Excellence Gateway
Published: 01 March 2010
This case study was produced by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centres) London on behalf of the Excellence Gateway.
Sector relevance: Further education and Sixth Form colleges
Keywords: Improving teaching and learning, improving responsiveness, improving institutional effectiveness, e-learning, creating and adapting e-learning materials, motivating learners, practical work, curriculum good practice, giving feedback to learners, curriculum development, capital project planning and management, preparation for inspection events, managing change (leadership), management staff development, project management, internal verification (quality improvement), monitoring quality improvements, managed learning environment, management of ICT infrastructure, staff development, service level agreement (subcontractors), preparation for life and work
Three years ago in November 2006, John Ruskin College made use of the ILT/e-Learning Health Check Service offered by the JISC Regional Support Centre in London. This helped the senior management team in the College to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their use of ILT to manage, deliver and support learning. This case study traces the College's immediate response to the key findings and recommendations of that first ILT health check and subsequent progress since it was completed.
John Ruskin College is a ‘Skills for Life' college that specialises in vocational courses for 16–19-year-olds. It is the only Sixth Form college in the country that specialises solely in these courses.
The College offers respected and renowned industry-standard qualifications that combine theory and practice, and are delivered by teachers who have industrial and business experience. A key feature of the vocational courses is that all students go out on work-related visits and work experience that is directly relevant to their course.
Looking back to 2004-5, Louis Strover, Director of Learning, Innovation and Capacity to Improve, recalls:
“We were investing peoples' time in ILT – we had ILT champions – and we were spending money, but we were not seeing the impact coming through to the classroom.”
Louis found himself sitting at meetings trying to promote ILT to other staff members, whilst acknowledging the deficiencies of the network infrastructure and knowing that the requests coming in from staff could not always be met. Staff would say, “I've seen this in another college. Surely we could…” and “What about a VLE and access from home?” While Louis was aware that the College lacked the capacity to provide these things, teachers and managers were not happy with the IT service they were getting; there was no agreed service level and they were becoming increasingly frustrated.
“The thing about the ICT Health Check in December 2006 was that somebody else came in. It allowed us to stand back and reflect on where we were with the help of an external perspective.” Louis Strover, Director of Learning, Innovation and Capacity to Improve
“The thing about the ICT Health Check in December 2006 was that somebody else came in. It allowed us to stand back and reflect on where we were with the help of an external perspective.”
Louis Strover, Director of Learning, Innovation and Capacity to Improve
Some staff at the College reacted to the findings of their health check with shock. All the things the College had put in place seemed to have made little impact:
“The staff focus group was probably the biggest stimulus; they were pointing out a list of frustrations and barriers and we had to listen to what they were saying. It was hard to take at the time, but it helped us to recognise that the network couldn't cope, we hadn't got the skills, we hadn't got the staff and these were all barriers to us moving forward with ILT.” Louis Strover, Director of Learning, Innovation and Capacity to Improve
“The staff focus group was probably the biggest stimulus; they were pointing out a list of frustrations and barriers and we had to listen to what they were saying. It was hard to take at the time, but it helped us to recognise that the network couldn't cope, we hadn't got the skills, we hadn't got the staff and these were all barriers to us moving forward with ILT.”
The whole management team realised that something had to be done, and within six months of receiving the Health Check report a contract was approved by the College's governors for the implementation of an outsourced network infrastructure and IT services.
A consultant was also appointed to help guide the College through the contracting process. As well as providing expertise and objective advice on what to look for from the contract, he also helped negotiate some added value, for example, student work-related visits to RM as part of the agreement.
The contract represented a major capital investment including re-cabling throughout the college, new servers and wireless connectivity. In addition, a new rolling program improved the replacement cycle of PCs to three years, helping to raise the standard of equipment available to students and achieving a ratio of one PC for every two students.
RM was also contracted to provide a comprehensive service on site. This entailed three technical staff members working full-time in the College, plus an account manager for two days a week. The account manager also worked at neighbouring Orpington College, which led to additional benefits as both colleges use the same management information system (MIS).
The new service agreement encompassed existing college systems, including the MIS (Columbus) and eRegistration (EAMS), and introduced new tools such as RM Tutor, which enables teaching staff to manage desktops in the classroom.
This was not a totally painless journey for John Ruskin. There were difficult staffing decisions involving redundancies and initial teething problems with the new infrastructure. The contract signed with RM in June 2007 represented a considerable investment by the College, and some members of staff were initially sceptical about the decision to outsource. However, by the end of the second term there were obvious improvements in the IT service and signs that people were being won over to the new arrangements.
Positive staff feedback reported improved levels of service, with issues sorted out promptly and also more proactive support for staff and learners in using the technology.
The vice principal at John Ruskin had day-to-day management of the contract, receiving weekly service reports that detailed service calls and any outstanding issues.
Louis Strover highlights the fact that the contracted staff also attend the ILT Strategy Group and have a remit that extends to delivering the ILT Service to enhance teaching and learning at the College through:
The new partnership arrangement has helped to develop the ILT and teaching and learning strategies by bringing new ideas to the strategy groups for the College directors to consider.
Students' reaction was also positive, as they gained access to their college email, virtual learning environment (VLE) and e-Tracker (electronic individual learning plan) from home with all their systems linked from the College website. Hits to the VLE rose from 4,500 during September 2007 at the start of the new contract to just under 92,000 for March 2009. Active users across both staff and students increased for the same periods by 540% and 660% respectively.
Louis stresses the benefit to the College of the ILT Health Check:
“We were too close; we needed an objective view, the external voice to give the hard hitting messages. It made us listen to the staff and the barriers they faced. If we had done this exercise ourselves we would have justified our observations, found reasons not to hear.” Louis Strover, Director of Learning, Innovation and Capacity to Improve
“We were too close; we needed an objective view, the external voice to give the hard hitting messages. It made us listen to the staff and the barriers they faced. If we had done this exercise ourselves we would have justified our observations, found reasons not to hear.”
Louis expects to run another Health Check in a year or so. Things are going well but he acknowledges there is still a lot to do. In spite of a massive uptake of available technologies, not all teachers are yet engaged with ILT, nor are all of the students.
In the meantime, the College is using its internal observation of subject areas to audit the use of ILT, and has used an Ofsted consultant to help to validate the process by speaking directly to staff and learners.
The Humanities curriculum team was one of the first to benefit from such an audit when low engagement with ILT in these subjects led to a follow-up ILT project. Key members of staff keen to develop their practice in the use of the VLE, e-Tracker, etc, receive a financial incentive to cascade their skills to colleagues.
Students taking sports subjects responded with enthusiasm to submitting their work and receiving feedback online, and media students to uploading their video files for assessment. The benefit of their proactive technical partner was felt here too, with RM staff able to respond quickly to fix minor technical barriers, such as maximum file sizes or opening access to social media sites for a specific lesson.
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