« Sloan-C Wiki - examples of student-generated content, including one from the University of Reading. | Main | John Lanchester writes on global warming in the London Review of Books »

Comments

I expect that data is available Seb, I'd be interested to see it myself. I don't think it would be particularly useful in the context of assessing Jam as a service though, mainly because it isn't a complete service yet, and of course now never will be.

I used to work at Jam. I left there for another part of the corporation about 6 months ago. I worked on the Maths 5-7 and Financial Capability 14-16 commissions, and one other on Statistics that (like so many others) has been on the shelf for 6 months and now will not go live.

For every subject you see live now, there are two more sat on the shelf that have been held up by the EC review. Jam had a soft launch last January, and a slightly more pushed launch in October. It's not been hardly sold to learners yet, mainly because it's not all there. The 170k users subscribed are the early adopters, out of a market of millions more that might have registered had the subjects that interested them been allowed to be published.

Finally on this, your implication that the extent to which teachers are using the material in classrooms will be a good measure of success, is misguided. BBC Jam was a learning resource not a teaching resource - all the material has been designed for the independent learner, wherever they maybe. It's success was not predicated on teachers using it in formal teaching, nor were they expected to be the gatekeepers to the content. Of course, teachers and consultants were involved throughout the design process (as well as kids and parents) to ensure the propriety of the content for learning, but its use in classrooms was always considered secondary.

[Thanks for this comment, Sam. I take your point about use by teachers being secondary, though I do believe that if teachers have been integrating Jam material into schemes of work, encouraging learners to use Jam etc, this is worth knowing. I also noted, and others will be interested to read, your informative response to Donald Clark's largely negative review of the existing materials. Seb - 18/3/2007]

The comments to this entry are closed.