In June 2008 we ran a small pilot research project with 8 Year 10 students, building delivery of a Unit of work within ICT into the learning platform - students could complete lessons in school time or from home or from wherever they had access to the Internet - ICT lessons took place Period 1 on a Monday - students who completed the online lesson could chose to register from Period 2 onwards - assessment took place through a formal online exam at the end of the Unit (results were higher than the school average and there were some interesting comments from students about their experience of flexible learning with a learning platform).

The pilot is being extended in November/December 2008 when all Year 11 students will be given the opportunity of studying a Spreadsheet unit of work online. The results of this will have an impact on school policy in relation ot the delivery of subject content and assessment online.

I have posted information about this and other projects on our school website at www.learningplatforms.info

Jim

Many teachers new to LPs will want resources already in there to enable them to exploit LP collaboration facilities. Many teachers will want to engage the student with a good use of multimedia and find that creating their own materials is time consuming and their own limitations may leave the student with a an LP that is simply carrying dry text with some pictures.

So where do the Digital Resources come from apart from the teachers who create them on their own platform? Purchased.......maybe.........but very few suppliers provide true LP resources that can exploit the tracking and assessment. Even fewer licence in a way in which the teacher can integrate the resources and not have any fear that when the school can't pay the annual licence their own work collapses without the 'rented' content.

One last thing, don't LPs now prevent sharing of resources with schools developing their own content but sharing with another school or another Local Authority now included the issue of how to do so easily. Resources in LPs are not openly available as they sit behind licenced applications, we've a great danger of having LPs that give great potential for collaboration between pupils and teachers............but not much in the way of digital materials to collaborate about?

eLCs have left behind a commercial market that was artificially inflated with no management of the quality of digital resources or their technical standards. The good stuff largely lost amongst the garbage and those suppliers with the biggest investment in marketing being the most successful. As for standards of development, they were never a condition of the COL branding, a brand that is a more a kitemark of poor quality than it is good.

Other countries are much smarter, they motivate the take-up of learning platforms in schools by creating National Repositories of resources. By setting a single set of standards they also encourage developers to produce to this one standard, establishing stability in the way in which resources are produced and an easy way for any supplier to have a profile in that market without major investments in marketing. A level playing field. Repositories such as these make resources easy to find and more importantly......enable easy exchange between learning platforms. If you read BECTAs Harnessing Technology Strategy there is simply a hope that there is a market response and repositories, resources and tools to create them will emerge. They probably will........to many different standards, creating even more barriers to sharing.

We are way behind many other countries, not in our strategic knowledge but in the IMPLEMENTATION of that strategic thinking.

The Web 2.0 argument occurs regularly - why don't our learners learn, in school, the way they learn out of school, with similar use of social technologies. But school is a very different place than home and the use of technology is very different in school than it is at home. Schools are also large institutions and for every teacher comfortable with technology there are 5 that are not, for every teacher capable of exploiting Learning Platforms there are 5 that aren't. Maybe their first use of a Learning Platform by a teacher will be to use an interesting video clip or a series of photos, or a animation to spark on-line discussion and if that content is already there to build upon maybe more teachers will be confident to go further?

There is another issue, Learning Platforms are not like Web 2.0 social technologies they have inbuilt barriers called licences. Platforms will encourage sharing across individual institutions but not between them.