness of the numerous resource gateways that exist and how material from here and other sources can be integrated in the course areas of VLEs.


Attendees reported finding the training very useful, although I am sure most would welcome more time and opportunity to explore how to integrate the skills and materials introduced by Simon into their own teaching contexts.