Collaboration is key to everything we do at the Heart of Worcestershire College: and nothing highlighted this better than the transition to remote learning during lockdown. 

The recent increase in remote learning offered great opportunities for wider peer-to-peer learning: learners from different campuses, institutions, even countries, have been sharing, curating and creating together. 

Not only does this encourage the development of professional communication and networks but it also helps to maintain a presence and the development of critical thinking skills. Teachers can facilitate sessions, rather than taking a didactic approach to delivery where learners are often passive and can instead begin to focus on the development of 21st-century skills such as problem-solving, social and cross-cultural interaction and productivity. 

During the lockdown, HoW College has employed cross-campus approaches to delivery and brought together learners from a variety of different courses and backgrounds to work together – the limitations of campus travel have been removed and learners have been exposed to a breadth of peer learning opportunities.

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Although formal learning is the core of life at college, an integral aspect to character development is informal and social communication. Working remotely offers flexibility, although learners still require a social space to encourage what would normally be corridor conversations. These informal discussions often build relationships, offer a sense of belonging to the institution and can spark relevant conversation around study.

While delivering wholly remote learning, HoW have ensured that community channels are available across cohorts within Microsoft Teams to enable learners to build on the vital social aspect of their time. Feedback from staff and students confirm that community channels, or a small amount of time for informal conversation allocated before lectures, enables lessons to be more focused.

Careful consideration is required to ensure teachers, support staff and learners are well supported to manage the online space as part of a blended learning environment. Support needs to be given to help teachers and learners develop enhanced communication skills: neither can rely on non-verbal cues to address misunderstandings or observe needs or disengagement.

Time management and workload can be a challenge in asynchronous classes with learners expecting to be online at any time, so teachers cannot predict when heavier workloads will occur. Teacher planning time may need to be extended at least initially and enriched content developed. As in the traditional classroom, teachers must be able to adapt online content for reaching students with physical or learning disabilities although huge progress has been made with resources to support these additional needs by software providers over the last few years.

Collaboration with industry

The opportunity to reimagine the curriculum has been presented during college closures through a case of necessity. Many industries will have had to diversify to survive. Some industries will look very different after Covid-19. This diversification may have also brought with it the need to develop additional skills that weren’t previously required such as transformed kitchen management in a hospitality setting for takeaways, highly contagious infection control and barrier nursing in health and social care settings, or video calling for an initial consultation for areas of trade work.

As vocational providers, we can use this opportunity to work with industry to better understand what these new skills are and integrate them into the curriculum.

The conception of a remote or blended curriculum should be co-created with industry to aid workforce development and equip our learners with an updated and relevant skillset. At HoW, learners have been working on live, co-created remote projects in conjunction with industry, mapped against current skill capabilities. In turn, this has offered the opportunity to develop real-time problem-solving tasks and offers acute insight into what is currently happening in their chosen industry. In addition, the remote work learners have undertaken alongside industry have holistically developed softer employability skills that will now be required as we move into a new way of working – video conferencing etiquette, cloud-based digital skills, time management, and the importance of a healthy work/life balance.

Dual professionals across the institution have used their professional network to engage with industry, which has been hugely supportive across vocational areas – delivering guest lectures, attending virtual mock interviews and setting project work for learners. It is vital that this rich partnership work continues in the post-Covid landscape.

The enforced scaling of online learning of recent times provides a huge opportunity to also revisit and refresh curriculum content. We all know that we live in a time of fast-paced change and we know too that in the workplace there is a need for different skills/abilities alongside technical/vocational skills. There is a clamour of opinion and evidence from employer/industry bodies for greater soft skills development. 

The blended learning approach offers a fantastic opportunity to meet these multiple outcomes. Instead of asking "what do you want to do when you leave education?" our focus and our curriculum content should be more focussed on "how do you want to go about solving problems?" and "what is your analysis of this information?", along with encouraging debate. Approaching the learning experience much more as a constructive participatory experience where learners develop meaning from what they learn and teachers means they can evaluate that learning against application in the real world and in employment.

Collaboration to drive the national productivity and skills agenda

This new normal prepares us comprehensively for the increasing move away from anachronistic approaches, environments and pedagogy. Methods of teaching and support which prop up the simple transmission of content are already under scrutiny in the new Ofsted framework which seeks to balance less data weighting with more examination of knowledge, skills and behaviours of learners: what do learners know (knowledge) that they didn’t before, and how well can they demonstrate (skills) it but also how well do they understand that progress in order to be able to apply it for the setting for which they have trained (behaviour)? This fine balancing act is at the heart of the challenge for most educators today who are still required to meet qualification criteria and curriculum policy expectations, themselves areas arguably due an upgrade.

In all circumstances, the additional use of technology-enabled learning should never determine teachers’ decision making rather, pedagogical goals and objectives should always govern whether a blended lesson model is the best approach for each particular topic/outcome sought.

It remains central to any strategy that, like all approaches to pedagogy, different methods work well for different objectives. The intended outcomes should always be the determining factor in deciding an approach; blended learning done well may be a longer-term choice to consider rather than just a lockdown solution and a fantastic opportunity to truly engage all learners while ensuring no one gets left behind.

Stuart Laverick is the principal and chief executive at the Heart of Worcestershire College, where Claire Heywood is vice-principal for inclusive, commercial and employer learning, and Amy Hollier is head of blended learning.

These articles will contribute to a post-covid edtech strategy eBook funded by Ufi that will be available to download for free on Amazon from 10 July.