Since 2006, the Teaching Qualification (Further Education) – a professional teaching qualification for in service college lecturers – has been delivered online by University of Dundee, via a virtual learning environment (VLE) on the Blackboard platform. This chapter charts developments in the programme over the period 2006 to 2010, during which time the teaching team have endeavoured to foster an interactive learning environment that actively promotes collaboration, in keeping with the social constructivist epistemology upon which the programme is modelled. The chapter explores the ways in which the programme has encouraged (recently very successfully) collaboration – participant-with-participant and participant-with-tutor –and concludes with discussion of a blog, piloted in 2009 and rolled out to all programme participants in 2010, which enabled them to initialise online discussion topics and through direct interaction with one another and teaching staff, create and disseminate user-generated knowledge. The author asserts that the closed VLE has not lived up to its promise in the TQ(FE) context in terms of collaborative learning and participant interactivity generally and suggests reasons for this and a way forward: constructing Open Educational Resources (OERs) to supplement and in time supersede the closed VLE.

Keywords

case study · OER creation · web 2.0