Innovation Profile 030

Choosing learning content needs new skills

To get effective use of learning content one must obviously consider how it will be used for learning by the learner, and how its use will be managed by the teacher. This has become more complex than it was with books.

ICT-based content enables a wider range of interactivity and supports more learning styles, which both need to be understood. For teachers to manage this content, and for learners to self-select it, some insight into the search criteria (meta-data) that can be used is also necessary.

Help is available from the content publishers who design these capabilities into their products. The important thing for teachers and learners is that the learning content works; they do not need to know the fine detail of how this is achieved as long as they can have confidence in the publisher. The question then becomes, what expertise should teachers and learners look for publishers to have?

There is immense change in the world of learning content publication, with convergence happening between book publication, multimedia and television. One of the largest European producers of ICT-based learning content is Granada Learning (http://www.granadalearning.com). Granada operate two research and development studios, working at the forefront of technological development, to continue to enhance their capabilities. You can get an idea of the skills they are bringing to bear on their content development by looking at the awards they have recently won, from the European Multimedia Awards (EMMA), the British Interactive Multimedia Association, the Royal Television Society, the National Educational and Multimedia Network and Educational Computing and Technology. They are also closely involved with the development of assessment for learning, which can now be much more closely integrated with the learning process (see 'Testwise' developments in the 'digital editions' section at http://www.nfer-nelson.co.uk).

Look at their learning management system, Learnwise (http://www.learnwise.net) and you can see that they are also keeping close to the development of international learning content standards, such as IMS and SCORM. Most of us will be content just to know that SCORM stands for 'Sharable Content Object Reference Model' - as long as we can be confident that the selection choices offered to us and our students are based on deep understanding by the content producer and careful meta-data tagging of their content.

As education and learning move forward in using more ICT and e-learning, the partnership between educators and content producers must become very much deeper than was necessary in a learning world based on books. It must also be a full two-way partnership. Educators need to help content producers understand how pedagogy and learning theory are developing in response to ICT, in order to properly benefit from the capabilities the content producers are working so hard to build.

The Granada Learning Group Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company.

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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

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