Keeping the Focus on Learning in e-Learning

Today I went to a workshop that drew on the National Museums Online Learning Project (NMOLP), which was presented by staff from the Tate Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A).

The project is the development of an e-learning resource for students, teachers, and lifelong learners. There are nine museums collaborating on this project, which will use all of the partners' online collections. It is a three year project that will launch in March 2009, funded by the UK Government.

The exercises for schools are called 'WebQuests', which are task-based lessons that draw content distributed across the partner museums' websites. For lifelong learners there is more of a social media portal, which uses an open source technology and although it is hosted by each partner museum it is continually updated via RSS feeds.

The workshop was interesting from a project management perspective, stating the importance of knowing your target audience and what you want to achieve. It's also important to establish who is leading the project, who needs to be involved and what the implications are after the funding ends.

They showed how they used wireframe sketches of the interface to shape the final product - testing their ideas with children and other stakeholders before starting web development. The project coordinators also gave templates to content producers to standardise the information supplied for WebQuests. I look forward to seeing the final result!

Chris and I will be blogging throughout the week about the sessions held at this year's Museums and the Web conference.