The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) is pleased to announce that following a tender process a new contract has been awarded to host the NLN materials. The new contract will rationalise the current arrangements and simplify access for all sectors, enabling users from authorised organisations in education and training to access the NLN Materials free of charge under licence from the LSC. The management of the service will now be provided by JANET(UK) in partnership with the LSC and the hosting service contract has been awarded to Xtensis Ltd. who have been involved in the NLN Materials programme since its inception and have been successfully offering NLN Materials access to Adult Community Learning and offender learning providers for the last 2 years.
The new service will be fully integrated into the existing support site at www.NLN.ac.uk, providing a unified point of access to the Materials, and supporting the entire community of NLN Materials users. The new site will include all the features currently enjoyed by the ACL community, such as collection creation, powerful search and browse, and export for easy import into virtual learning environments (VLEs), such as Moodle, or immediate use on CD, DVD, or Intranets, plus a range of new features and enhancements. The service will be launched mid October.
Following the transition of the NLN programme from Becta to the Learning and Skills Council, this site is being comprehensively restructured, redesigned and updated.
Part of the redesign is to better reflect that there are now multiple interfaces to the materials. Because of this, rather than a single "access the materials" link, there are now separate pages for each sector. Users who used to use this site to access the Content Access Tool for FE/HE can still do so from this dedicated page.
LSC welcomes new look to National Learning Network website
The National Learning Network (NLN) website (www.nln.ac.uk) has been given a fresh new look and a whole bank of new information to reflect the use of the NLN materials in adult and community learning, colleges, work based learning and prisons.
Funded by the LSC and available free to the post-16 sector, the NLN Materials represent one of the most substantial and wide-ranging collections of e-learning materials in the UK.
The website contains essential information on how to access NLN Materials, where you can obtain support, notes for tutors, lesson plans and practical case studies.
NLN Materials are small, flexible 'bite-sized' chunks of learning and are designed to support a whole host of subject and topic areas. They adopt a range of approaches involving some knowledge acquisition, a chance to practice and absorb, and some form of assessment to check that the learning has been understood and the desired outcomes achieved.
The materials give learners things to do and a chance to think for themselves and there is plenty of in-built help and opportunities to go back and revise. Many of the materials include games or quizzes.
Designed to appeal to the different learning styles of learners, the materials were created by commercial developers, in partnership with subject matter experts, a wide range of colleges and adult and community learning experts. All the materials were trialled by tutors and students and tested for accessibility at the Royal National College in Hereford.
Tony Burgess, Senior e-Learning Policy Manager at the LSC, welcomed the new look website. "The materials have been extremely popular with learners and teachers alike. Hopefully the new website, which pulls information together for all parts of our sector, will enable even more learners to experience the NLN Materials for themselves," he said.
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