Excellence Gateway
Published: 20 October 2008
Hairdressing Training is an online learning package designed to support teaching of hairdressing and barbering across various awards including NVQ, SVQ, Diplomas and Apprenticeships. This resource has proved to be very popular with teachers and students at colleges in the UK.
As a result, in August 2007, the Learning and Skills Council provided funding to enable JISC Collections to make Hairdressing Training freely available to all UK Further Education institutions through Mimas, the JISC national data centre, which is based at the University of Manchester.
Mobile learning and the use of handheld devices is an affordable and portable way of enabling learning materials to be used wherever and whenever learning takes place for example, classrooms, community venues and other teaching environments with limited access to computers.
Hairdressing Training for Mobiles launched in February 2008, making it the first ever freely available mobile educational service. The pioneering work of Stuart Smith, the Hairdressing Training for Mobiles Project Lead, has been rewarded by the resource winning the esteemed ‘Tertiary, FE, HE and Adult Innovation Award' at the Handheld Learning 2008 Conference on October 13th. This service enables users to access the resource on mobile phones, as well as a range of other handheld devices such as handheld game consoles, portable media players and PDAs.
The winner was selected on the basis of the number of public votes received.
Stuart Smith along with Dr Jackie Carter (Service Manager) at Mimas, JISC Collections colleagues, Jo Jordan, Glen Burr and Simon Sanders; the original creators of Hairdressing Training were thrilled to receive this prestigious award. The service can now focus attention on encouraging teaching staff and students to use mobile learning to raise students' skills and attainment levels.
Hairdressing for Mobiles is already an integral part of the ‘Learning on the go (LoG) Mobile Learning Project', the result of collaboration between Stockport College, Trafford College and Mimas. The project aims to roll-out mobile learning to 455 learners in vocational learning programmes, increase participation and achievement by young people and attract non-traditional learners and those not in education, employment or training.
Stuart Smith reflects on the success of the resource; “Delivery on mobile devices enables students to access this invaluable and highly practical resource, without a computer, at any time and any place; whether they are working in the classroom, the salon, or at home. It's exciting that with our involvement with the MoLeNET Projects, we have an excellent opportunity to positively engage all groups of learners in this important vocational area.”
Dr Jackie Carter, Service Manager at the University of Manchester - says "This is an example of innovation in elearning at its best. We are exited about extending lessons learned from delivery of this service to other area of education and would welcome interest from others who are engaged in delivering learning via mobile devices."
JISC Collections was established as a mutual trading company by the UK further and higher education funding councils in 2006 to negotiate with publishers of online information and other owners of digital content. The range of resources licensed for use by such agreements constitutes a large national collection of online resources for education and research. JISC Collections is funded by JISC. For further information, please go to the JISC Collections website.
Mimas hosts and supports Hairdressing Training on behalf of JISC Collections. It is a national data centre based at The University of Manchester and supported by JISC and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Mimas provides the UK further, higher education and research community with networked access to key data and information resources to support teaching, learning and research across a wide range of disciplines. For further information, please go to the Mimas website.
Jo Jordan and Glen Burr are managing directors of a top London salon and the creators of Hairdressing Training, who together, have over 50 years of management experience in the UK hairdressing industry. They travelled to various colleges to research which particular education and training provisions would best appeal to hairdressing students. Simon Sanders is an award winning web developer who specialises in developing web sites for the public sector.
You can find this page and download any referenced resources from the Excellence Gateway at http://excellence.org.uk/166751.
