Kineo, leader in innovative e-learning design, created together with the League Football Education and Sportiv8 an e-learning programme that incorporates the development of functional skills in a real sport context, namely the Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012. Recently this project won a bronze award in the E-learning Age Awards 2011 for Excellence in the production of learning content - Not for Profit Sector.
The power of sport
The learners using the e-tool enter in the story (see ‘Get in the zone’ on the picture below) as a member of a team of young athletes, qualified to go to the Olympics in London. During the training period, the members are sharing a flat where they discuss their training schemes, where they try to help each other in taking decisions concerning their nutrition, fitness training levels, personal problems, … The scenarios are all based around the real 2012 Olympics and use contributions from promising and top athletes to make the game more authentic and engaging for the learners (see the part ‘Hear from the best’ in the e-tool).
The interesting thing of the kineo-creation is the re-usability of the core material for other e-learning resources on functional skills. Kineo is thinking of providing real sport contexts (such as the rugby world cup and the 2018 football world cup), scenarios and problems to all future models in order to attract a wide range of learners. Though, the founders of the tool especially want to attract apprentices, learners of technical and vocational programmes and all 14 to 19 year olds that have difficulties to stay motivated in class. Although I think that an e-learning programme can’t completely replace the traditional learning (with books), the tool certainly offers a nice learning support for pupils (with or without learning difficulties).
An authentic and cross curricular approach
The content offers the learners realistic scenarios and problems that:
- specify tasks that are relevant to the context;
- require application of knowledge, skills and understanding for a purpose;
- require problem solving;
- assess process skills and the outcome of their application in different contexts.
The users are confronted with all kind of (un)familiar situations, such as writing an e-mail to your trainer, writing a report, measuring your BMI, … The advantage of such a tool is that the authenticity and cross curricular character reach a higher value than possible in a normal class environment. Throughout the ‘game’ learners improve their functional skills and learn more in English (reading, grammar, formal and informal speech), Mathematics and Personal Social Development. You are only sent to the more theoretical part of the programme (the ‘learn it’-tool in the ‘kit bag’) when you made too much mistakes during the exercise. In the learning tool theory concerning good listening, efficient reading, decimals, … is explained in a very animated and clear way. Though, even when it is the purpose to learn in a functional context the theoretical part probably is too superficial for effective learning.
Have a look at the sample, to see what it looks like!
Offline support
E-learning has definite benefits over traditional classroom training, but it’s not the e-learning tool on itself that makes the learning experience effective and valuable. Therefore, the theoretical part or the real content of the tested tool is, as I mentioned before, too superficial. And even with this challenging sport context unmotivated students may fall behind. This doesn’t mean that you don’t learn anything from the e-learning tool. It certainly takes you through an adventure and the fact of being able to explore, try things out, succeed or fail makes a good training. But I see more benefit in an efficient combination of challenging e-learning tools and offline support and expansion, such as tutor (or teacher) guidance, supporting (offline) activities, reflection on the objectives and the results, … Exactly the combination of both makes the learning experience more valuable and profound and leads to increased retention and lifelong knowledge. So I’m glad that kineo provided a teachers guideline with quite some interesting offline activities, ways of assessment, etc. During the supported activities learners will have to create an Olympic Legacy website with information concerning the Olympic Games and the details of a self chosen Opening Ceremony Event. The following challenge is to create an Olympic Opening Event, to think about the financial considerations of such events, to develop promoting materials and to set up a detailed programme considering the organisational challenges of such an event.
Learning and Technology Exhibition
The e-learning programme ‘Fit for the Future?’ and the supporting activities put a lot of objectives together and chose an actual and interesting setting for it. Though, I think it’s very important that a tutor or teacher guides the learners, not in working with the programme, but in reflecting on the objectives and the results and in offering supporting offline activities to make the learning experience really valuable.
If you want to know more about the tools kineo is designing, have a look on their website. The company offers some free learning tools and presents the projects they realised with big companies such as BP, BBC, McDonald’s, … And when you are planning a visit to London in the end of January, maybe you can pass by the Learning and Technology Exhibition, where kineo will be present amongst other professionals in the e-learning sector.
But let’s go first to … the real fitness!
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