Excellence Gateway
This case study was produced by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centres) West Midlands on behalf of the Excellence Gateway
Sector relevance: Further education and Sixth Form colleges
Keywords: Improving responsiveness to learners, improving teaching and learning, 14-19, ILT services, learning centres and library services, curriculum good practice, planning and resources, reviewing learners' progress
Sandwell College has purchased Metamorphosis - e-learning authoring software that converts Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents into more interactive learning objects through features such as images, quizzes and closed exercises.
It has around 6,000 students with three campuses in Smethwick, Oldbury and West Bromwich. Catering predominantly for ages 16-18, Sandwell College also provides courses for students aged over 19.
A new campus is planned for West Bromwich. The aim is to create a state-of-the art facility with satellite provision by 2011.
The ILT team wanted to encourage teaching staff to populate the college VLE with teaching materials in a format other than Microsoft Word. This meant converting existing Word documents into a more user-friendly, interactive format. The solution needed to be easy to use and help the teaching staff by saving them valuable time.
From the learners' perspective, they are generally resistant to reading large blocks of text. Sandwell is a deprived area with one of the lowest achievement rates in the UK. Many students fall below the Government target of having 5 GCSEs at grades A-C, so there is a real need to make materials more accessible.
Anne Hughes, Head of ILT and Learning Resources discovered Metamorphosis - a piece of software which automatically creates interactive learning objects for courses or lessons. Metamorphosis converts existing Microsoft Word or PowerPoint documents, and generates learning activities such as multiple-choice quizzes, and word matching and missing word exercises. It also includes an extensive, built-in image library, which matches text from a Word or PowerPoint document to appropriate images.
Impressed with the capabilities of Metamorphosis, the ILT team purchased 10 licenses during the Summer term in 2008.
Metamorphosis is very intuitive, easy to use and does not require any technical programming skills.
There are four simple steps to create a learning object:
The flexibility of Metamorphosis means that it could be used for a broad range of courses or subjects. There is a part identification exercise where the student must click on the appropriate part of an image to identify it correctly, for example, the carburettor of a car engine. With all of the learning activities, the teacher can specify if they want to reveal the correct answer to the students, or display a ‘that's not the correct answer' message and ask the student to repeat the exercise to re-enforce learning.
Despite the automated process, Metamorphosis still allows you to replace images, edit text, change background colours, add borders to images, change fonts and even add a logo.
You can also add course codes, descriptors, create metatags and set pass marks. The learning object can be created as a standalone item or you can ask the students to login as part of an ongoing assessment.
Additional features of Metamorphosis include:
Initial feedback from the ILT team has been very positive. At the time of writing this case study, the team had trained all of the ILT and learning resources staff, and had begun demonstrating the software to programme managers and members of the senior management team.
Anne says:
"We hope that eventually, all the teaching staff will use it. We are starting with those who use the VLE, ILT champions and advanced practitioners - basically early adopters of new technologies. The idea is to make staff understand that Metamorphosis can save them a lot of time and introduce a more engaging way of teaching and learning. We are planning to run Metamorphosis workshops as part of our ILT staff development sessions."
The only drawback so far has been the cost, although this is reduced significantly when more licenses are purchased.
She adds:
"The support from Apixel, the manufacturers of Metamorphosis, has been fantastic. There is a very comprehensive training course to accompany the software but, as it is very intuitive, we have found a lot out for ourselves just by using it. We had an initial demonstration and have since been offered further training - we haven't needed it, which I think is testament to how easy the software is to use."
TIP: Have you rated how useful this case study is? Use the star-rating facility, which features in the grey bar that runs across the top of every page of this site. (To rate a case study, or any page in the Excellence Gateway, you need to log in to the site first.)
Disclaimer: The Regional Support Centres (RSC) and the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) support the development of educational e-learning. We may refer to specific products, processes or services. Such references are examples and are not endorsements or recommendations and should not be used for product endorsement purposes.
Source: Learning and Skills Improvement Service
You can find this page and download any referenced resources from the Excellence Gateway at http://excellence.org.uk/196672.
