The Learning for Living e-learning resources will be rolled out fully complete and tested by City & Guilds via community/carers' support groups/centres and colleges in September 2004. The qualification, 'Certification in Personal Development for Unpaid Carers', will be made available at the same time.
The resources may have wider application (with some modifications) for other marginalized social groups, and the lessons learned from working with home-based carers and their community support agencies have provided valuable information for working outside the formal education and training systems. Valuable lessons have also been learned in terms of supporting and enhancing employability as well giving recognition to the contribution of these sometimes less than visible contributors to economic and social life in the UK.
For Carers UK, the experience of working on the pilot and developing the Learning for Living resources has helped to enlarge the debate on their strategic development. It has confirmed their mission as one of promoting access to learning and work. It has also expanded their area of interest (and a wider public discourse) from purely financial and physical well-being of carers in the community to encompass a range of other dimensions of 'well-being'. They believe it has helped to shape their ideas in terms of the 'participation agenda'; how less visible members of society and can help in the design of wider social services in the community. Significantly, it has given them some insight into the potential of technology and how e-services might play a part in this participation agenda.
For City & Guilds, the Learning for Living initiative has provided a challenging opportunity to examine its own systems and culture. As noted by the Learning for Living Technical & Piloting Manager, 'this is the first time City & Guilds have done something like this. We have learned a great deal from this project, which has been very innovative. Not least, we have realised the need for us as an organisation to review our current internal processes to better support developments of this kind. If this is to be successful and for other future projects, we need our internal systems to be more flexible.'
City & Guilds has gained important new experience in designing technology-supported learning programmes as well as e-learning and embedded formative e-assessment. It has given the organisation an insight into the potential for learning technologies to provide innovative approaches to learning in socially at-risk and marginal communities - and the challenges that such innovative initiatives pose to all the stakeholders in adapting to the changes needed. However, they have also learned that within both the current education and training systems for e-learning delivery and assessment, and the broader UK quality assurance processes for technology supported learning, there will need to be many changes to enable the comprehensive development and exploitation of technologies for learning and that these changes need to be addressed immediately if resources like Learning for Living are to be effectively rolled out to the target constituencies.
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