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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.
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Organisation: Cornwall Adult Education ServiceType of FE provider: Adult Education ServiceFocus on: Technology
BackgroundCornwall Adult Education Service is a community basedorganisation which currently makes use of over 300venues across the county. Martin Thomson, head ofinformation and learning technology (ILT), is currentlybased in their Falmouth office. The service operatesout of six main adult education centres with twoperipheral centres. Last year there were around 20,000enrolments. The service has a SfL brand, ‘Link intoLearning’ and works out of around 30 town centreshops. There is also a vibrant family learning side to theservice which is a keen user of ILT. Around 60 full-timestaff and 300 part-time tutors work for the service.
After moving to Cornwall, Martin became deputymanager of Cornwall’s Information Technology Centre(ITEC) before moving to the college to teach IT tocatering students, eventually becoming the head ofstudies. He was then given the central role ofintroducing e-business/ILT into the college beforemoving into the adult education service as head of ILTin September 2004.
Use of technologyThe vast majority of the service’s courses are delivered byface to face teaching but Moodle (Moodle is a free andopen source web based e-learning software platform) isused to support learning and add value. For the first timethis year a decision was made to put every course onMoodle. This means that some 3,000+ courses areavailable on the Moodle site. Not all courses are currentlyactive but every learner has access to the site where thereare a number of learner facing resources made available.
The service also uses a staff facing Moodle for informationdissemination and collaboration.
When Martin commenced his position as head of ILT,the organisation had already committed itself toundertaking the e-guides training programme. Hequestioned why assistant principals and curriculummanagers were going on the e-guides training, ratherthan sending just IT enthusiasts, but subsequentlyfound that working together as a collective, thesemanagers were in a position to be able to embed ILTinto their practice and meetings.
Martin, along with two other colleagues, form the ILT support team who do most of the staffdevelopment training. The team also offers openaccess 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 basisacross the county for training and for ICT classroomsupport.
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Technology is being used across the team for trainingthe service’s tutors. There are tutors using just aboutevery device and software on the ILT continuum:
“I’m always surprised at the amount of ILT that is goingon in our centres on any one day, at any one time. We all take it for granted, but you look at somebody usingPowerPoint in a classroom and you have to pinchyourself to remind yourself that this is ILT too. It’swonderful, really, really super.”
As well as having a number of trained e-guides within theorganisation, Martin and his Moodle administrator havevolunteered for e-CPD training and have just completedtheir action plan. Subject learning coaches are in placeacross all curriculum areas, some of whom arecurriculum managers who also happen to be e-guides.
Assistive technology is available, for example accessiblekeyboards and screen readers. The service has aproactive support infrastructure and this ensures thatany assistive technology, together with ILT equipment,is all made available.
Impact/key lessonsThere has been a year on year improvement in thenumber of hits on Moodle and the service has justrecently seen its millionth hit (the learner who made thishit received a special prize at a presentation).
The service runs one or two training events a monthwith between 10 to 18 people attending each event.Martin estimates that a majority of their 300 part-timetutors use some form of technology in their teaching.However, there are still some tutors who don’t wish toengage with technology:
“At the moment we have some areas where staff don’twant to engage and we are trying desperately hard toengage them just to the point where they can make asensible decision about how they should employ ILT or not. We would like our staff to agree to come andlisten and if they don’t want to use the technology,then don’t use it, but at least they are making thatdecision from a position of strength.”
Often Martin and his e-guides team will get an invite to do a training course embedded into a curriculummeeting. For example, they have been invited later thismonth to a modern foreign languages team curriculummeeting and have a slot for an hour and a half during the day.
One of the questions in observations of teaching andlearning is about tutors’ use of resources including ILT.Curriculum managers are picking up where there areproblems in observations, for example if no appropriateILT is being used, they will then refer the tutors to theILT support team.
Technology is having an impact on the service’slearners as well as its tutors, although Martin feels thatit is not always easy to measure the precise impact onretention, achievement, and success. However hewent on to say:
“In modern foreign languages we have enoughevidence to suggest that there is better retention andachievement from courses that not only use IT, butalso use it as a learning platform.”
At the moment, the service’s learner evaluation formsdon’t include a question about the use of ILT butinformal e-mail comments are being collected bytutors from learners about the resources that they use.
So far, there has been no feedback on the organisation’suse of technology from Ofsted. The last inspection wasfour years ago. However, the service has recently beenworking with the Isles of Scilly where it is using Skype todeliver Spanish lessons over on the island on Mondayevenings. The pilot that Cornwall ran coincided with theislands’ own Ofsted inspection where the inspectorswere very positive in their report about the learningopportunity being offered.
Future plansFuture technological developments within the servicewill very much depend on funding. The service iscurrently in the process of buying some Nintendo Wiigame consoles for family learning with some of thefunding from its latest trained e-guide. Plans are alsoafoot 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 thantraining them. They will use wikis and blogs to feedback on the process.
The service is currently trialling 50 ASUS handheldmachines with 50 tutors but Martin feels that at theend of the day, the service needs to consolidate thetechnology 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 notsimply to indulge in our IT dreams!”
RW09/09/CS013
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