Helping adults gain the Numeracy and Literacy qualifications they need

A partnership, involving Giunti Labs, East London e-Learning (ELeL) and Oxford eLearning (OeL), is helping adults to gain much needed GCSE equivalent qualifications, initially in numeracy and literacy.

The result of this partnership, given the working title of ‘Easy2Learn’, is a tutor-supported e-learning resource for people from all backgrounds aged 16 and over.

The target group for these learning programmes comprises low skilled British adults as well as immigrants, who might have attained a high level of education in their own country but who still lack basic UK-based qualifications. However, those taking advantage of these learning materials are likely to also include former offenders – that is, those within three months of being released from prison – who will, thereby, be able to gain qualifications which could help them get jobs and so reduce the temptation for them to re-offend.

After carrying out an international benchmarking exercise, ELeL selected Giunti Labs, with its learn eXact LCMS platform, as its technological partner.

A first prototype, to be released in April, will be used initially by between 300 and 500 people to help them gain GCSE equivalent qualifications in numeracy or literacy. In the longer term, this approach will be expanded to include other qualifications where user numbers are expected to grow exponentially as soon as new curricular offerings have been finalised.

According to ELeL, eXact Skills and eXact Portfolio are new modules extending Giunti Labs’ learn eXact LCMS technology along the lines of skills based content personalisation.

These are the first commercial outputs of Giunti Labs’ long-lasting involvement with the leading learning personalisation projects from the EU’s R&D framework. These include EPICC (http://www.epiccproject.info/), Prolix (www.prolixproject.org) and TENCompetence (www.tencompetence.org), which are among the world’s foremost projects for the development of skills, competency and portfolio based human talent development and performance support technologies.

Leon Rodin, CEO of ELeL commented: ”Working with Giunti Labs has helped us as an organisation to understand the tools available to us in order to achieve our goals. Giunti Labs’ innovation and willingness to explore new concepts has accelerated the development of the prototype system we are creating in order to establish an innovative approach to e-learning in the UK further education sector that puts e-learning at the heart of learning delivery rather than just something that sits alongside the main college-type offer.”

He added: “With Easy2Learn, we aim to ensure learning using a computer or electronic device is easy: easy to use, understand and learn. We provide learners with online – and, sometimes, offline - access to courses and learning through this platform; tutor support either in person at one of our outreach centres, at the workplace or online anywhere that learners have access to an internet connection, as well as providing online learning tools such as an e-portfolio to support individuals learning and their attainment of qualifications."

Jonathan Turner, managing director of OeL, added: “This is a pioneering project in its use of assessments to tailor the individual’s pathway through the learning material. We see a very strong fit between our experience in online content and curricula structuring, ELeL’s vision and learner awareness, and Giunti Labs’ learning content management and skills personalisation platform. Ultimately this will enable the learners to progress much more quickly and efficiently than before by automatically developing a learning pathway which only covers areas where further knowledge is required.”

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