“Many hands make light work,” the saying goes. While technology has increasingly helped us to make work lighter, it is teamwork with like-minded individuals that will make this lighter still.

With that in mind, and with the ever-increasing influence of technology on our daily lives, Heart of Worcestershire (HoW) College set out to create a blended learning consortium; pooling resources with fellow colleges in order to continually deliver high-quality online provision for our learners.

As winner of the “outstanding use of technology” category at the TES FE Awards last year, the college has externally-recognised expertise in this area.

We are now in the fifth year of delivering a cross-college blended learning curriculum (combining face-to-face and online learning), and have found that fully embracing online components in courses brings great benefits for students and colleges.

One of the main challenges that we have encountered over the past four years has been sourcing good quality learning resources that have specifically been developed for the further education curriculum and learners. Online learning, if crafted correctly, can play a vital role in students’ learning experiences. By giving students the opportunity to learn online, we are giving them the freedom to take control of their own studying, fitting their education around work, home and family life.

Workplace skills

Through the blended learning model, students have continued to improve upon their existing independent learning and research abilities, inevitably helping to tone and shape their employability skills. Colleges, in turn, benefit through being able to maintain a wide range of provision in the challenging funding climate that the sector faces.

So why form a blended learning consortium? The answer is simple: many hands really do make light work. Our own experience, from working on a number of partnership-based projects, is that the most effective way to set up such a scheme is through a co-development process where costs and expertise are shared across partnerships.

In order to facilitate this process, HoW College set up and continues to lead the Blended Learning Consortium.

So far, more than 40 colleges have joined forces (see map below), pooling expertise and resources from Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales, working side by side in order to further advance blended learning. This is believed to be the largest consortium of its kind in the sector.

Peter Kilcoyne is information and learning technoogy director at Heart of Worcestershire College
@peterkilcoyne

This is an edited article from the 26 February edition of TES. Subscribers can read the full article here. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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