Case study Organisation: Cornwall Adult Education Service Type of FE provider: Adult Education Service Focus on: Technology Background Cornwall Adult Education Service is a community based organisation which currently makes use of over 300 venues across the county. Martin Thomson, head of information and learning technology (ILT), is currently based in their Falmouth office. The service operates out of six main adult education centres with two peripheral centres. Last year there were around 20,000 enrolments. The service has a SfL brand, ‘Link into Learning’ and works out of around 30 town centre shops. There is also a vibrant family learning side to the service which is a keen user of ILT. Around 60 full-time staff and 300 part-time tutors work for the service. After moving to Cornwall, Martin became deputy manager of Cornwall’s Information Technology Centre (ITEC) before moving to the college to teach IT to catering students, eventually becoming the head of studies. He was then given the central role of introducing e-business/ILT into the college before moving into the adult education service as head of ILT in September 2004.
Use of technology The vast majority of the service’s courses are delivered by face to face teaching but Moodle (Moodle is a free and open source web based e-learning software platform) is used to support learning and add value. For the first time this year a decision was made to put every course on Moodle. This means that some 3,000+ courses are available on the Moodle site. Not all courses are currently active but every learner has access to the site where there are a number of learner facing resources made available.
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The service also uses a staff facing Moodle for information dissemination and collaboration. When Martin commenced his position as head of ILT, the organisation had already committed itself to undertaking the e-guides training programme. He questioned why assistant principals and curriculum managers were going on the e-guides training, rather than sending just IT enthusiasts, but subsequently found that working together as a collective, these managers were in a position to be able to embed ILT into their practice and meetings. Martin, along with two other colleagues, form the ILT support team who do most of the staff development training. The team also offers open access support to tutors: “Staff tell us what they want. If we’re not putting on what they want training wise, they tell us and we address those issues and run a course.” The team also support tutors on a one-to-one basis across the county for training and for ICT classroom support.
Technology is being used across the team for training the service’s tutors. There are tutors using just about every device and software on the ILT continuum: “I’m always surprised at the amount of ILT that is going on in our centres on any one day, at any one time. We all take it for granted, but you look at somebody using PowerPoint in a classroom and you have to pinch yourself to remind yourself that this is ILT too. It’s wonderful, really, really super.” As well as having a number of trained e-guides within the organisation, Martin and his Moodle administrator have volunteered for e-CPD training and have just completed their action plan. Subject learning coaches are in place across all curriculum areas, some of whom are curriculum managers who also happen to be e-guides. Assistive technology is available, for example accessible keyboards and screen readers. The service has a proactive support infrastructure and this ensures that any assistive technology, together with ILT equipment, is all made available.
Impact/key lessons There has been a year on year improvement in the number of hits on Moodle and the service has just recently seen its millionth hit (the learner who made this hit received a special prize at a presentation). The service runs one or two training events a month with between 10 to 18 people attending each event. Martin estimates that a majority of their 300 part-time tutors use some form of technology in their teaching. However, there are still some tutors who don’t wish to engage with technology: “At the moment we have some areas where staff don’t want to engage and we are trying desperately hard to engage them just to the point where they can make a sensible decision about how they should employ ILT or not. We would like our staff to agree to come and listen and if they don’t want to use the technology, then don’t use it, but at least they are making that decision from a position of strength.” Often Martin and his e-guides team will get an invite to do a training course embedded into a curriculum meeting. For example, they have been invited later this month to a modern foreign languages team curriculum meeting and have a slot for an hour and a half during the day.
One of the questions in observations of teaching and learning is about tutors’ use of resources including ILT. Curriculum managers are picking up where there are problems in observations, for example if no appropriate ILT is being used, they will then refer the tutors to the ILT support team. Technology is having an impact on the service’s learners as well as its tutors, although Martin feels that it is not always easy to measure the precise impact on retention, achievement, and success. However he went on to say: “In modern foreign languages we have enough evidence to suggest that there is better retention and achievement from courses that not only use IT, but also use it as a learning platform.” At the moment, the service’s learner evaluation forms don’t include a question about the use of ILT but informal e-mail comments are being collected by tutors from learners about the resources that they use. So far, there has been no feedback on the organisation’s use of technology from Ofsted. The last inspection was four years ago. However, the service has recently been working with the Isles of Scilly where it is using Skype to deliver Spanish lessons over on the island on Monday evenings. The pilot that Cornwall ran coincided with the islands’ own Ofsted inspection where the inspectors were very positive in their report about the learning opportunity being offered.
Future plans Future technological developments within the service will very much depend on funding. The service is currently in the process of buying some Nintendo Wii game consoles for family learning with some of the funding from its latest trained e-guide. Plans are also afoot to move the Moodle further forward. The team is also going to re-look at blogs and wikis as part of e-CPD on mentoring tutors rather than training them. They will use wikis and blogs to feed back on the process. The service is currently trialling 50 ASUS handheld machines with 50 tutors but Martin feels that at the end of the day, the service needs to consolidate the technology it already has and: “bring ourselves back to the reason why we’re doing it – it’s for better quality learning to take place and not simply to indulge in our IT dreams!”
RW09/09/CS013
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