When a system that already has two and a half million users in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland takes just a few months to gain a cult following in the UK, it’s clear that something very exciting is happening. And that’s the case in the North East of England, where Norwegian company Fronter is rapidly establishing a reputation for offering the Virtual Learning Environment of choice to schools and colleges in the region.

There is no doubt that Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are becoming an increasingly important part of the strategy for delivering lifelong learning. Many colleges already have VLEs in place, though relatively few are using them with large numbers of students. In many cases, this is because some systems require considerable user training, and significant IT management resources.

By contrast, because the Fronter VLE is hosted remotely, it requires relatively little IT input and, because of its ease of use, teachers can start to upload information straight away. Furthermore, Fronter has also developed a hierarchical training system, based on mentors, that allows rapid deployment of the system within an educational environment.

Another of the unique advantages of the Fronter system though is that, quite apart from being financially easily accessible, teachers actually contribute to ongoing software development. And, because the system has been designed by teachers for teachers, it has a powerful pedagogic focus. Moreover, Fronter’s VLE actively encourages ‘cluster management’, or collaboration between schools in the locality to share experiences.

Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College

Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College in Darlington is among the UK’s top ten colleges by results according to the DfES. The College’s core business is offering full time Advanced Level courses. In addition, it offers a number of GCSE courses, plus Access to Higher Education and a Foundation Art course. Two evenings a week the college offers part time courses, which help the College reach into the local community.

In 2003, the College took the decision to purchase a VLE, and considered various suppliers before choosing Fronter’s Classfronter flexible web-based learning environment. According to Jackie Wilson, the College’s Assistant Principal (IT and Resources), selecting Fronter as its VLE provider was based on a number of criteria.

‘We chose Fronter because it is ideally suited to our needs and requirements. There is a huge demand for staff and students to access resources on an anytime, anywhere basis, and Fronter fills that need by increasing accessibility and aiding communication. Moreover, the system can even assist with a programme of lifelong learning after leaving school,’ says Jackie.

Her view is confirmed by Tom Soron, Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College’s VLE Administrator tasked with implementing the VLE and also in charge of the College’s web development. Being heavily involved in roll out of the Fronter project, Tom is well placed to comment on how the system functions in practice, as well as offering an insight into how the College’s student and staff users rate the VLE. And, with over 2000 users already online with Fronter, Tom feels that the roll out is an unqualified success.

‘Out of this figure, 1600 users are full time day students, and 150 are members of staff. The remainder are evening and part time students,’ he comments. ‘The fact that in practice most members of staff can use the Fronter system with confidence is testament in itself to the ease of use and intuitive interface of the VLE,’ adds Tom.

QESFC: A Natural Choice

Having experienced a number of Virtual Learning Environment systems, Tom agrees that Fronter was the natural choice for the College. ‘Competitor systems are just too complex to operate,’ he says. ‘Fronter’s text editor and other tools have a familiar Windows-style interface. What’s more, even though Fronter is very simple to operate thanks to its room concept, it still features the most powerful administrative resources of any system I’ve come across,’ states Tom.

In fact, the Fronter system can even operate as a fully fledged Managed Learning Environment (MLE), using a Java powered framework to support IMS content packaging and exchange data between management systems.

Setting up the Fronter VLE is simplicity itself. The system can be activated virtually instantly directly from Fronter’s headquarters, and schools and operators can add standard learning materials into the VLE from the Internet, simply by dragging and dropping files within the interface. The same tools also mean that schools and colleges can dynamically publish information from the VLE to upload automatically onto their web site. What’s more, the system actively encourages familiarity with the VLE, through use of Fronter’s e-mail services, in turn allowing expensive college e-mail systems to be dispensed with.

Of course, as users at Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College become more accustomed to the Fronter VLE, the way in which they use the system continues to evolve. As an integral part of this development, the College plans to encourage staff and student participants to use the system more often, and in more innovative ways. After just six months of using the system, Tom Soron says he is astonished at how much it is being used.

QESFC: Easy To Operate

As part of the induction process for first year students, the College gives a compulsory presentation of the Fronter system, as well as a brief explanation of how the VLE rooms work, and how to upload and download files with a single click. Because the system is so easy to operate, student take up is very high. ‘We are consistently getting about 600 to 700 logins a day, and 200 plus at the weekend - figures that are much higher than we would have expected at this early stage. Amazingly, Christmas Day even saw eight students logged on to the system,’ enthuses Tom. And it is these statistics, more than anything, that underline the College’s belief that its students thoroughly enjoy using Fronter as a learning resource.

One of the stated aims of Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College is to ensure that students and staff have access to the best learning resources available. Tom Soron feels that the Fronter system is the ideal vehicle to facilitate this, because learning material can be developed by teachers year on year. Additionally, the College can also access external teaching resources derived directly from sources such as the NLN and added into the VLE.

Because Fronter’s Classfronter system is room driven, the College has also developed a number of less obvious uses for the VLE, as rooms can easily be set up to host different events and contain different participants. For example, there is a student common room facility that is driven by its users, and which offers an informal environment in which students can participate in a variety of topics. Most College curriculum areas have embraced the VLE, with the Psychology, Law, Media and ICT departments having already migrated heavily onto Fronter.

The ICT department uses the system as evidence for formative and summative learning, while the languages department places MP3 format file streams on the system to enable students to download these to work with at home. Furthermore, the Fronter system can manage data so that different information is accessible at College and home. This is especially useful where home users have a slower web connection than at College. Equally, learning tools can be created and edited by the College, which can then determine which categories of users can deploy and view these. For example, the College can choose that Week One resources can only be viewed during that particular week.

QESFC: Stable and Reliable

Tom Soron points out another major plus for the College - the fact that Fronter hosts the system itself, rather than expecting the College to use its own IT resources. There are no servers or hardware located at the College for the VLE, because Fronter uses state of the art servers located at the University of Oslo, communicating over the Internet. This makes the Fronter system very responsive and, because it uses open source Linux and Apache servers, the VLE is both stable and reliable.

‘Our policy is to use mass uploads to send data and files to the VLE. The College develops the course offline, on our Intranet, then simply drags and drops the content to upload it to the Fronter system. This is not a facility that’s usually available in competitor VLEs, so it’s a major advantage,’ says Tom.

Jackie Wilson affirms the decision to choose Fronter. ‘These are exciting times for everybody at the College. We are exceptionally pleased with our decision, and have no regrets at all. There have been minimal problems compared with what we hear of some colleges’ experiences of introducing other systems’ says Jackie.

‘Students come to Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form with high expectations. Fronter is the tool that enables us to match their expectations of resource availability, and it’s especially rewarding to hear that other colleges are also now specifying the system. Moreover, our recent Ofsted inspection resulted in a very pleasing report. The inspectors examined our ILT capabilities and asked about student access to resources both in the College and at home. The fact that we had a VLE was a major benefit.’ adds Jackie Wilson.

A further unique advantage that Fronter’s VLE offers is student tracking. This facility allows standard data to be used to create electronic marking books. According to Jackie, Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College will be considering linking the VLE to the College’s MIS database in the near future.

Bishop Auckland College

Bishop Auckland College is another North Eastern college that is already reaping the benefits of the Fronter VLE. One of only three BECTA test bed colleges selected in the country, together with Sandwell and Barking, the key tasks of the project at Bishop Auckland College are to determine how the use of ICT can raise standards in schools and colleges, gather evidence about how ICT can bring about significant improvements in all aspects of educational endeavour, and successfully disseminate the lessons learnt from the project.

As a medium sized technical college, Bishop Auckland College needed a VLE that empowers its teaching teams and curriculum managers. According to the college’s Senior Manager of ICT, Jim Cullen, ‘Fronter gives our heads of department the ability to manage their rooms, while devolving control to all teachers. Information and responsibility is entrusted to middle managers, allowing us to respond quickly to various teaching issues as they arise.’

Accessible and Adaptable

Prior to participating in the BECTA test bed programme, Bishop Auckland College had been fact-finding about VLEs for almost four years. This had led Jim Cullen to consider these systems from two different perspectives, in his capacity of overall responsibility for overseeing the test bed project. ‘Educationally, we had to develop a sound pedagogy, but also we needed a system that could adapt to our organisational structure, not the other way round. Because Fronter is so accessible, everyone knows their place, and new users learn very quickly. My view is that, to succeed, a VLE needs a fast user uptake, and Fronter encourages this,’ says Jim.

The test bed areas that Bishop Auckland College is trialling are in the Health & Beauty, Plumbing and Care & Child Education faculties. While these areas are traditionally not IT oriented, they have been chosen specifically because of this, to enable the college to observe the maximum effect and benefit. Plumbing has its own virtual centre, and the Care & Child Education department is able to log on to primary school lessons remotely. ‘We are already using an Intranet, and Fronter is a natural extension of this. We only have to use the system, not maintain it. The fact that it is hosted by Fronter is a big advantage, and makes the IT department’s task a lot simpler,’ adds Jim.

All in all therefore, it’s clear that Fronter’s leading edge Norwegian technology has made a swift and easy transition into the UK educational market. And the expectation is that, over the next twelve months, even more schools and colleges will be benefiting from the company’s unique VLE offering.

- Ends -

About Fronter

Fronter provides Virtual Learning Environments for schools, colleges and universities. Its Open Source Technology is hosted in Norway. The company works uniquely with its customer base so that teachers suggest the development of the product and associated tools. The VLE is used in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands and has recently penetrated the UK market in the North of England.

About ICT Test Bed Project

The main aims of the project are to determine how the use of ICT can raise standards in schools and colleges, gather evidence about how ICT can bring about significant improvements in all aspects of educational endeavour, and successfully disseminate the lessons learnt from the project.
The project will enable transformational change in all the schools and colleges involved in the project and thus demonstrate that effective deployment of ICT in clusters of educational institutions, coupled with appropriate support, can raise standards by providing a significant improvement in:
teaching and learning
institutional leadership and management
teacher workforce issues
inter school/college collaboration
the relationship between schools and colleges and their students' home and community.

Further information can be found at www.becta.org.uk/icttestbed

About Becta

Becta is the Government's lead agency for ICT in education. Working to support the development of ICT in education throughout the UK, Becta's unique contribution is to combine knowledge of the needs of education with an understanding of the power of technology.

As a national agency, Becta’s purpose is to support the transformation of education through the integration of ICT into learning and teaching, educational institutions and systems.

Becta has five strategic aims which are to:

improve learning and teaching through the effective and embedded use of ICT
increase the number of educational organisations making effective, innovative and sustainable use of ICT
improve the availability and use of high quality educational content
develop a coherent, sustainable and dependable ICT infrastructure for education
continuously improve its ability to deliver

Fronter UK: -

Mike Pedersen
Tel Direct: - +44 (0) 191 246 1002
Fax Direct: - +44 (0) 709 212 5710
Mobile: - +44 (0) 7866 670 624
Email: - mpedersen@fronter.com
Web: - www.fronter.com

Fronter Press Information: -

Chris Shaw
Pink Elephant PR
Telephone: - +44 1484 341 001
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