I needed a change. After twenty years in a Further Education college I thought it was about time to try something new, come out from under the stifling blanket of institutional life. I am fascinated by the potential of online distance learning, but I watched with despair how colleges and universities were shedding their general interest courses in favour of training for the job market, and how adult learners were becoming sidelined. In Scotland, the number of distance learners in FE dropped from over 27,000 in 2001 to under 13,000 in 2007. In a recent response to a consultation paper to the DFeS NIACE claim: “1.4 million places in publicly-supported adult learning in England have been lost over the last two years.” I thought it was time to stop talking and start doing.
Luckily, my friend and colleague Arthur Chapman, who also spent twenty years in the same college, agreed. After careful planning we built the model that is now the New Curiosity Shop Online College.
It’s growing slowly, but from scratch (wonderful stuff, scratch) we now have a catalogue of 24 fully online distance learning courses, each one written and supported by a tutor. Take a look at our web site - links below - to see the range of subjects we currently offer.
We were clear in our aims. We wanted to develop courses aimed at adults, to encourage learning for the sake of learning, and, yes, encourage our students on to courses at college and university. We wanted our courses to be written for the online medium and so we developed a system for working with course writers and tutors to help create online courses that would be attractive and easy to use, a process made a lot less painful thanks to the VLE Moodle, which we discovered very early on in our story.
And it’s our long experience of Moodle that has led us to develop two fully online courses aimed at educators: Making the Most of Moodle I and II. This has brought us into contact with numerous colleges and universities where Moodle is becoming the VLE of choice. So far, over 150 lecturers and teachers have joined us online to discover the delights of Moodle.
How successful are we? By our very nature that is a difficult question to answer. We have plenty of room for more students - including jaded university and college lecturers who fancy a fresh look at a new subject. But our overheads are minimal, and our tutor model is based on partnership, not on salary. (And yes, we are making ends meet.) The main problem we face is that our marketing budget is tiny compared to the vast sums spent by traditional educational institutes. This is also an area in which we lack in-house expertise.
How good are we? We don’t offer accreditation, we are an ‘informal’ learning provider, and we are also still at the early stages of this model. However, in our evaluation we ask: “Would you recommend the New Curiosity Shop to a friend?”, and so far 96% have answered “yes.” And our favourite response? It has to be: “The best thing about this course is that it was FUN!”
Websites:
The New Curiosity Shop: http://www.newcurioshop.com
NIACE: http://www.niace.org.uk/
Scottish Funding Council: http://www.sfc.ac.uk
Noel Chidwick,
Partner
The New Curiosity Shop.
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