Wow!
Google has been listening to feedback; as of yesterday Google has opened up it’s excellent Classroom product to learners without an education domain. In simple terms this means that anyone with a personal, free, gmail account can make use of this excellent VLE system. It also makes it much easier for our tutors to create a class to share additional extension activities without having to set up the learners in advance.
it’s important for companies to understand that the needs of learners are changing, working in Community Learning is a good reminder of this
It’s always clear to us, and this was re-confirmed after attending Jisc Digifest on Tuesday this week, is that, much of the thinking in education is predicated on the FE & HE paradigm. That is to say that learners will be quite located in a controlled environment on long easily defined discrete courses. For people taking their first steps into learning (or just returning) we need to do more to make things flexible and understandable (i.e. I need to stop using the word paradigm).
This is a great step towards that open future.