3 E-learning in social care

'If someone is learning in a way that uses information and communication technologies, then they are e-learning.'
DfES (2003a)

  1. E-learning at its simplest is the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to provide, support or enhance learning. Our vision for e-learning in social care is to develop a high proportion of the workforce capable of using ICTs to update continually their knowledge and skills, in order to deliver an improved service for users and carers.

  2. The social care workforce is large, dispersed and, for the most part, lacking in formal training. Workforce inspection and regulation processes are undergoing significant reforms. We believe that e-learning can provide unique benefits for both employers and staff, and ultimately contribute to improving services for users. However, e-learning is not an end in itself. Rather, it is one of a range of tools that can improve workforce training and learning on a sector-wide basis.

  3. To make e-learning really work for the social care sector, we need specifically to understand how it can:

    • be made accessible to as many potential learners as possible
    • support both individual learners and group/network approaches to learning
    • support a variety of approaches to education and training, including both academic and vocational approaches
    • encourage uptake and retention in education and training
    • encourage sharing of quality learning content
    • support collaborative approaches to the delivery of care services
    • help reinforce the link between learning and improved outcomes for service users.

  4. The potential benefits of e-learning for learners in social care include:

    • flexibility - anytime anywhere access
    • widened access to learning opportunities for diverse learners
    • widened internet access to the knowledge base for social care
    • gains in information literacy, writing and presentation skills
    • support for individual, self-paced learners
    • support for active learning/knowledge sharing though collaborative working and online communities
    • improved motivation and engagement
    • potential for self-testing/self-assessment
    • enabling learners to assess, monitor and record their learning progress e.g. e-portfolios.

  5. The potential benefits of e-learning for social care educators and employers include:

    • flexibility of time and place of delivery of learning opportunities
    • anytime anywhere support for learner-teacher communication
    • new communication dimensions, such as e-mail, chat and bulletin boards
    • new testing and assessment methods
    • enhanced consistency of teaching and training across large numbers of learners
    • improved recruitment and retention in training
    • reduction of the administrative burden of learning delivery
    • sharing and re-use of learning resources
    • widened access via the internet to the knowledge base for social care
    • collaborative working for educators and learners.

  6. All social care education and training is expected to have an explicit value base, incorporating:

    • equal opportunities
    • anti-racist, anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice
    • partnership working with service users' groups and representatives
    • human, civil and legal rights for individuals, families and community groups
    • a learner-centred approach.

    In addition, the DH Social Work E-learning Steering Group (DH 2003) requires e-learning in the social care sector to 'provide a means to learn collaboratively and across and within multi-professional and inter-professional organisations'.

  7. E-learning has been accused of offering lonely, individualised and sterile learning experiences. However, we believe that e-learning, properly implemented and supported, can in fact be a tool to support learning as a collaborative, collective and social experience. It can support learning networks and open up new communication channels.

  8. In social care, therefore, e-learning is not:

    • learning viewed solely as the transmission of information electronically
    • a way of making educators or face-to-face contact redundant
    • synonymous with distance learning
    • aimed at only part of the social care sector
    • divorced from service outcomes
    • a technology-led development.

  9. Our vision for social care is of e-learning as 'blended learning'; that is, learning achieved by interaction with people as well as technologies. It is both a collective and an individual process. In order to enable social care workers to update and improve their social care knowledge and skills, we will aim to develop individual learners' critical thinking, support the social skills to apply these thinking skills, and cultivate active participation in improving learning communities or communities of practice. All of these activities need to be grounded in social care practice and the evolving social care evidence base.

SCENARIO: A carer learning from home and at college

Patience

Patience is a 43-year-old woman who cares for her mother, who has dementia. She used to work as an office administrator but gave up full-time work four years ago when her mother became too ill to live alone. Patience has good reading, writing and comprehension skills in English.

Patience is concerned she is not managing her mother's affairs as well as she could, and is worried about being away from work for a number of years, and whether she will be able to get a job when she no longer has to care for her mother.

Patience's learning

Patience heard about the 'Learning for living' course at her local carers' centre. She is interested in the course because it offers to develop knowledge and skills relevant to her everyday needs in caring for her mother. It is also a course that Patience is doing 'for herself', to help her plan her own future further education, training and employment.

She is concerned initially that the course requires some work online, but is pleased to hear that only basic computer skills - using a mouse and typing small amounts of text - are required. Patience has the option of doing the course completely online, or as a mixture of online and face-to-face teaching at the local further education (FE) college. She opts for the 'blended learning' approach.

She also has the option of learning informally, picking what she wants from the 16 topics on offer, and studying as little or as much as she prefers. Or she can take the course in a formal way, which leads to accreditation - a City and Guilds 'Certificate in Personal Development for Unpaid Carers'. Patience decides she would like a certificate at the end of her work, so opts for the accreditation route.

She enrols on the course at her local FE college. She contacts the course helpdesk to get some advice on which of the modules to choose. She chooses the introductory unit, which offers help with learning skills, communication skills and assertiveness; she also chooses the 'Managing Caring' unit because it offers help with managing money (something that is of increasing concern to her with regard to her mother's estate), working with decision-makers, knowing how services work and safety matters.

Each of the four topics in Patience's two chosen units takes about three hours to complete, but she finds she can break the learning into 'bite-sized' chunks of half an hour or so that fit around her carer's schedule.

Patience gets assigned a personal tutor, who welcomes her to the course, helps her with queries during her studies and assesses her work for each unit. She finds the tutor very supportive.

Benefits for Patience

Patience is able to complete the course from beginning to end in a way that fits in with her lifestyle. She gains a sense of the value of her role as a carer, the complexity of the tasks she manages daily, and the high level of responsibility she is shouldering.

She has gained in self-confidence, and her skills as a carer are also enhanced, with the units on communication and on dealing with authorities proving particularly beneficial. She has also gained ICT skills and increased confidence with computers. She feels the course will help her look for and engage with work when she decides she wants to return to employment.

This scenario is based, with permission, on an existing course developed by City and Guilds and Carers UK. For more information see www.learning-for-living.co.uk

SCENARIO: Preparing social work students to work with diverse communities

Tarlochan and Angela

Tarlochan and Angela are lecturers responsible for delivering a 'Working with diverse communities' module to approximately 45 social work students in the first year of their social work degree.

Tarlochan has a well-developed knowledge of the institution's virtual learning environment, and is helping Angela develop her skills in its use through the incorporation of e-learning into the module.

Blending teaching and learning

Their university is in a large city with an ethnically diverse population. In previous years, representatives from different ethnic communities in the city had come into the university to give an overview of their community to students. They would provide a personal account of their perception of their particular community. Assessments revealed that this approach did not encourage individual students to reflect on their own beliefs, and negative student stereotypes of diverse communities were being reinforced.

Tarlochan and Angela decide to reformat the module, using the virtual learning environment to manage learning, provide online resources and enable student learning through dialogue with staff and peers. In the following year, students are split into seven groups and assigned a community to explore within the city. They are also provided with training in the use of the virtual learning environment.

The students are given specific tasks to carry out to develop their knowledge of the community in terms of cultural practices, history within the UK, demographic profiles and what barriers they face in accessing appropriate social care services. During their research, students have to complete a weekly online group reflective journal, where they share the activities they have undertaken and their findings during the week with their peers. At the end of the module, this reflective journal is used as part of a half-hour presentation to peers and staff.

Benefits to Tarlochan and Angela

During the delivery of the module, the students are responsible for directing their own learning. Most of their work is carried out through visiting people and accessing resources in the local communities to which they have been assigned. Tarlochan and Angela are able to monitor and facilitate student learning by using the communication tools available in the virtual learning environment.

All students read the online entries of the other groups, and the tracking facility enables the tutors to make certain that all students are doing this. This allows all students to access information about all groups, not just the one they have been assigned.

Tarlochan and Angela use the discussion forums to highlight common issues of oppression, discrimination and good and bad practice across the groups under study.

The reflective group journal illustrates the starting point of the students' knowledge and understanding at the onset, and the subsequent learning that takes place. By asking appropriate questions online, the tutors are able to manage and guide student learning to achieve the aims and objectives of the module.

Tarlochan gains some valuable insight into pedagogic design issues, and Angela gains a greater working knowledge into how online learning environments can be blended into an overall teaching and learning design.

This scenario is based, with permission, on an existing module at the University of Birmingham School of Social Sciences. For more information see www.socialresearch.bham.ac.uk

SCENARIO: Evaluating the quality of student placements

Martha

Martha is a manager of a mental health service. She is keen to offer students on the social work degree opportunities to undertake their practice or work-based learning in her team. Martha is particularly interested in identifying what makes a good work-based learning experience. She is committed to involving service users in student placements, and wants to encourage her own team to see themselves as part of a learning organisation.

Martha's evaluation tool

Martha has access to a web-based evaluation tool. The tool consists of a series of online questionnaires: one each for students, their assessors, teachers, services users and work-based managers. Once each person has completed their questionnaire, the software produces a series of charts and reports comparing the evaluations of all these key people. The software provides feedback about a placement under four main headings: organisation and management of placement; relevance to students' needs; quality and responsiveness of staff; and quality of assessment.

Martha can see instantly how well the placement has achieved its aims. With each person's agreement, Martha can see the results of everyone's evaluation, which will give her clear information as to the strengths and limitations of a particular work-based learning event.

Detailed breakdowns of answers provide information on which to base improvements. On one placement, Martha discovers that the service user felt that they had not been included in the assessment and that they would have liked to share their comments about a student's work. The student felt that they had not been offered sufficient opportunity to work with people from different disciplines. The preparation arrangements for taking on the student were not as thorough as they should have been.

Benefits for Martha

Martha can critically review a work-based opportunity, enabling her to develop specific improvement plans. This in turn allows her to support her staff's continuing professional development.

She uses scores to compare her team's scores with those of similar teams in the country. This evidence can be used to demonstrate that she is part of a learning organisation for best value reviews and for her own professional development. Martha is also able to use the evidence to support her achieving quality benchmarks such as Investors in People.

The evaluation tool can collect information at various levels: for individual placements; for whole social care organisations; for HE institutions; across regions, and so on.

This scenario is based, with permission, on an existing resource developed by the Practice Learning Taskforce. For further information see www.practicelearning.org.uk/pelqet/

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