Abstract:

The University of Gloucestershire has been working with Gloucestershire Hospital Education Service (GHES) to provide new learning opportunities for its service users. GHES offers education to children, often in their own homes, who are too ill to be in school. This has meant teachers driving around the County and working one-to-one. This has many benefits, but also uses a lot of time, and discussion between UoG staff and GHES led to some ideas around blended learning approaches.

The approach taken has two aspects. One is the use of a virtual classroom - using Adobe Connect - which can be recorded, and provides distance support in any subject. The intent has been to make us of the conferencing options, in conjunction with the shared whiteboard tools.

The other aspect is to the new requirements around SMSC (spiritual, moral, social, cultural) education - which is a mandatory requirement for all children. The goal here is to use discursive, bite-sized interview-podcasts - each based on a discrete topic from the topic areas. These are then Reusable Learning Objects, which can be hosted on video sharing sites, embedded into a VLE, and emailed to pupils. This part of the approach produces resources which can be made publicly available, hence enhancing the provision for other equivalent services around the UK.

This paper will demonstrate the trial materials for this project, the roll-out, obstacles encountered, culminating in an evaluation, and a glance toward GHES' future plans in this area.

Keywords:

Podcasts, Hospital education, Connect, Gloucestershire.