Ten years of online learning at The Sheffield College: taking a new direction - Guest Contribution by Julia Duggleby and Julie Hooper

Earlier this year the Sheffield College celebrated 10 years of delivering online learning. Significantly for us, the end of this decade also marks a new beginning where the two previously distinct teams, Online Learning and Online English, have merged to combine resources and experience in new online learning initiatives such as a fully online BA Foundation Degree in e Communications (beginning February 2008) validated and topped up with an online BA Hons year by Sheffield Hallam University.  These teams have developed respectively some well known and award winning courses such as LeTTOL and English GCSE Online.

So as the College moves into its 11th year, it seems like a good time to reflect on what we have achieved, what challenges we face (and not always overcome), and what we hope to gain from the merger, through the e Communications Foundation Degree and in other ways.

The Sheffield College's first steps into online learning were in 1997, with the development and delivery of "Living IT", in partnership with MANCAT, DJAssociates, and Fretwell Downing (now part of the Tribal Group). At that time the Internet was only just becoming well-used – perhaps some of you will recall when it was a thrill to get an email.  Living IT aimed to teach the skills we believed people would need to make effective use of the Internet:  using email, searching for and deploying information, creating websites.  Even as early as Living IT we developed a pedagogical model that has remained largely unchained. The key principles of this model are:

• High quality content, written and designed in-house by those with subject expertise plus expertise in using the Internet as a medium for learning.
• Assessment activities that made best use of the medium.
• Tutoring that was proactive, speedy and supportive, using tutors who were subject and online experts.
• Peer communications and collaboration.
• A dedicated administrative function which ensures that the processes learners went through were efficient and tailored to the needs of online learners.
• Pre-course assessment, to ensure that learner and course were the right match.
• Online teaching and learning practice that mirrors the very best of face to face practice.

Living IT's development coincided with funding for a greatly improved technical infrastructure, and the colleges in South Yorkshire formed a partnership to exploit the opportunities this provided. Naturally one of the demands was for teachers who knew how to teach online, and so a small team from the South Yorkshire Further Education Consortium colleges developed and piloted LeTTOL (Learning to Teach Online).  LeTTOL has been a significant success, training several thousand teachers (and others) in South Yorkshire, but throughout the world.

We do not want this article to be just a list of courses we offer, but LeTTOL is mentioned here because of its significance for the Sheffield College.  From LeTTOL have arisen all our other online courses.  These courses are in two main areas:

Online Professional: LeTTOL (at Level 3), plus E-mentor (Level 2 and 3), E-tutor (Level 3), and Net-Trainers (Level 4).  The latest addition to the Online Professional stable is “Getting to Grips with Moodle” a short online course which aims to introduce teachers and tutors to the tools they can use to create and deliver a course in Moodle's virtual learning environment.

Academic:  GCSE English, AS/A2 English Language and Literature, GCSE Psychology, IELTS and a range of courses in English, Literacy and I Media  that are delivered partly online and partly in the classroom.

The two directions – the professional and the academic – that online learning has taken in the College has not meant a separation of teams. There has been continuous cross-fertilisation of ideas, expertise, and a way of approaching online learning which is distinctly our own, and which we have found works.  It is because of that shared history we now able to launch into the College's latest venture – a Foundation Degree in e-Communications, which start in February 2008.  We know from long experience that many of our learners would not have any qualifications if it was not for online learning, and we felt ready to offer online learning at degree level.  E-Communications seemed the right way forward since it built so neatly on our expertise in English, Media, Online Communications, and the use of the Internet in the workplace. 

Learners are currently enrolling for this course, drawn by course modules such as:

• the social web;
• writing for digital communications;
• sound and vision;
• popular culture and the Internet;
• effective e-mentoring;
• e-promotion and e-marketing;

and what is happening is exactly what we would expect – that learners recognise that they have already taught themselves many of the skills you might associate with these modules and will use the BA in e Communications to put a qualification behind their skills.

It is interesting for us to be able to look back and see how the courses we are  currently developing such as the BA in e Communications BA look very different from where we began 10 years ago in the sense that multimedia and social software have become highly accessible to all and now not only influence  the look and the feel of the courses we develop and the way we communicate, but what skills and concepts are actually learned. However, at the same time the pedagogical principles we have outlined above remain the same.

At the beginning of this article we said we would talk about some of the challenges we have faced over the years, how we tackled them, and what we learned.

• Online learners are special.  Not everyone is suited to online learning, so we learned early on it was important to consider applications very carefully, making sure that learners had the literacy and IT literacy skills they would need.  We also knew they had to think carefully about the time commitment, since some applicants seem to imagine that time spent on learning online appeared magically from outside the 24 hour day.  It does not.
• Online delivery is not cheap.  Some institutions did, and still do, imagine that online learning means that learners can be packed onto courses, "facilitated" by a tutor without any specialist knowledge of the subject matter or of online learning.  To make sure learners get the best possible experience, and to make sure they get through to the end of the course and achieve their qualification, the best quality tutoring is needed.  Tutors have to be subject experts, and properly trained, and also willing to work flexibly.  Our tutors do not just sit about answering the occasional emailed question!
• Developing online learning is not cheap either.  The delivery team needs time to write the course properly, and to properly develop assessment tasks which are appropriate to the subject matter and to the medium.  Once the course is written it needs technical, technological and design implementation – again a specialist requirements, and therefore expensive, skills.
• College and national systems are geared towards face-to-face learners.  Working in the online world can sometimes be frustrating since systems are not designed to accommodate flexibility in terms of time, nor learners who could be based anywhere from Frecheville to Fiji.  We have tried to develop systems which parallel and feed into face-to-face systems, and we have also learned to be patient when it is necessary to explain the ways of the online world to planners and funders.

For more information about the Online College at the Sheffield College see:   http://www.sheffcol.ac.uk/onlinecollege, or contact the authors of this posting: Julia Duggleby – julia.duggleby "AT" sheffcol.ac.uk; or Julie Hooper – julie.hooper "AT" sheffcol.ac.uk.

Comments

[Kevin Donovan]

It has been a pleasure and privilege to have been associated in minor ways over the years with LeTTOL and its dispersed great staff team. It's a real tribute to the colleagues who have devised and managed LeTTOL that it has survived and prospered and acted as a model for others.

Am I allowed to note that an early minor stimulus to LeTTOL was support from the FE QUILT programme of staff development. This was launched in Wales and England in 1996/7 and, amongst other things, funded scores of small-scale college development projects.

[Kathryn Atkin]

I have had the pleasure of being an online student with the Sheffield College for some years, during which time I have successfully completed several courses, including the AS/A2 English Language & Literature and GCSE Psychology. Having previously attempted A Level English taught in the conventional way (and dropping out by Christmas when the dark nights began to draw in...), I now know that online learning suits me best and was thrilled to achieve a Grade A in both subjects - something I feel sure I would never have achieved at 'night school'.
I have nothing but praise for the Online Team and for their way they support learners and help them to achieve their potential.
I am looking forward to starting the new BA e-Communications in February 08 and (hopefully) gaining a Foundation Degree.

[Nic]

I also had the pleasure of studying AS/A2 English online at Sheffield College, and that has led directly to going to University to take a part time degree, and to a whole new employment field. Although learning online sounds like there could be distance between student and tutor, nothing could be further from the truth, and the personal care and encouragement was a huge factor in my success, getting A grades for both qualifications. I can't speak highly enough of the course and the quality of the teaching.