eXact learning solutions and Link2ICT, a division of Service Birmingham, a partnership between Birmingham City Council and the Capita Group, won a Learning Impact Leadership Award (LIA) at this year’s IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS) LIA ceremony, which was held in Long Beach, California.

The LIA related to the Birmingham City Learning Platform  an initiative which currently involves over 190 Birmingham schools – infants, primary, junior, secondary, special and extended schools – and is used by teachers, pupils, parents, governors and administrators. The Platform – which uses eXact learning solutions’ HarvestRoad Hive digital repository and Moodle – facilitates the sharing of information and is creating a Birmingham-wide social learning community.

The Platform includes such activities as:

• A virtual transition programme which, for the last nine years, has helped Year 6 (ten year old) pupils, who are transferring from primary to secondary education, to make friends with others going to their new school in September, and find out more about the school from trained peer mentors (Year 7, 8 or 9 pupils).
• ‘Brum Talks’: a city-wide Moodle/Hive site which supports the teaching and revision of mathematics.
• The Birmingham Children’s University, a Moodle/Hive initiative providing SCORM-compliant e-learning packages for non-curriculum learning to over 60 subscribing schools.

Comment: The initiatives incorporated into the Birmingham City Learning Platform – especially the virtual transition programme for Year 6 pupils – have much to recommend them. While this blog – last month – criticised the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) for being reluctant to include wider representation on its Board from those outside the US, Canada and UK ‘old school elite’ of learning technologists, it would appear that, in awarding this LIA, these people – whatever their cultural and business backgrounds and interests – have ‘got it right’ this time.