Case study 3: Stonemasonry

Trade and Technician Skills Institute (Brisbane North)

From simple beginnings bigger things grow

I’d advise anyone starting out in developing e-learning to just have a go – Simon Brown, teacher

The staff are now seeing the fruits of their endeavour at the Stonemasonry division of Brisbane North Trade and Technical Skills Institute after embarking several years ago on their e-learning journey.

Over time, they have made some exciting discoveries for their teaching practice as they explored the world of open source and free e-learning tools.

‘I just started out by playing with whatever e-learning tools came to hand. And if something was free, I’d take it and use it before I invested money in a more expensive option’. (Simon)

Beginning with some simple online activities, Simon Brown, the stonemasonry teacher leading the development now has a range of learning materials in WebCT for the Certificate III Stonemasonry course.

Simon’s over-riding motivation has been to improve learning resources for the students and to help motivate them. The students are widely dispersed, coming from Darwin in the Northern Territory to Lismore in NSW. There are thus good reasons to provide the theory component of the course via flexible delivery. Simon also wanted to share resources with other teachers by putting them in an accessible electronic form.

Another great benefit of e-learning for Simon is the opportunity to re-assess all his pre-existing learning material.

‘It’s given me a fresh look at the resources I’m using, not only to develop into a different format, but also it helps me to upgrade the resources. I can freshen them up, add a lot of pictures and video as I need to’. (Simon)

TO READ THE FULL CASE STUDY - DOWNLOAD THE PDF