Background

The Australian Flexible Learning Community can trace its genesis back to 1998 when a new national professional development project called LearnScope began providing opportunities for registered training organisations to explore the applications of technology for quality educational delivery through structured work based learning. Underpinning the project, and led by community manager Marie Jasinski and technology developer Tim Cavanagh, the LearnScope website (the Virtual Learning Community - VLC) become for many LearnScopers their first experience of a safe, supportive, interactive, collaborative online environment in which to explore new skills, technologies and practices.

2000 marked the launch of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework 2000 - 2004 (Framework) and LearnScope was given an even more prominent role nationally through the Framework Goal 1 area: Creative Capable People. The management of LearnScope was devolved to states and territories and the VLC continued to connect, support and expand the network of early adopters and enthusiastic newbies who had continued their involvement in the Community beyond the life of their LearnScope projects. By the end of 2001 this membership had grown to more than twelve hundred people.

A new beginning

In 2002 the online Community became a discrete project within the Framework as a strategy to harness the growing interest in flexible learning and extend the range of professional development opportunities available to Australian VET practitioners.

Given the strong connections and interdependencies between the projects it was decided that the VLC (renamed the “Australian Flexible Learning Community” at the end of 2002) would continue to support LearnScope nationally through the provision of web services and project support.

Additionally, funding for this “new” project provided an opportunity to specifically target and expand the range of services being provided to people who weren’t involved in a LearnScope project.

Research undertaken in 2001 had overwhelmingly shown that existing members and potential users of the Community shared one characteristic in common – almost every single respondent reported “TIME!” (or lack thereof) as the biggest obstacle to their exploration or adoption of more flexible learning practices. Professional development needs reported by respondents included:

• good quality resources that were easy to access and use
  
• reliable information, advice and news
  
• opportunities to meet with other practitioners
  
• online presentations from subject matter experts

The funding body's requirements were:

• demonstrable progress towards Framework Goal 1:  "Creative, Capable People"
• increase in collaboration across groups, states and territories, organisations and sectors
  
• increase in new skills being applied to delivery resulting in higher take-up of e-learning by VET clients
  
• increase in contributions (both number and quality) to the Community from members

The challenge was to build a space that provided opportunities for a significantly diverse user base which included people from:

• public, private and ACE organisations
  
• most training package areas
  
• lots of different functional areas in organisations including teachers/trainers, managers, instructional designers, multimedia staff, librarians, student services officers and so on
  
• absolute newbies to specialists
  
• rural, remote and urban areas
  
• every state and territory in Australia

Additionally it would be necessary to try to achieve a balance between providing a dynamic environment with centrally coordinated processes and activities and allowing the site to be organic enough to respond to the needs and preferences of members as they grew in skills and confidence. Even then, this balance would shift as the Community started to assume its own shape and form.  Overall we set the following goals:

• maintain existing user base by attracting these users to the new online environment
  
• implement a dynamic and engaging calendar of events, resources and other "carrots"!
  
• monitor and respond to members' needs and preferences as they emerged
  
• encourage members to collaborate and invest back into the Community

Approach

In 2002 a new site was built which included a range of communications tools designed to encourage collaboration and interactivity including:

• Forum tools enabling asynchronous discussions and creation of public and private groups
  
• DHTML publishing tool enabling members to publish articles and resources directly to the site
  
• Who’s Online? showing all the other members who were logged on, links to their profiles and opportunity to send an instant message
  
• Find People allowing members to search the Community for other members based on first name, surname, location and/or industry area
  
• Instant Message tool which allowed people to interact privately (and immediately)
  
• Comments tool at the end of all articles allowing additional information or feedback
  
• Opinion Poll which was used to run a weekly poll on everything from "What's your favourite search engine?" to "Which dwarf from Snow White do you most resemble?"
  
• My VLC which allowed members to manage their membership profile, Community contributions and personal preferences

The summary below shows the three phase approach applied to the development of the Community:

Site Activity

The table below summarises the statistics for site activity during its operations. (Data from January - March 2005 is provided mainly because the site was still publicly accessible even though we had ceased operations in December 2004).

Additional information:

• Membership statistics
• Photo gallery of key people who were part of the central coordination during the period.