Developments at Blackpool and the Fylde College. Guest Contribution from Christine McAllister.

Christine McAllister is Head of Learning Resources at Blackpool and The Fylde College.

After years of struggling to interest academic staff in the potential of learning technology, Moodle seems to have made all the difference!  At Blackpool, we have been lucky enough to retain e-Learning Champions for each academic department – they each get 3 hours per week off their teaching timetabletimetable.  Over the past few years, this has been a relatively stable group working first with Learnwise and then with Moodle.

This is our second academic year with Moodle and all Schools are engaged with it.  In some Schools, all courses have a presence – in others it is limited to particular courses.  Each School uses Moodle in different ways, some more heavily involved in the content side of courses (including NLN materials), others using reflective logs and communication tools.  There is a lot of interest in using video and some interest in sound.

At the end of last year, I organised a very simple staff development event where each School had a slot with a cross-section of e-learning Champions in order to share good practice across the college.  I have never run an event which generated such positive feedback!  Yes, there were some dissenting voices but the vast majority of staff all said the same things – yes, I can see the point of this, yes, this will help me.  We are now building on this to run a major e-Learning Conference for upwards of 500 staff in May of this year bringing in top level speakers from both HE and FE across a range of e-learning-related topics.  I hope this will also feel like a celebration of how far we have some as a college.

This year we have won an Association of Colleges "Beacon Award" for our Beauty Therapy provision. This was related to our Moodle use; and we also received high praise from Ofsted in relation to our Teacher Education, and Engineering and Computing provision.

There is now an interest in the college in developing multimedia materials and a possible interest in running some courses fully or partially online.

We find that there is more development work done on the Moodle system than with any commercial systems that we have experienced.  We were prepared to buy in external maintenance but we have never needed to.  So – there are lots of good feelings around Open Source Software as well as the product itself.

In terms of staff support, the college has a full-time Administrator plus another member of staff who is more or less full-time on Moodle.  Training has been done by one of the Learning Resources staff on a half-time basis.

Christine McAllister - cmca"AT"blackpool.ac.uk

Comments

[Dave Foord]

It is good to see the impact that a tool like Moodle can have on a college, and Blackpool's approach to the issues - firstly by giving staff real time to engage (the 3 hours per week), and secondly the fact that they are having a conference in May to celebrate their success. Blackpool should be an example to other colleges!