The Belfast Metropolitan College has secured funding for five projects across the Leonardo, Grundtvig, Comenius and Transversal opportunities in the European Lifelong Learning Funded Programme.

The College’s Employee Development Service will manage a Leonardo VETPRO project for 20 tutors to visit one of five partner colleges in Ireland, Holland and Finland to review innovative practices in employer engagement, project based learning and sustainability to enhance the delivery of Priority Skills. As part of their preparation, tutors will use Skype and video-conferencing to plan their trips with their host college. A support area will be set up on Blackboard with language podcasts, phrasebooks and host college information packs. Tutors will also maintain reflective blogs during their visit in order to disseminate their findings to colleagues.

The A-Level team will participate in a Comenius Bi-lateral Partnership project. The funding will be used for a two-year partnership between the College and a Business College in Germany to develop employability resources on European citizenship, teamwork, leadership and cultural diversity. The two-year project also includes staff and student exchange visits. Students have been using

email and Skype in recent months in order to get to know each other. These tools allowed students to discuss their respective courses and general interests before the first exchange visit planned for, later in 2010.

The College’s Director, Marie-Thérèse McGivern, congratulated staff for securing these projects as they will assist the College to develop new innovative curriculum approaches, use e-technologies and enhance the student learning experience.

BMC Success in Funding Contents1 BMC Success in Funding

2 New facility at Belfast Office of RSCni

2 Beyond Current Horizons – Learning in the Future

2 NI Colleges Lead the Way to e-Books

3 Good-bye and good luck

3 Help - I am teaching ICT Essential Skills!

3 New Tools for Supporting Inclusion

4 RSCni Customer Satisfaction Survey 2010

4 Ethical Hacking in Colleges

4 How e-Safe Are You?

RSCNewsletterStimulating and supporting innovation in learning

Issue 25 – August 2010

Northern Ireland

RSCni are pleased to announce the opening of their training/meeting room facility within their Belfast Office at 14 Lennoxvale. This facility will allow the RSCni to deliver their portfolio of workshops to small groups of staff as well as providing a meeting room to host all of the RSCni support Forums and Management Briefings.

For a nominal fee this facility can also be used by college management for away-day meetings or by course teams for planning days.

The facility contains 8 laptops with access to the web, a promethean whiteboard, data projector, flip chart and a meeting table which can accommodate up to 12 people. The tables can also be arranged to allow 2 tables of 8 people. Refreshments will also be available.

For further details please contact:

Barbara Stewart b.stewart@rsc-ni.ac.uk Telephone: 028 90976511

Can anyone tell what the future will be like? How should educators prepare for future learning? The Beyond Current Horizons programme, conducted with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), explores the future for education, beyond 2025. The aim is to help the education system prepare for and develop an ongoing and sustainable response to the challenges it faces as society and technology rapidly evolve.

The ideas are not pure guesswork or fantasy. They are based on

current research across a number of dimensions – economic, societal, technological and educational.

If you would like a taster of this future state, then you can watch a short video at http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/multimedia/video/Video1589 and you can see and examine 6 possible scenarios at http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/. Will this be a future that you will prepare for – or will you wait for it to overwhelm you?

NI Colleges Lead the Way to e-BooksFigures released by the JISC e-Books for FE project showing the number of engagements with the ebrary e-books collection during the first 6 months of 2010 have placed Northern Ireland colleges consistently in the Top 20 across the UK. In recent months various NI colleges have been in the top three.

These high placings in the league have come about by active engagement between the library and network staff in all of the area-based colleges in bringing the Shibboleth access management installations into operation and connecting them up to the e-books platform. As a result, teachers can gain access to a collection of over 3,000 titles – many of them core texts for BTEC courses. An unlimited number of students can get access to each title at the same time – opening the way to more active learning.

For further information the titles available and advice on using e-books in your college, contact your college library team.

New facility at Belfast Office of RSCni

Beyond Current Horizons – Learning in the Future

The Essential Skills ICT qualification Level 1 and Level 2 replaced Key Skills ICT Level 1 and 2 in FE Colleges and Training Organisations in Northern Ireland from August 2009.

The RSCni has provided a key role throughout the development of the qualification in supporting the professional development needs of tutors in FE Colleges and in training organisations. Its role in upskilling tutors and particularly in introducing them to new technologies enabled the tutors to then incorporate these new technologies effectively in their teaching, as appropriate.

One of the main vehicles for delivering this staff development has been the provision of the Moodle VLE ICT Essential Skills website.

The website (hosted by RSCni) provided support to tutors and e-learning support.

It included:

• Training and continuous support in the use of the Moodle (Virtual Learning Environment) Essential Skills ICT site

• Support for the qualification through a discussion/news/announcements/forum on Moodle

• Use of the VLE as a central repository for useful curriculum resources, e-resources and assessment material

• Training the tutors in developing appropriate e-resources and technical skills as required for teaching ICT

All tutors teaching the Essential Skills ICT qualification have undertaken training in using photos/images in teaching (using Photo Story 3), using moving images (Movie Maker and Flip video) and using online surveys (Survey Monkey).

Many practitioners have also attended workshops where they were introduced to Web 2.0 technologies. Tools such as blogs, wikis and the use of social networking and online file sharing were demonstrated to tutors and examples were given of where they could be incorporated in the learning.

For more information contact Catherine Gormley, c.gormley@rsc-ni.ac.uk

Help I am teaching ICT Essential Skills!

RSCni would like to take this opportunity to wish Mike Moran good luck and all the best for the future. Mike had worked with the RSCni for 5 years in the role of e-Learning Adviser for Learning Resources and retired from the RSC on the 31st July 2010.

The whole RSCni team wish him well in his retirement:

“Retired from work, but not from life.” (M. K. Soni)

Good-bye and good luck

New Tools for Supporting InclusionMyStudyBarMyStudyBar, produced by RSC Scotland North and East, is a new Windows-based tool to help overcome common problems that students experience when reading and writing. Comprising a suite of portable open-source and freeware applications originally designed for learners with literacy-related difficulties, it offers potential benefits to all learners.You can use MyStudyBar straight from a USB stick or install it on the desktop: technical staff have the option of installing the software on the network.The tool can be downloaded from the RSC Scotland North and East website: http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/mystudybar.php

JISC TechDis ToolbarThe JISC TechDis Toolbar is an open-source, cross-browser toolbar to help students customise how they view and interact with web pages and assist with their study skills. The toolbar provides the functionality common in many different products, and will run in any desktop web browser.There are two versions of JISC TechDis Toolbar available:• User: Lite bookmarklet version

that can be accessed with one click in your browser, or a full install which will load automatically for every page

• Web manager: you can embed JISC TechDis Toolbar Lite on your website which allows visitors to utilise the Toolbar without installation

More information and opportunity to download the Toolbar can be found at: http://access.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ToolBar/

The RSCni thank all of you who responded to our annual customer satisfaction survey: your feedback is essential to help us gauge how we have performed during the last year and how to shape our forthcoming services.

The following were the key highlights of the survey:

• All colleges responded and the spread of roles surveyed was diverse. The largest role group response was from Lecturing staff, followed by ILT managers and IT managers/staff

• Almost all respondents stated that they regularly engaged with and used RSCni services

• A very high percentage indicated that the RSCni had a very positive impact of their job/role and also within their organisation as a whole

• Almost all respondents indicated that the RSCni provided oppor-tunities to develop their skills and knowledge in their relevant roles

• The vast majority of respondents indicated that the RSCni provided timely, relevant, value for money events/training and expressed an interest in future support

• Some lecturing staff indicated that, although the desire to attend is still strong, due to new teaching contracts, it was becoming more difficult to attend events

The RSCni team are extremely happy with the high levels of satisfaction with our performance and services and we will continue to ensure that we provide a strong and relevant service to our colleges going into the academic year 2010-11.

Finally we would like to congratulate the winners of our survey prize draw, Maureen Pigott (BMC) and Sharon McCone (SRC).

How e-Safe Are You?The popularity of the Internet and Web 2.0 applications, eg, facebook, provide their own inherent personal risks of overexposure of your personal data which can be useful to those intent on crime.Within the college network environment it is essential that there are the appropriate systems, controls and filtering to ensure that colleges fulfil their duty-of-care obligations. In the past, controls have been implemented in absence of many policies, procedures, management input and user education. Properly controlled, colleges can benefit from safe and secure network systems that allow secure access to internet applications and guidance on online conduct. The benefits are:• Improved knowledge of internet

safety and how to identify and deal with incidents

• Reduced need to implement security and filtering controls on social networking sites

• Staff will be able to quickly identify potential breeches /issues and know how to deal with them

• College managers will have assurance that they have effective and confident staff that can implement an e-safe policy

The RSCni are currently working on developing an e-safety workshop for staff to explore the issues, encourage discussion and help them take forward college policy. We can also help with:• Raising awareness of staff and

students• Advice on safe and secure

networks and systems• Help with developing e-safety-

aware policies and incident responses

• Signposting to relevant resources and authorities

RSCni Customer Satisfaction Survey 2010

Ethical Hacking in CollegesThese days ‘hackers’ and, more commonly, automated hacking software, illegally attempt to exploit vulnerabilities within the software of network systems to gain access to information or to take control of systems to destroy or disrupt business or function.

The safety and integrity of our student/staff data is crucial to our colleges and, to protect or mitigate the possibility of these types of attack, a great deal of investment has been made in security protection software and hardware

which has provided great security benefits in recent years. However, confidence in the security systems’ effectiveness remains low.

In order to combat this threat, it is essential that our college IT departments learn the skills and tools to test and audit their own systems. To meet this need the RSCni have brokered an ethical hacking course which will allow colleges to use the same tools and procedures as ‘hackers’ to ensure that their systems are safe and secure.