We need to stay out of our silos

Every Friday night for the past two decades I have gone out with the same group of mates who have often delighted at pouring scorn on e-learning and e-portfolios. This week was different one of them has just joined Doosan, a South Korean company and he confessed to be enjoying his e-learning course that was inducting him into the history of the company and also showing him how to interact Koreans. Quite important given they are now his boss. He was not just enjoying it he could see its validity.


Early on in the week I was with the Group Director for E- learning for a large college and he was describing how e-learning was having a transformational effect in his organisation. As a result he was being enabled to harness expertise from a number of sources, including the private sector to create a full range of learning opportunities. Incrementally his team have been able to encourage each Department, to see the benefits of e-learning and they are now transforming the way that learning is delivered and tracked.

What had been clearly critical to this success was that e-learning was not seen as a separate activity from the development of the technical capacity and resources of the College, all this activity is being co-ordinated from one place, by someone who had the vision to see the links and with support from the executive to bring all the links together.

In one sense that is an obvious development but if you were to go around any learning institution in this country and track e-learning projects you are likely to find lots of ‘pet projects’ happening; a number of different e-learning products procured to do the same thing and little evidence of a positive benefit on the whole institution. You might also find that these initiatives were taking place with at best minimal support and at worst outright opposition, from those responsible for technology in the institution.

As someone going in from the outside into these institutions, the one person I am least happy to see at any demonstration is the representative from the IT department. As one of ‘their number’ was clearly pleased to remark recently ‘these e-portfolios were meant to be the big new thing 10 years ago and they have not gone anywhere’ It them became clear that any notion of the transformational effect of technology on learning was clearly not on his agenda.

Just over a decade ago I was manager of the East Leeds Family Learning Centre which was the venue for one of the first job guarantee programmes with Tesco. This was where unemployed people were offered a job, on the basis of their potential to be a good employee and provided they completed a training programme. The success of the programme was lauded because it got lots of unemployed people back into work. That was the end objective and it was spectacularly delivered.

However it was the easy and natural access into other services that ‘seamlessly’ delivered the result. What made the difference, was that a number of the successfully applicants, motivated by the guarantee of getting a job were able to quietly access the centre’s literacy and numeracy programmes, so that they were able to address the key issue that had stopped them making progress before. The ability to read and write. What mattered was that when the store opening was delayed, so that it opened after the summer holidays, we were able to harness the work of the Council’s Early Years’ service to create over 60 child care places. A process helped by the fact they were already in the building. It was the full integration of service delivery that made the difference.

E-learning and e-assessment will only be successfully delivered when it becomes a fully integrated part of curriculum delivery not something that is an occasionally added on and made available. The full extent of what it can offer will only be realised, when it is seen as more than just making learning environments electronic but where there is a recognition that it can transform the way that those learning environments are structured and delivered.

One would have hoped that the organisation like JISC that have asked to make this transformation would have done so by now, but for all the reasons described in this blog this is never likely to be the case. Like most things it is probably down to individual centres to pick up the e-learning ball and run with it in the hope that organisation like JISC might eventually catch up and others might look outside their silos.