What does an e-Learning Officer do?
January 12, 2009 About my museum job, LearningI joined the Learning Department as the e-Learning Officer (Web) at the very end of September 2008.
What is e-Learning?
The best definition I’ve heard of e-Learning is that it’s a learning experience that is significantly enhanced by the use of technology. This means that you can’t just plonk a copy of a worksheet online and call it e-Learning. Instead there needs to be some element of the experience that technology makes better.
So what do I do as the e-Learning Officer (Web)?
As the ‘brackets web’ part of my job title suggests, I’m responsible for the web side of e-Learning. There’s also an e-Learning Officer (Programmes) who is responsible for integrating other kinds of technology (mp3 players, cameras, video recorders etc) into our learning sessions.
The Museum of London website has a specific section for Learning and the easiest way of summarising my job is to say that I work on that!
About our Learning online section
As I see it, the learning provision on our website does three things:
- It promotes our learning programmes (for adults and families as well as schools)
- It is a place for teachers to find resources to use to prepare their visit to the Museum
- It provides web visitors with the opportunity to have a museum learning experience online i.e. by playing interactive games or reading historical fact packs
Learning Online contains a huge amounts of really valuable information and resources and really fun games. We’ve had quite a lot of reports, however, that suggest that the way that people find that information could be improved.
My first big task, then, is to rationalise all the content to ensure that it provides the smoothest and easiest ‘user experience’. At the moment I’m in the process of working out just how to do this!
Another really fun project is the development of two interactive games for under-5 year olds. These will go on the Learning website and will also be available to use in drop-in sessions in our new Clore Learning Centre which will be opening next year. This has been a really fun project to plan particularly the part where we explored the CBeebies website for ideas! We hope to have the games up and running by the end of March 2009.
These are just a couple of examples of the kinds of projects I work on. I hope to continue to blog when other projects get off the ground and the ones I’ve already described develop.