South Essex College: Learner voice – a 360-degree approach

The Excellence Gateway has just published a case study on South Essex College’s use of ILT and students use of communication tools on C_Space, the College's online environment.

Commissioned by JISC the case study is a report on how the College is making effective use of ILT to improve teaching and learning. One of the main findings of the report is that students are using C_Space to find new ways to promote the learner voice.

"The online tools and increased learner voice are making an impact on the whole college, as tutors and senior management can keep abreast of what is going on and what is wanted by reading students' comments."

You can view the report here.

Heads down!

Whew! It's been a busy time, with requests for work coming from everywhere!

The last few weeks have been full on e-portfolio building. It seems the word is spreading and more and more HE tutors are interested in their students using the e-portfolio pages we've developed to support their students' professional development planning.

It's quite a time consuming process to design templates, add resources and documentation and then build individual pages for whole groups of learners...but we're getting there! Thankfully Sharepoint makes life a little easier and is relatively quick to get the basics in place...alas, my organisational skills (or lack of them) make getting all the e-portfolios finished and in place all at the same time to the tutors' satisfaction a logistical nightmare!

So far we've built new e-portfolios for first year Sports Science students, first year Fashion and Marketing students, first year Photography students and added additional pages to the second year Fashion and marketing students exisitng pages. We've also desingned new templates for the Animation Degree students and the Business Degree students which are almost ready to go into production. After this we have interest in e-portfolios from the Televsion Production and the Engineering degree courses...

...ooooppppsss, sorry, got to keep my head down and get back to work!

College Sports

The College Sports site has been fully upgraded on the College's intranet. It now features a full Content Management System, which allows tutors and staff to keep the site up to date.

Summer of Change

This summer sees the start of some major developments at all 3 campuses (Basildon, Thurrock and Southend). As well as an all round tidy up and fresh coat of paint, we've rethought the way we deliver our services in ILT and multimedia. At the forefront of these changes, and the places where they will be most visible, are the libraries.

At each campus we're building a C Space centre, which will be the contact point for all ILT and Multimedia queries, the flagship location for all ILT training, and also a useful help point for IT Helpdesk queries.

This brings ILT team members closer to both teaching staff and students and gives us the opportunity to transform the library into a hub of support for teaching and learning - whether it's through the use of technology, the development of tailored resources, or sharing good practice.

All systems full ahead!!

Got alot on at the moment. Course plan system, av equipment and inventory system, my_skills training system, and rolling out a comprehensive range of training from bitesized to advanced levels for pretty much all staff.All of it is top priority, urgent and will result in widescale change. Difficult, challenging, interesting and stressful times !!

Increase in the number of users of online services

South Essex College now has up to 20,000 students and up to 2,000 members of staff. The represents a large increase in the number of users who can now access the College's online environment.

Usage stats don't normally mean a great deal but it's interesting to note that since 28 January of this year the student homepage of the College's intranet (C_Space) has been accessed 1066054 times.

In order to ensure that teaching staff are familiar with C_Space we will be running training sessions each week on C_Space resources and services.

Technology Exemplar Network News

The Technology Exemplar Network has just published its first newsletter.

As part of our contribution to the Network, South Essex College will be working with students to promote the use of technology in teaching and learning.

During the past couple of years students have had a major impact on the way the College uses web-based services in its teaching. It is therefore appropriate that students should now act as advocates of ILT as South Essex College.

More on the 'learner voice'

South Essex College has developed a range of social networking tools that allow students to share experiences and ideas regarding their teaching and learning. Students can create blogs, post status updates using an in-house Twitter type application (Seek), vote in online polls and post messages in online forums.

These tools are becoming increasingly popular amongst students. During the last academic year, for example, 25855 messages were posted in 1023 topics in 245 forums. Since the start of the current academic year students have posted over 8000 messages in the forums.

Students here hardly need encouragement to make their views known. We are though planning to issue a number of netbooks to students to enable them to access the College’s social networking tools via the wireless network. Informal soundings to date have indicated that we will not be short of volunteers when it comes to allocating netbooks to students.

Technology Exemplar Network

South Essex College is now a member of the Technology Exemplar Network. The network is a group of FE Colleges and skills training bodies which aims to promote and share the use of technology to support teaching and learning.

The Network was launched in 2008 to help colleges and other learning and training organisations use technology more effectively by sharing best practice. It is led by Becta – the government’s educational technology agency – and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC).

South Essex College will be working with the following Colleges on the network

• College Of West Anglia
• Otley College
• Boston College
• Workers’ Educational Association: Eastern Region
• Leeds City College
• Blackburn College
• Southend Adult Community College
• Grantham College

More information about the network can be found here.

Updates on the work of the network will be published on ICTHorizons.com

This week's poll of the week

This week's poll has been suggested by a student. The poll went live this morning and so far over 450 students have voted.


We have been running a poll of the week for students since 2002. The first ever poll was on the UK voting age and attracted 278 votes. Currently over 2000 students vote in the poll each week.