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Bolton Community College

Year 2: Implementing Personalised Accessible Learning (i-PAL) 2008/2009

 

 

 

The i-PAL project aims to create a sustainable mobile learning culture in order to enhance participation, collaboration and success. The project aims to increase access to learning at any time without being dependent on connectivity or location.

The project will promote a technology rich, teaching and learning culture, by providing tutors with staff development materials on their own mobile devices. By providing staff with their own 'mobile learning' it should inspire them to deliver learning in the same way.

The project will use 3D motion capture to create a bank of innovative, inspiring, mobile learning and staff development resources.

Project Aims

• To utilise mobile technologies to engage, excite and enable our learners and ultimately seek to enhance their retention and achievement.
• To support and add value to learning activities through creation of catalogue of multimedia rich, innovative and inspiring learning resources across a number of vocational areas.
• To build learner confidence by making learning accessible and available to them at any time, any place and anywhere they require it.
• To support tutors to use/utilise ILT equipment/e-learning (including mobile technologies) in a formal teaching and learning environment and outside of the classroom.

Project Objectives

• Create inspiring, interesting and innovative learning resources for mobile devices using 3D animation, 3D motion capture and ultra slow motion video. By utilising the skills of our BTEC visual arts students.
• Enable learners to utilise their own mobile devices to access inspiring, informative, innovative learning resources which support their individual learning needs.
• Integrate a mobile learning model which extends learning beyond the classroom
  through the provision of pedagogically sound content which can be accessed at a
  learners' convenience.
• Make learning fun and engaging, by utilising Brain training and other software available with Nintendo DS to support functional skills learners.
• Encourage learners to utilise their own technologies to record their own progress and achievement.
• Engage and support (275) practitioners by providing them with staff development resources, which support the delivery of ILT/e-learning inside and outside the classroom, which they can access any time, anyplace, anywhere via their own mobile devices. Thus exposing staff to the benefits of mobile technologies and promoting a technology rich teaching and learning culture.
• Create a community of practitioners (across organisations, by encouraging cross site visits by key staff) to share good practice, work collaboratively and provide appropriate training and support to staff; which may count towards the 30hrs CPD requirement.
• Develop a sustainable infrastructure for extending work beyond the lifetime of project, ensuring the project is both affordable and scalable.
• Share content and experiences from the project including partner 'celebration' dissemination events.

Year 1: Extending, inspiring and supporting learning through the use of mobile technologies 2007/2008

 

 

 

The EISL (Extending, inspiring and supporting learning) project was a collaboration between City College Manchester, Oldham Sixth Form College, Bolton Community College and Manchester College of Arts and Technology. The main aim of the project was to extend, inspire and support learning through the use of mobile technologies across various curriculum areas.

Using a range of technologies and platforms and adopting different approaches, the EISL project consortium provided practitioners and learners with access to ubiquitous and innovative learning. Technologies included video-on-demand service, mini laptops, video cameras, mp3/mp4 players, iPod touches, and so on. The project involved around 500 learners and 50 practitioners and investigated the effectiveness of mobile learning based on learners’ and practitioners’ experiences in using the MoLeNET-funded mobile technologies and platforms across four colleges.

Colleges and Project Background

The EISL project targeted a variety of learners including the confident, motivated and disadvantaged, as well as those who need to be enthused and actively engaged to achieve their potential through the use of technologies. The focus was on developing key competencies and skills including literacy, numeracy and personal skills for employability. With different groups and learning scenarios, there was a range of emphasis from generating content generation and delivery to independent and collaborative learning.

The EISL project was carried out by a consortium of further education (FE) colleges and a local council in North West England including:

Bolton Community College (lead college)

Bolton Community College (BCC) has a very traditional vocational offer as well as a full range of personal and community development learning (PCDL) across the borough. BCC chose to work with the construction and hair and beauty curriculum areas for this project. The college had existing expertise in the creation and delivery of mobile learning content (namely video) and aimed to implement a podcast server that would support the delivery of video content in a variety of formats suitable for use via several different mobile devices.

Unlike the other consortia partners, BCC aimed to use the technologies already available to learners and therefore used project funds to provide learners with extra memory for their existing devices rather than providing ‘new’ devices. This was seen as a sustainable model that BCC believes they can continue once the MoLeNET funding ends. The focus of BCCs role was development and delivery to specified audiences with emphasis on research and assessment of learner experiences of the learning assets and also working collaboratively to generate content.

City College Manchester

City College Manchester (CCM, now part of The Manchester College) is a large general further education (GFE) college with five main sites throughout the city. CCM offers provision in 14 sector-subject areas and attracts learners from Manchester and neighbouring local authorities. There are established higher education (HE) programmes, a sixth form centre and provision for international learners. The college is the lead partner for the Centre of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) in health and social care. There are small programmes for Train to Gain and work-based learning. CCM is the largest provider of offender education and skills in England and Wales. The College has experience of delivering mobile learning and assessment in a variety of settings, using wireless routing and hardwire connections. The focus of CCM’s role was to contribute research into various means of connecting with learners with no internet connectivity and creation of materials for delivery of learning through use of mobile devices.

Manchester College of Arts and Technology (MANCAT)

MANCAT is one of the largest FE colleges in the UK with an outstanding Ofsted inspection report (2007) and expertise in the development of the use of technologies in teaching, learning and the management of learning. In the MoleNET project MANCAT targeted 14–19 year olds in vocational programmes and advanced-level qualifications. Working with a range of learners from the confident and inspired, to those who need to be enthused and actively engaged to achieve their potentials; the primary aim was to inspire learning by employing a range of mobile technologies that learners are relatively comfortable with but do not usually have access to. The focus was on the development of key competencies and skills including literacy, numeracy and personal skills for employability. With different groups and learning scenarios there was a range of emphasis including the generation of content, supportive assessment tasks, content delivery, independent and collaborative learning.

The Oldham College

Bolton Council

Bolton Council’s PCDL provision is delivered by Bolton Community College. The Council and BCC have previously worked successfully on several ILT projects, one of which focused on mobile learning delivery. The Council’s role was to build on the success of previous mobile learning projects ELVIS and ELVIS 2, delivering mobile video content to learners and providing support to partners.

Project aims

• To engage, inspire and support different learner groups through the use of emerging technologies to build their competence and ultimately seek to enhance retention and achievement
• To support and add value to learning activities through the creation of a catalogue of video and multimedia rich interactive learning objects across a number of vocational areas
• To build learner confidence through development of individual responsibility for their own learning and collaborative activity
• To provide a platform to aid the development of provision of online portfolio evidence for vocational qualifications including infrastructure.

Key objectives

• Integrate a mobile learning model that extends learning beyond the classroom through the provision of pedagogically sound content that can be accessed at learners' convenience. This will focus on achievement and reflection for learning as part of transferable and core skills across curriculum areas.
• Encourage learners to use technologies readily available to them to support their learning and the recording of their own achievement.
• Investigate the development of activities for the support and assessment of learners' literacy, numeracy and employability skills.
• Create a community of practitioners to work collaboratively to provide appropriate training and support to staff that may count towards the 30 hours Institute for Learning continuing professional development (CPD) requirement.
• Develop sustainable infrastructure for extending work beyond the lifetime of project.
• Share content and experiences from the project including partner 'celebration' dissemination events.

Benefits for participants

Benefits for learners, across all learner groups

Learners gained:

• improved access to learning materials
• new technologies and ways of learning
• learning that was more fun.
• More time to learn (most learners learn up to an hour a week more)
• e-learning through mobile technologies enabling research
• new opportunities to present evidence for assessment.

Benefits for staff

Staff gained:

• access to video-recording equipment.
• new ways to provide learning materials to learners
• an easy-to-use video encoding web interface
• increased personal skill levels in use and awareness of the benefits of mobile learning
• the opportunity to work with a community of practitioners sharing resources and expertise online.

Benefits for the lead college

The lead college has gained:

• implementation of a podcast server
• development time to resolve major technical obstacles
• podcast server and Moodle integration.

Benefits for institutions taking part (partners and colleges)

They have:

• shared research, development in new areas of technology
• shared experience and specialist expertise in each of the partner institution
• gained development time to resolve major technical obstacles.

Lessons learned

The main teaching and learning lesson was the sheer amount of time required to plan, create resources and to embed them into curriculum delivery.

Although there were enthusiastic tutors who all bought into the project after they were provided with mini video cameras and memory cards, they felt that to produce coherent, pedagogically sound resources for their courses they needed time to plan, record and implement them into their programme of delivery. This in itself is a big job and something cannot be taken on half-way through a year, and in particular in a year in which they were already required to have in place 30 hours’ CPD for IfL.

If this project is to be repeated a start point of May/June would be ideal. This would enable staff to be trained at the end of a college year and give them the summer to plan and record content ready for the following year’s delivery.

The 3G connection used was unable to handle media-rich materials so these will have to be distributed to devices directly rather than downloaded.

Working with geographically dispersed staff and students requires a more effective communication infrastructure.

Student involvement was delayed because of time taken for technical developments.