COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

We have run courses for thousands of years without the use of computers or the Web, so why change? The familiar, Walk, Talk & Chalk approach favoured by teachers over the years is still the predominant method of delivering instruction. While face-to-face meetings can still be effective, applying the new tools currently available on the Internet opens up new possibilities for learning that weren't possible even a decade ago. We are currently going through a phase of blended learning, using both face-to-face and intranet resources accessable by pupils during lessons. ICT is a faculty which is still skills based and I believe that within the next decade the need for an ICT room in school will have diminished, and all classrooms will have an ICT capability to enhance pupil learning in their own subject area. The ICT skills we deliver today will be taught at Primary schools and we will be left to encourage our pupils to apply these tools in a vocational manner to assist their smoother integration into employment or further towards higher accademic qualifications.

Students are demanding more as they become more technically savvy, with the latest information at any time of the day in a variety of formats. Online communication to most students is now second nature.

Students now have greater demands on their time and a different work schedule. They want to have instant access to their course material and extra resources to be able to answer the problems they are set. They like a structure that they can rely upon to be logical and trustworthy.

Students are becoming independent learners, which is excellent news for teachers as it allows them to contribute in areas where students become stuck. the face-to-face lessons can then develop into question and answer sessions to clarify the learning, rather than covering the basics. Students also prefer to work within peer groups to solve their own problems, so a CMS has to be flexible enough to satisfy the need of a particular cohort rather than a generic, off-the-shelf solution designed to fit most applications.

I believe that an open source course it the route forward as it means that the software can be modified by someone like myself to produce exactly what our school and its stakeholders need. A popular pckage used by almost a million schools world-wide is Moodle, which the school already implemented and has plenty of experience with in developing some support materials.

UPGRADING THE VLE

This is a blog that I hope will monitor the changes that will be made to use blogs, video and podcasts to improve the qualitY of the learning by pupils in the school. It is intended to reach out to parents to provide additional tools that they can use to support their childs educational development while in the home environment.

All lesson plans will be available on-line together with all the resources used in the class. In addition further resources can be added by parents or students and a forum developed to assist pupils to answer questions about the current topic in more detail. Pupils will be encouraged to become more independent learners.

The scheme of work and samples of work will also be available, to use both as exemplars but also as evidence of standards being achieved. It is intended that the assessment of all work should be transparent. It is the authors intention to blend learning using VLE into face-to-face lessons across the curricilum.