2.45pm Thursday

Barrier Reef Institute of TAFE - The Netlearn community

Seven campuses each with a range of offerings - staff needed to work together to be able to broaden range of learning options on each site.

Netlearn is a learning community where the needs of the learners are at the forefront of practice and supported by distributed delivery strategies - had to be a whole staff approach - after 18 months have 27% of staff involved including admin staff.
"We want to make lots of mistakes so we can learn lots of different things"

John Bell
Netlearn enabler group - was established to keep Netlearn community on track - change management group and visioning as well as solving operational issues
Gravity and drag are powerful forces - needed to make sure plan could be understood - broken up in different pieces.
Had to be highly visible - large number of people involved in multiple projects, encouraged staff to take risks - Cremate, Embalm or Enshrine the outcomes.
LMS is an open source solution - iLearn.

Julie Woodlock FLL 2003
Facilitation - to ease a process but which process? Action learning supports a risk taking atmosphere.
Netlearn would appear to be a whole of organisation approach - 2 or 3 facilitators on the project team are mainly focussed on the technology skills.

Kerry Russo - a participant in the Netlearn project
Extensive consultation with industry and clients f2f as they were planning to gain acceptance - employed a local tutor in the regional areas, had coordinators in each area to keep track of the admin processes.

Use video conference, tutorials, chat and discussion, chat used as a social gathering tool, home study using learning guides, using video streaming - students use as a review tool or if can’t attend, also have phone and email contact also, industry placement for people who are not employed yet.

Find that for videoconferencing need to be fun loud energising, in your face presenters, and try to limit talking heads to 10 mins.
Did not work for students on Palm Island - did not meet their (cultural?) needs,
Also needed to participate in VC, rather than treating it as watching TV
Why does it work? Captured imaginations, responded to student needs and suggestions - never had so much feedback before.

Debbie Abbott
Literacy in Yr10
Created an online module - previously offered via f2f and home study and phone support
Teachers learning new skills was the biggest part of our process, also had to work out of normal hours. Learnt we could work independently, learnt to trust each other and resourcefulness, also had to adapt to LMS,
Screens - left hand contents list organised in a file management look-alike, then content in body of screen 2/3 width