Greetings dear hearts.

Regarding Learnwise, like our colleagues at Tamworth College, here at
Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College we are part of the Staffordshire Learnwise
group and have the beast installed on our system.

At the moment - it was installed over the summer, and I took post at the
beginning of this term - I am getting used to it myself and preparing the
underlying structure and templates ready to begin training staff on it after
half term.

I would be happy to share ideas and materials with other Learnwise users.

One thing I am particularly concerned with is ensuring that it does not
become too narrow and constraining. While the 'student tracking' facilities
of a VLE have many advantages, it is easy to fall into the trap of only
giving them access to their own course. Often - and it is something not
always visible to individual tutors, it needs the overarching view that a
webmaster or system manager can take - there are useful materials in other
courses that are relevant to what the student is studying. For example, if a
Business Studies tutor creates an excellent resource on how to write a
report, it can be relevant to students of many disciplines and it would be a
shame if only people taking Business courses were able to read it.

As far as I can tell so far, part of the key to this is making the
individual 'chunks' quite small - so, for example, this resource on how to
write a report is stand-alone although part of the wider sweep of material
on, say, management systems. Then any tutor who thought it useful for his
students to know how to write a report can recommend it... although ideally
I'd like for the students themselves to be able to search around the VLE for
additional material that they feel would be useful to them. Or even just of
interest... the true student will want to find out about all manner of
things, and this is the mindset we'd like to engender in our learners, after
all.

How do other people intend to ensure that the 'openness' of a more
conventional web-style Intranet is maintained while taking advantage of the
many possibilities and potentials opened up by using VLE-style content and
student management systems?

Hugs and kisses,

Megan Robertson.
ILT Champion, Stoke on Trent Sixth Form College.

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