Thank you for your contribution to our Diocesan learning resources. Here you will find general guidance on how to design your course, tailored to the type of learning experience you’re developing – whether, for instance, you’ve been invited to design a short course or an ALM training programme. If you’d value a conversation, by all means, get in touch with us by emailing at learning@elydiocese.org.

Blended Learning

The first thing to note is that for all forms of learning, we are encouraging the adoption of a ‘blended learning’ approach. Learning has historically been delivered in this Diocese face-to-face. There has been some really creative work done developing learning that engages people in different ways, with lecture-style teaching, seminars, group work and reflective practice all in the mix. Developing this online platform opens up for us the world of blended learning, where we can ‘flip’ the classroom and encourage people to engage with content online at their own pace and studying at the time that suits them best. The classroom then becomes the place where learning can be shared, consolidated, and applied to the real ministry contexts of students. It is the place for engaged, communal and facilitated learning, rather than focusing as it might have in the past on ‘chalk and talk’.

This shift in the way we deliver learning will also affect how you develop content. Students can engage with knowledge directly. The tutor then becomes a skilled facilitator of interpersonal sharing and learning rather than the deliverer of knowledge. Learning facilitators are likely to be interested in enabling learning in subjects they know well, and so their wisdom, experience and learning will come into play in those discussions, but you have the opportunity as a learning designer to shape the input for learners much more directly. For a brief introduction to blended learning, watch the video clip below.

Online Learning Resources

Some of our newer Learning Resources for Growth are going to be accessible for wholly online delivery so that learners who might not be able to travel to a venue, or attend a course at a set time can take advantage of the learning available too. If you’re working on this sort of learning resource, you’ll need to design the learning experience with this sort of learning in mind. The aim with this digital learning platform, however, is that small groups, parishes or deaneries could make use of this material to run a blended or fully in-person course too if they so wished. We encourage you, therefore, to include whatever guidance you can for a range of delivery methods for your learning resources – online, blended and wholly in-person.

Interactive Learning

We also encourage you to make the most of a variety of different media and learning approaches in writing your content. It’s fine for some of the course material to be text-based, but the possibilities are much richer. You can include audio and video clips, quizzes and forums. That doesn’t mean you need to become adept at making your own videos (though we do encourage you to experiment – it’s pretty easy these days even just to capture a clip of you talking from your own desktop). You can make use of pre-existing video and audio resources from the web. In time, we hope you will become familiar with some of the wide variety of options Moodle affords for interactivity, but for now, getting beyond purely text-based content is really helpful. This sort of content can be easily deployed in classrooms as well as online, with a decent internet connection.

Guidance on Designing Different Sorts of Learning Experiences

One form of medium offered by this platform (Moodle) is what is called an Interactive Book. This is what we have used below for the more detailed and technical guidance for each course type.