CORE Educations Past Projects

Why workplace e-learning?
e-Learning in the workplace has the potential to reduce organisations’ spending on training and development by reducing the need for travel and accommodation for learners. It has the potential to offer ‘anywhere, anytime’ learning, and allows widely dispersed workforces to receive essential material.

Meat inspector supervisor training – retrospective evaluation

Many of these tertiary teachers, outside education departments or colleges of education, had limited formal teacher training or expertise. The emphasis of the pilot was on:

The outcomes of the QTR&D project informed policy, and future research and development work with teachers in schools.

Having managed the very successful ICT PD Cluster programme for several years, CORE Education recognised the need for participating schools to continue and sustain the professional development journey they had embarked on. PLOT was seen as a valuable resource and one that could meet this need. A decision was made to conduct a pilot PLOT project in New Zealand to test the resource and also assess the role facilitation played in its effectiveness.

The pilot project involved the undertaking of a community ICT audit, the development of Pasifika online content and the provision of learning spaces/environments, both physical and virtual, where Pacific Island peoples could communicate utilising both existing and new forms of ICT.

The pilot project was conducted in Christchurch, with the end goal of rolling out the successful outcomes of the project nationwide.

The network enabled students from one institution to enroll on modules delivered at another institution. The evaluation focused on the effectiveness of the pilot and made recommendations to guide future rollouts and similar projects.

ICT access and skills are seen as crucial for migrants and refugees to enable them to find and secure employment; and to help them learn about and settle in their new country. At the time of this project the Canterbury area had over 1000 Muslims, of a wide range of ethnic backgrounds.

Classrooms and individual learners were able to join pre-packaged projects or design and develop customized self-driven, web-based programmes, with online facilitation by Learn-Now staff. Learn-Now projects became topics on classroom long-term plans, individual education plans, and were even taken on as homework projects.

The programme focused on collaborative learning processes and key competencies. The learners experienced the use of ICT, social learning, and a learner-centred approach through an integrated curriculum.

The key questions for the study were:

• How are various ICTs currently being used to improve language learning outcomes for students in New Zealand?
• How effective is that use of ICTs in improving language learning outcomes for students?

The Research Report and online Webcases for this project were submitted to the Ministry in June 2009.

CORE joined with some of New Zealand's other leading providers of e-learning products and services to form the iNZed (Innovation New Zealand Education) Group which managed the 3-month demonstrator project to build e-learning capability within the schools.