Cloisters Summer Special 2006

The World’s First Virtual College Open Week

Noel Chidwick

What is Online Learning? Can I try an online course? Can I meet the tutors? How does an online class work?

These are the questions we tried to answer during the world’s first^* virtual college Open Week.

Colleges, Universities and schools have been doing it for years: opening the doors to invite the general public to come inside and take a look at what they were offering, and meet the teachers. At the New Curiosity Shop we run a whole range of courses that are available online over the web and one of our greatest hurdles is to explain what we do to people who might not have realised it was possible to take a course or a class online. We thought it was about time, as a virtual college, to open our (virtual) doors and invite visitors in to show what we do, explore what we offer and to meet some of our tutors.
So we did. It was Adult Learners’ Week and Silver Surfer Week in May 2006, and we thought we would contribute to this festival of learning for adults.

How did we do this?

We took advantage of where we are: on the Internet. Rather than having to traipse to your local college, we came to you, to your home, your local learning centre or your workplace. A few clicks of a mouse button, and you were there.
We ran three kinds of events:

Samples of courses - little tasters to give a ‘feel’ for what an online course is
Live text based chats - to talk to some of course tutors via text chat
Live audio conferencing via Skypecast - to explain about online learning and to talk to some of our tutors

We also held a Treasure Hunt competition with a prize of a free course for the winner.
What we mostly wanted to do was to have fun showing off the New Curiosity Shop, its courses, and our tutors.
Our tutors were terrific. They brought their interest and their enthusiasm to the event and because of that we could display a whole range of course samples:

Egypt - A Glimpse Through the Shifting Sands
Philosophy of Mind: Personal Identity
AIDS Awareness - How aware are you?
A Cultural Adventure: Cybertrip to Tajikistan
Dreams and the Unconscious
Dorian Gray meets Jekyll and Hyde
Astronomy: A Little Light Observing
The Fire Balloon - a brief history of the Hot Air Balloon

Each course had a sample of material to work through, and an activity linked with that sample - an online course at the New Curiosity Shop involves the learner as much as possible.
We also opened up our course How to Learn Online, a short confidence booster of a course to show how easy it is to study online.
And that was the key to this event: we weren’t telling, we were showing. Visitors explored the courses, tackled the activities and assignments - all lovingly hands-on and tactile - just like a ‘real’ open week.
We had great fun in the Skypecasts. A Skypecast is a service provided by Skype to let people talk to each other from anywhere in the world. After setting up a stall anyone with a microphone equipped PC can drop in to the chat, and there seems to be no limit to the number of folk online at the same time. Mark Toner hosted our live events and he had a good time explaining to passers-by what we were up to, and we stimulated interest in online learning in a number of people who were simply exploring Skypecast on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

Who came along?

We ran this event as part of Adult Learners’ Week. This is a UK wide event supported by NIACE (http://www.niace.org.uk/) and the Scottish Adult Learning Partnership (http://www.salp.org.uk/), but we were delighted by the visitors we received from all over the world. In fact, over half the visitors who took part came from outside the UK: we had visitors from Uganda, Sweden, Venuzuala, Brazil, New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, Australia and mainland Europe.
We had some great feedback, including one who said we should run an Open Fortnight, and not just a week as there was so much to do.

So what next?

We made a lot of new friends with this Open Week, and we look forward to them returning to us in the future. We will keep the Open Week page open for a while for you to visit, and after the summer we will be modifying it to become a permanent feature of the New Curiosity Shop. We also plan to run more live events, so keep your eyes peeled on our website for more information.

Did we answer the questions at the beginning? We think so: the evaluations show that people will return to take our courses, and most importantly, because of this open week, will continue or return to learning.

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^* We are yet to be disproved that this is not the case!