Taking e-learning Instructional Design to the next generation – Learn Appeal and Appitierre run workshops for schools
Learn Appeal and Appitierre are delighted to run its inaugural schools workshop at Villiers, a High School in Southall, London Borough of Ealing. Running as part of its Career Day, the session focused on the exciting – but often little known - career development opportunities in e-learning Instructional Design which continue to grow rapidly.
Access to e-learning is not just a challenge in developing countries; it is also a challenge across the UK. This can be as a result of access, but also because so often the needs of safeguarding young people and ensuring they are accessing content in a secure environment has to take priority. This means young learners can miss out on the benefits of online content because it is too challenging to block out inappropriate content elsewhere on the Internet. Villiers High School is very aware of these issues but also wants their students to become familiar with, and benefit from, e-learning. As a result, Learn Appeal is pleased to announce that during the next academic year, Villiers will be first UK school to pilot the Learn Appeal Capsule with its students.
And Villiers High is going one step further than just access to e-learning. It will introduce its students to the potential career opportunities that working in this field can offer when they leave school. This is what Learn Appeal and Appitierre provided during the inaugural series of workshops.
Over a 100 students attended the workshops where they saw examples of e-learning courses, learned more about the role of an Instructional Designer, the range of backgrounds and qualifications available, including a recognised Apprenticeship in Digital Learning Design. Wes Atkinson, of Appitierre, also helped them create an outline course for themselves using their own ideas.
Feedback following the workshops was excellent. Senior Management at Villiers said ‘we were absolutely delighted to have experts in the e-learning community introduce this career opportunity to our students and are looking forward to them learning even more by using the Capsule to support their own learning’.
Jonathan Satchell, Founder of Learn Appeal and Wes Atkinson, Co-Founder of Appitierre agreed, saying, ‘e-learning is not a career either of us envisaged when we were at school and we are both delighted to be able to encourage, nurture and grow young talent in our industry’.
As a follow up, Learn Appeal will be inviting students who attended the sessions to ‘apply’ to learn more about Instructional Design skills and create courses that can be used on the Learn Appeal Capsule both in their school and in Kenya. Mentors will be needed to help in this new initiative so watch this space!
To learn more about the Learn Appeal Capsule and other projects around the world, visit the website or email Lesley Price at [email protected]