JISC

Start date: 5 August 2002

End date: 31 July 2003

Funding programme: Exchange for Learning (X4L) programme

Project website: http://www.solihull.ac.uk/

JISC theme(s): e-Learning

Introduction

The partners involved in this collaborative bid include Henley College, Solihull College and City College, Birmingham. The rationale for this decision was based on the groups previous history of collaborative success and was seen as a further opportunity for working even more closely on the implementation of like VLEs, sharing and benchmarking good ILT practices. 

The re-purposing project will target Engineering and Basic Skills/ESOL. The fundamental reason for these choices are as follows:

1. Engineering represents the historical core industrial base within this part of the West Midlands. Currently all partners to the bid are involved in providing educational/training support for both the local community of students as well as a range of SMEs.
   
2. In response to the culturally diverse community that has also grown throughout the West Midlands, the need to develop high quality resource materials to support learners in ESOL and Basic Skills acquisition was also a common objective amongst partners.

Aims and Objectives

The teams clear intention is to work towards the design of learning objects which will be have value for learners within Further & Higher Education, ones which create meaningful learning pathways and are usable across different VLEs.  

In terms of resource sustainability the project team will work towards ensuring that learning objects are generic enough to have multiple-curriculum impact.

Working with JISC review bodies, standards compliance incorporating meta tagging and wider dissemination will be actively pursued. 

It is hoped that the partnership will extend beyond the life of the project either through further joint bid submissions or simply by closer networking activity centred around local or regional ILT developments.

Future Plans

The main objectives for the next reporting period are to comment on how successful our push has been in really beginning to purposefully produce a good collection of learning objects against a set of criteria that is likely to remain relatively unchanged for the remainder of the project life. Equally, an important part of that report will concern detail on the processes and approaches employed in uploading materials to Xtensis and the Intra-library repositories. 

Without doubt a clearer set of issues will have emerged regarding our requests for copyright clearance, this too will form a substantial part of that report. 

The interim conclusions that can be drawn thus far I feel are positive ones. After a period of uncertainty the whole team feel far more comfortable in dealing with the underlying technical issues and feel equally less threatened by the competing influences of technological concept and sound pedagogical practice.  

It is with these thoughts in satisfying this co-existence, that the team recognizes the importance of producing outputs that will add significant impact and value to national outcomes.