Your school not ready for eLearning yet?

1. It's not an organisational priority (are you thinking it's all too hard?... establishment effort; physical and financial resourcing; time; staff training; no remote students; pedagogy issues; portability of content etc)

2. It's not a budgetary priority (did you hear that Learning Management Systems are too expensive when all factors are considered in a tight fiscal climate?)

3. It's not a staff priority (given the slow pace at which departments ordinarily change their teaching patterns, and with time and other pressures, it is not surprising that some staff may resist change)

4. Who will make it work at our busy and cash-strapped school anyway? (after all, we don't have an IT support person on hand!)

Well this is what we did to help you...

1. The WebLearning design brief included many school scenarios including:

• Scenario 1: Support for a busy senior teacher who, because of commitments wants to write up her lesson plans and notes at home ready for class. The Problem: There is no Virtual Private Network (VPN) access between school and home and emailing large documents to and fro is difficult on a dial-up internet connection. WebLearning solution: The teacher can logon and write her notes in her 'site' (virtual classroom) and print out at school. Supporting individual teachers to cope with keeping their own subject content up-to-date and version controlled was one of our design performance indicators. Being able to quickly and easily deliver newly written documents (notes/ problems/ references/ quizs/ assignments etc) to a class of connected students was a bonus, particularly if someone was absent! (as most students today have some access to a computer either at school, home or in the community, eg library, internet cafe).

• Scenario 2: A group of teachers at school or in an area or sector wish to collaborate on the development of new curricula or examinations. The Problem: For various timetable, geographic or personal reasons, all the staff cannot attend the after-school meetings to progress the work. WebLearning solution: The group can establish a secure site to remotely co-author or validate their work either simultaneously or in their own time. The document(s) can even be notated with (shown/ hidden) comments at each section so copyright and other issues are covered.

2. We built WebLearning on open standards to overcome expensive proprietory software licensing costs that would need to be passed onto clients. Hence our prices are incredibly low when compared with other Learning Management Systems but we guarantee the quality is world class! We made it cheap enough so that even a very small school (with only dial-up in the bush) can afford WebLearning to support its staff, students and community without breaking the budget! Equity of access (considering cost and available ISP services) was a major criterion for us.

3. WebLearning offers all staff members their own virtual classrooms and the management and authoring tools are remarkably easy to use. Forget html. As long as you can type a word doc, you'll be right! After all, the ex-teacher on our design team was very keen to ensure that WebLearning made a positive contribution to easing every teacher's workload, even for those who claim computer illiteracy! Nor did we want users to have to endure long training hours before they felt competent, or worse, require specialist authors to upload their content (at some later, less convenient time). If I can do it, so can you!

4. As WebLearning is a hosted technology, there's no tech support or expensive hardware/software requirements to worry about at your end. All you need is an internet-connected computer (doesn't matter if PC, Mac, other) to logon through any web-browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari etc). We include a 4-day implementation program in your contract where we come on site and take staff through all aspects of WebLearning in line with your vision. Now this is probably overkill but we want to ensure that everyone feels comfortable and competent before we leave. And remember our Help Desk is only an email or call away!