League Football Education - Olympics E-learning

Fit for the Future – a new approach to flexible learning on functional skills

Kineo (working with League Football Education and Sportiv8) have produced a set of ground–breaking, re-usable e-learning resources on Functional Skills for apprentices and learners within traditional school and college programmes. The ‘Fit for the Future’ modules will be used to support NVQs, 14-19 Diplomas, Technical Certificates and programmes designed for disengaged and hard to reach learners.

This project has since won Bronze for Excellence in the production of learning content - Not for Profit Sector at the eLearning (Age) Awards 2011.

Want to check it out? See a sample module in action.

Interested in how Kineo can help you accelerate your learning through custom design and development? Contact us, we’d be happy to help.

The challenge

It is often hard for ‘generic’ published learning content to match exactly the context that everyone in Education needs. We all want to tweak things to fit our exact needs. So, we had to ensure the content was easy to amend by someone with basic IT skills.

The other challenge lay in the audience itself. Today, the time it takes for most people’s mind to wander is at an all time low. The key group for this series of e-learning modules (14 to 19 year olds) form part of a generation that has been referred to as ‘digital goldfish’ who are constantly on the lookout for entertainment with limited attention spans. The learners we were targeting with this e-learning include many students who have struggled with traditional teaching environments and so it had to engage and speak to them right from the start.

The approach

We started with a strong compelling storyline.

The e-learning is set within an overall framework of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, with the learner placed within a group of teenagers who have qualified to compete in the event to be held in London. During a period of intensive training, the group all share a flat together and the scenarios in the e-learning are all based around the members of the group as they learn to live together and help one another make decisions about their training regimes, fitness levels, and nutrition and so on.

We made the content easy to amend through the design approach that we followed throughout the modules. The core theory modules do not need to be changed but the context, the story, can be adapted easily for very different situations. The characters could alternatively be preparing for very different events that might be more related to the educational centre using the learning.

This is done by making everything XML driven with an easy-to-edit approach for all the text-based content. By making the material and contextualisation pack freely available the project will provide resources that can be used throughout the education sector.  This will save providers millions of pounds and address a very real shortfall that currently exists with the lack of availability of functional skills material.

 None of this is of much use though unless it delivers effective learning for a group who need something different to get them engaged.

 This was done through:

• The use of sport as a central attraction
• Using language and dialogue that was familiar and comfortable for the learners
• Setting the story lines within a group of young people to whom the learners can relate
• Keeping it very visual with rich media (teenagers don't like to read a lot online!) with interfaces that feel different from the usual e-learning they have come across before
• Keeping it short and sharp with bite-sized learning modules
• Making it relevant around realistic practical applications
• Use of audio stories and examples from athletes in a ‘hear from the best’ section – including a voiceover from the UK judo champion, no less….

 Example images from the module:

The results

It’s the first time that sporting scenarios have been used in such a flexible way in mainstream education and the reaction to the finished modules has been excellent.  The project has itself achieved a valued Inspire Mark accreditation.  We’re grateful for the ALP funding that was received to make this project possible.

Have a look at one of the modules we've worked on, and see for yourself how we approached this fascinating e-learning design challenge.