Excellence Gateway
This case study was produced by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centres) South East on behalf of the Excellence Gateway.
Sector relevance: Further education and Sixth Form colleges
Keywords: Languages, Literature and Culture; ESOL, outreach, blended e-learning improving teaching and learning, improving responsiveness to learners
Despite roaming like nomads from location to location loaded with sundry IT equipment, the outreach ESOL provision at Amersham & Wycombe College has been providing high-quality teaching of English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) for many years. However, the barriers to any coherent development of e-learning were considerable. That was until the outreach classes found a new home in a purpose built ESOL Centre equipped with two well appointed IT suites, interactive whiteboards and the Blackboard learning platform.
In just over a year, the outreach ESOL Centre has developed some of the best examples of blended e-learning in this sector and found great success by integrating IT skills courses within the ESOL programme.
Amersham and Wycombe College provides education and training to over 2000 full-time and 5000 part-time students each year. The College has achieved much success in recent years including: the Beacon Award for ESOL; Investors in People; and Centre of Vocational Excellence status for Construction & Building Services, Digital Arts, Design and Media, and ICT Applications. As a result, the College now runs courses on three main campuses in Amersham, Chesham and High Wycombe, as well as its Cressex Training Centre and ESOL Centre, both in High Wycombe.
The ESOL Department at Amersham and Wycombe College has grown significantly, catering for some 1000 students covering a broad spectrum of English language courses including: Pre Entry Level; Entry Levels 1, 2 and 3; and Level 1 and 2. Ninety per cent of the students are part-time with full-time courses delivered in class sizes of 12.
The outreach ESOL Centre in the middle of High Wycombe delivers ESOL courses to 250 part-time and all the College’s 100 full-time ESOL students. Many of these foreign students are from impoverished rural backgrounds with little or no formal education beyond primary level.
The outreach satellite facility helps to meet the needs of those students who - for cultural, financial and practical reasons - find it difficult to attend one of the main College campuses.
The ESOL department has always provided high-quality education, as clearly recognised by the College’s Beacon Award for ESOL. However, the outreach provision has had to overcome much adversity in previous years until it moved into its present well equipped centre in High Wycombe.
ESOL Lecturer Stephani Pistorius recalls, “Before being refurbished with two new IT suites, delivery was patchy to say the least. We struggled with unreliable laptops for only half the students at best and frequently had to carry equipment such as printers from location to location.”
The combination of high-quality IT facilities and the e-learning expertise and enthusiasm of Stephani has allowed the department to integrate IT skills courses within the ESOL programme. The outreach office has been delivering CLAIT Level 1 courses with ESOL students for five years. This has now been developed and broadened to include a much wider range of IT core skills courses. In the process, Stephani has established some of the best e-learning practice being applied to the delivery of ESOL.
Head of Department Usha Sidhu observes, “ESOL is a basic skill, so it makes complete sense to incorporate numeracy and IT skills within our courses.” The department now combines the new OCR Skills for Life ICT qualification at Entry Levels 1, 2 and 3 with the corresponding ESOL Entry Level courses.”
Before the arrival of the IT suites, the outreach ESOL provision had to contend with a variety of problems that hindered the effectiveness of both teaching and learning. These included:
With the new combination of fully equipped IT suites, interactive whiteboards and full use of the College Blackboard virtual learning environment (VLE), typical ESOL lessons at Amersham & Wycombe have a completely different look and feel. Students now log onto the VLE and use Blackboard to work through the following lesson structure:
Assignments are set via the Blackboard and, when finished, are uploaded into the tutor’s Grade Book where they can be marked. Once a mark is entered, it is automatically sent to the student and integrated into the totals within the tutor’s Grade Book. Most written assignments submitted by the students are Word documents. By using Word’s Tracking Changes facility, students not only receive a mark but can also see the corrections made, allowing them to understand where they have gone wrong.
The Discussion Boards use an external wiki as this facility is an optional extra on the Blackboard VLE. Tutors use these to host discussions amongst the students which can then be moderated, providing almost instant feedback.
Each student has one page on the wiki, which also includes collaborative pages such as internal social bookmarking for useful dictionaries etc and for project planning (such as a trip to Warwick Castle).
How do the students get on with this new e-learning technology? Apart from a bit of help to familiarise learners with the VLE and facilities like Tracking Changes in Word, Stephani observes that the classes “just get on and use the tools available with no real fuss”. She adds: “Inevitably, there are different abilities within each class. A Polish graduate might be sitting next to a Pakistani student with no formal secondary education. The students now demand more – they expect additional facilities to be available to them at home – allowing them to work at their own pace. Now we can provide this.”
As to future developments, the Department is looking to develop its own language laboratory on the VLE using Audacity. “This is the one important facility that we do not have,” explains Stephani. “This will become our ‘virtual language lab’ and, as it will hosted on Blackboard, all students will have unlimited access to it.”
Stephani summarises: “Since the arrival of the two dedicated IT suites and the full use that staff are making of the VLE and interactive whiteboard, the students are clearly enjoying themselves, they are able to learn at their own pace, the curriculum has become significantly enhanced and the results are beginning to speak for themselves.”
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