How college innovation is bringing online learning to health and social care workers

Forth Valley College’s e-learning induction programme is one of the projects being funded by the Scottish Funding Council’s College Innovation Fund.

At Forth Valley College we are all working in a way that pushes us to the limits of our capabilities. Now more than ever, we are appreciating the digital technologies that we interact with and our ability to operate online has become key to ensuring that we can continue to speak with loved ones, buy our shopping and work safely.

Progressing to the final stages of our project to create a digital skills induction programme for health and social care workers has been a real challenge for us and our partner organisations.  The role that digital technologies are playing to allow people to live their lives with some semblance of normality is encouraging to us as a team who are trying to digitally upskill the health and social care workforce and tells us that our training has never been more relevant and important.

Over the last few weeks, we have started to see our e-learning induction programme take shape. Using new and creative technologies, we are hoping that we can provide a rich and engaging e-learning experience for our future students who will be logging on to upskill their digital abilities soon.

Working with Stirling and Clackmannanshire Health and Social Care partnership we have created video and picture content in Ludgate House Resource Centre. This centre is a hive of digital technologies used in care and was the perfect setting for kicking off this crucial part of our project.

With the help of students from Forth Valley College’s creative industries department, we were able to hear about the wonderful experiences of how digital technologies have transformed the lives of real people and how care providers are using technology to improve the lives of people that they care for.

We have been working closely with our local strategic partners in order to get this project off the ground. Given the unprecedented changes recently, they have been working flat out to continue to provide care to the most vulnerable in their communities. Our project partners contacted us to help recruit our learners to help them during the pandemic providing them with valuable work experience during this difficult time and putting health and social care values in to practice. We have been overwhelmed with the readiness of our learners to help our project partners who are facing such huge difficulties at this time.

Originally, the launch of our project was scheduled to take place in our new Falkirk campus but keeping in the spirit of the times, we are launching our training using an online platform instead. On the 16th of June, we will be hosting an online launch of our project and look forward to welcoming our new students.