JISC

Audience Senior Managers and staff with responsibility for widening participation, access schemes, partnership management, and student support

Session Chair Sarah Davies, Programme Manager, JISC

Presenters

• Gill Ferrell, Director, JISC infoNet
• Bill Pollard, Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College
• Bill Leivers, Loughborough College
• Mark Stiles, Head of Learning Development and Innovation

Objectives of the session

This session will highlight some of the ways in which e-learning and joined-up systems can facilitate widening participation and support lifelong learners. 

Institutions face many challenges in making education accessible to key groups of lifelong learners, such as work-based learners, part-time learners. These challenges include helping learners find out about and apply for learning opportunities, and developing and implementing appropriate support, delivery modes and policies. This session considers the ways in which a wide range of institutions, and cross institutional partnerships, have used technology to support lifelong learners - from reducing administrative hurdles to supporting personal and professional devlopment. 

The symposium will draw on the experience of the JISC MLEs for Lifelong Learning programme,  JISC Distributed e-Learning regional pilot projects, the HEFCE-funded lifelong learning networks, and the participants in the HEFCE-funded CAMEL project, which demonstrated what institutions can learn from each other (and from a group of Uruguayan farmers.)

Presentations will highlight issues including the:

• use of a range of technologies to help learners of all ages develop the skills for reflective, lifelong and flexible learning
• administrative challenges faced by regional, cross-institutional partnerships aiming to facilitate student progression and widened participation, and some technologies which can help
• ways in which technology can support the design and delivery of work-based learning

Participants will gain an awareness of the ways that a range of technologies can be used to support learners, especially non-traditional learners, in planning progress, transferring between educational contexts, and accessing higher education, and an understanding of the possibility of applying some of these approaches in their own context. 

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